Favour Rating

Your favour with Rome is an important matter: if you fall into their bad graces, you will be forcefully removed from office by Rome’s armies. Your favour will drop with one point a year, so you’ll have to do some work to maintain your rating.

So what can you do to keep that favour rating up?

Orders and Requests

A decrease or increase in favour usually comes from orders and requests made by Rome. The main difference between orders and requests is that, for orders, your favour falls when you don’t fulfil them; for requests, your favour increases when you do fulfil them. You won’t gain any favour for fulfilling orders, or lose favour for not fulfilling requests.

How much your favour rating will increase or decrease depends on the scenario. Usually you can lose or gain around 5 to 15 favour per order/request.

If you have Jupiter’s level 1 bonus, the favour penalty upon not fulfilling an order will be reduced by 10%.

Gifts

A quick way to increase your favour with Rome is to give them a gift, paid out of your own savings. While this may be an attractive way to increase your favour, you are limited to 3 gifts of each type (small, medium, large) per scenario. Giving more than 3 of each will not increase your favour rating any further.

To give a gift to Rome, you need to have sufficient personal savings. Giving gifts is done through the Imperial Advisor. The price of a gift depends on your current savings, with a minimum cost per gift. The price is rounded down to the nearest whole denarius.

After giving a gift, your favour rating will increase if you haven’t yet reached your limit of 3 gifts per gift type. How much your rating will increase is in the following table. The Imperial Advisor and the Ratings advisor seem to be at odds sometimes on what the actual rating is. The Ratings advisor rounds either up or down to the nearest whole number, while the Imperial advisor always rounds down.

The favour you get for a second gift of the same type is only 66% of what you got for the first gift, and with the third gift you get only 33% of the favour.

In total, you can get 49.75 favour points with gifting. Due to the limited nature of these gifts, it’s a good idea to use them only to push you over the favour goal near the end of a scenario, or to quickly increase your favour if Rome’s army is about to arrest you.

Losing Favour

Besides ignoring orders from Rome and the annual favour decay of one point, there are two other ways to lose favour in Rome.

If you go in debt, you have a grace period of 1.5 months to get your treasury in the black again. If you are still in debt after 1.5 months, your favour rating will decrease by two points per month.

In Rome they also don’t like it very much when governors overpay themselves. If you pay yourself a higher salary than your rank, you will lose one favour point per rank per month overpaid. For example, if you’re a Quaestor and you’re paying yourself a Caesar’s salary (5 ranks above Quaestor), you lose 5 points per month.

On the other hand, paying yourself a lower salary will not increase your favour with Rome.

As an aside: the annual favour decrease can be circumvented, but this is an exploit that borders on cheating. If you load a saved game, you won’t lose favour at the end of that year. Now, if you don’t want any favour decay at all, save the game each year and immediately reload the save.

Rome’s Armies

When your favour falls below 20, you have a year to increase it to at least 30. If your favour is still too low after a year, Rome’s armies will come to arrest you. If you can’t beat off this invasion, you will lose the scenario.

If you’re a reasonably good governor, you’ll hopefully never see Rome’s armies: if you mind your treasury, don’t go in debt, meet most of Rome’s demands, and don’t overpay yourself, you have little to fear.