Refuse Motion

[Beorn]

The minority faction, which has goals inimical to mine, makes a demand. If I refuse, according to the mouseover, I get a word, profile, and faction relation penalty.

The faction relation penalty makes perfect sense. As does profile penalty. But word penalty does not, in my opinion. That is a measure of whether I keep my word. Telling people what they do not want to hear is not at all the same thing as not keeping your word. In my opinion, the word penalty should be reserved for if I say I am going to meet their demand, and then do not.

[ramnblam]

I think it's a balancing feature to just refusing every demand and I think it's a good thing. It would be easy to trivialize factions if you could just eat the malus for refusing demands, and remember you can make factions happier by recruiting their leaders into desired posts. Happy factions make less demands.

[Beorn]

Well, I am all for game balancing, but it just seems to me to be the wrong solution. Some little minority party says "Do X" and the leader says, "I won't" might risk a)members of that party cooperating less, or b) the party picking up popular support or c) the idea going mainstream and the demand being picked up by a main party. Any of these would be realistic negative consequences. But the leader's word meaning less? This strikes me as just off.

My suggestion would be a certain percentage chance that this increases the party's support by, say, 15%. That would mean that a splinter party with ideas you hate could be ignored with impunity, at least temporarily, but the main opposition party might win the next election if ignored.

[zgrssd]

It was a serious effort for them to even get the power to make a Demand.

Generally, if they are not the majority faction they got a very much reduced chance to make a demand.