What is "Favoring"?

[Alexander]

(not sure if it belongs here or to the "Suggestions" forum. It is more a train of thoughts than a suggestion, so I'm putting it here for now).

So what is "Favoring"? I know, it is a button in a species menu that can be toggled to give all villagers of this species +5 to resolve while giving all other villagers -5 to resolve. But what is it from the in-game reality's point of view? There supposed to be a pretty significant change in the life of the "favored" workers to produce such a big boost to their resolve. For comparison: +5 is the bonus provided by feeding all of the villagers of a species with a single type of complex food, or by picking the cornerstone that increases food consumption by 50%. Favoring, on the other hand, does not have any impact on villager's lives. Is the +5 bonus achieved just by the Viceroy singing praises to them? Surely it would require an outstanding charisma to compete with a belly full of tasty food or with having good a cloak to wear while working in the rain.

So, how could "Favoring" be represented in the game? It should be something that makes villager's lives easier or more pleasant. As I mentioned before, there's an effect that increases food consumption that provides the same bonus, but since villagers consume food during their breaks, a temporary effect that is favoring would interact weirdly with breaks mechanics. But what if "Favoring" meant that villagers of the favored species were allowed to slack in their work? 50% work speed decrease in exchange for +5 resolve, for example. That would also explain why workers of other species are upset: no one likes slackers.

Since favoring currently has no tangible effect, except resolve change, it used to be a very abusable mechanics in the past, so developers introduced some changes to keep it in check. Favoring became impossible in a settlement with only a single species, then, relatively recently, a cooldown was added. The proposed work speed penalty does not interact with these measures, but perhaps they would become unnecessary if Favoring itself had a cost. Favoring has two main purposes: preventing villagers from leaving (mostly in Storm) and generating extra resolve. The cooldown affects mostly the "emergency favoring" in Storm, while the proposed work speed penalty would mostly tax the late game resolve generation (resolve generation scales with species population size, and so does work speed penalty effect).

So what do esteemed Viceroys think about it? What is "Favoring" to you? How do you make use of it? What kind of cost would you assign to it?

[Born to Coom]

TL DR

Favoring is when you click the hand shake hand near race portrait to make their resolve go up.

[Clawyer]

OP knows that, they wondered HOW could a Viceroy treat their people "more equally" in order to raise their resolve by as much as a loved complex food for all of them would. You know, lore-wise..

[prpl_mage]

Well, you are the viceroy and the viceroy has servants living in their settlements. Sometimes you will show more favour to a specie by simply letting their interests go before others.

The 2 minute dealy is like 1/3 of a year in the game so you can just imagine it being the viceroy celebrating their most important holidays and naming one of those long roads to the woodcutters out by the forest after a famous person of that specie.