How to lower the influence of Estates? (2024)

I am playing for the first time with estates.

There are all kind of interesting exchanges to make, and most factors can be influenced by some action, but for lowering influence I have only discovered events. Did I miss something? Does it decay?

Well just hover over the value and it'll tell you. It's not like Loyalty which builds/decreases naturally.

Some nations will have problems with certain estates, like Poland with their Nobility/Szchalta(Sp?). Their monarchy and being Eastern gives them a lot of influence, so you need to keep their land count as low as possible and take every possible popup to lower it.

The main source of influence will always be land though, it can grant up to 40%, so what you need to do is take land from them but beware, if taking that land drops their loyalty below 40% there will be a rebellion in that province, if it keeps it above 40% still, it's fine- but they'll still be pissed.

Oh and if you take a province from them and it doesn't drop their influence, it means that you've given them so much land they've gone far beyond 40% influence from land but there's just a cap there. You'll have to take much more off.

Hope this helps

Removing land that X estate owns will reduce their influence. Be warned, this will also reduce your loyalty. And if I remember correctly if the loyalty is below 40 while trying to remove that estate from a province, it will cause a rebellion.

This may be worth crucial to avoid estate disasters.

Yeah, it took me a bit of practice to understand the tradeoffs. The easiest way to manage it is try to be conservative with the 'Have an advisor, give us influence' types of choices. Ideally you don't want your base influence getting over 70, maybe even 60, the catch is if you've got a temporary influence reduction that's about to expire, you have more base influence than you think you do and you need to take that into account, otherwise you can easily get hit by a random event that pushes up the influence at the same time that negative modifier expires.

That said, the high loyalty/high influence bonuses are often quite nice so it can be tempting to push it close. If you do, then you either have a disaster on your hands, or you revoke provinces, sometimes creating a loyalty problem with associated penalties and maybe revolts.

I do understand why players criticise the system, but when you get the hang of it, it's quite a neat little mechanic to experiment with and decide whether you're going to play it conservative or roll the dice with a powerful estate that has bonuses you want.

artemis667 said:

I do understand why players criticise the system, but when you get the hang of it, it's quite a neat little mechanic to experiment with and decide whether you're going to play it conservative or roll the dice with a powerful estate that has bonuses you want.

Click to expand...

yeah, this is how I feel too.

You can lower their influence by revoking conrol of land from estates. But if you give one estate a LOAD of land, even that won't help. There is certain treshold of estates controlling X % of development. After you reached it, even revoking control from provinces won't lower their influence, until they are back UNDER that treshold. Forgot what that treshold % is.

artemis667 said:

Yeah, it took me a bit of practice to understand the tradeoffs. The easiest way to manage it is try to be conservative with the 'Have an advisor, give us influence' types of choices. Ideally you don't want your base influence getting over 70, maybe even 60,....

Click to expand...

The GUI is not clear (check the wiki) but your bonuses are increased even more when both loyalty and influence are >=60.

So what is the most convenient way to find provinces with high Admin, Diplo or Military development?

I haven't found a better way than just clicking through all my provinces yet.

springel said:

So what is the most convenient way to find provinces with high Admin, Diplo or Military development?

I haven't found a better way than just clicking through all my provinces yet.

Click to expand...

For the nobility - the manpower mapmode is useful. I believe the nobility increases fort defense in their provinces (I delete all forts once the threat of rebellion has passed to kind of irrelevant for me) so that's worth bearing in mind. Depending on circ*mstances it can be useful to give them a few grassland/farmland provinces which you can use as a mil power sink. You can get a sick amount of manpower out of these when you build a barracks.

Use trade mapmode for the merchants. Give em centres of trade & estuaries as a priority. Then rich trade goods.

For the church I guess you could use the ledger. Prioritizing newly conquered or integrated land is a good place to start. Also it is useful to give them (and all of the estates really) at least one fairly high development province though. That way, if you need to reduce their influence you can bring it down to the low 40s and then remove a high Dev province to bring influence down a lot without causing a revolt.