Was it something I said? Factions + Influence

[MissedHurry]

Okay, so I'm a new player, still getting used to all the micro-managing options in the U.I., and last night I realized I can mess around with embracing, supporting, or suppressing the factions in my empire. So, I sort by how aligned with my government ethics they are... support the three that like what I'm doing and suppress the two that don't approve. Well, a few turns later, my influence points dropped to negative one (-1) per cycle !!! . Also, the one A.I. machine empire in the galaxy declared war on me around that time. Is it the war? Could empire sprawl be part of the problem? Was it messing around with the faction buttons? Is it something I said? No matter what, I can't seem to recover influence points, now. Boo.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Supressing and Promoting both use monthly influence.

[Nightmyre]

Yeah I really don't know why they don't make that more evident.

Bottom line is that promoting / suppressing is really only something you want to do if you are aiming to embrace a faction in order to change your empire around. Otherwise, don't bother with it.

[Mistfox]

If you wait for the tooltip on the actions to pop up, it will show you their effects and cost. One of the cost of political actions is a reduction in monthly influence.

The other point to note about empire ethics is that it controls the faction of any new pop formed, not old pop (which will change so rarely you might as well treat it as non-existent). This means unless you cull the pop out, it will forever be there.

Might work better with an example. For example, if you started a game with something like 50% egalitarian ethics, a lot of your new pop spawned will be egalitarian. Then if you suddenly for some reason or other switched to authoritarian, the egalitarian "old pop" will still be there, so you will still have half your population being egalitarians, just that any new pop you spawn will be authoritarian.

TLDR: Ethics only grant a faction on population spawning, it won't change the party the pop belongs to even if the government ethics did. (The chance of a pop changing ethics was quoted as a 1% chance a year, so low that you might as well not count on it).

[MissedHurry]

Okaaaay, yep! Stopped promoting and suppressing everyone, and got 3 influence points back. Phwew! Not being able to build new outposts was sad! Thanks, guys.