If I might offer some thoughts from left field: I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of a revolt mechanism, but I was confused by the inclusion of the anarchy mechanism, where your whole empire overthrows you (or, at least, the ruling party).  Of course, some of that is because it's a first attempt, and it'll be revised latter, but let me pitch a completely different idea: dropping it altogether.  Let me pitch this hypothetically, not because I dislike it or because I think you should get rid of it, but to provoke discussion on the topic and to think about what happiness really means for an empire.

Currently, if a system is low in Happiness, it cripples your Influence and Food production.  That makes sense: if people do not like your empire, they leave your empire, and your empire will have a hard time promoting itself ("Come to Cravertopia!  We have the most ruthless slave drivers and we promise to eat you when we're done!  Hello?  Anyone?"). I haven't checked in awhile, but there was a time when it impacted your science; is that still the case?  It doesn't impact your industry or dust, which rather makes sense.  You can squeeze the peasants and still build your grand fleets; people don't have to approve of you while they're dying in your mines.  But in this version, happiness isn't actually all that important.  I can just crush my populace and conquer the galaxy, and I'll be doing it with military power rather than Influence (though it makes me vulnerable to influence, as well it should, and it makes it hard to replenish my manpower, as nobody wants to die for my cause).

Revolts add an interesting new mechanic in that if you do not keep your people happy, they will eventually attempt to liberate themselves and wage war upon you.  Fascinating!  For example, if you capture too many systems, the recently captured systems (which I would presume already dislike you, but this is currently covered by an "ownership mechanic" though I'd rather see a lingering hatred for the conqueror, or the reverse if it's an influence win), which lack some of the happiness facilities that the older colonies have, might start to rise up in revolt.  Your empire, if it grows too big, might start to splinter.

This creates a few interesting scenarios.  First, it creates a natural consequence and a stop to military expansion.  You might have to stop and reclaim lost worlds, or spend valuable resources temporarily suppressing revolts. It also involves active interaction: You need to either build new buildings or introduce new policies to make them happy, or you need to keep really large fleets in your home systems to stop these revolts.  This last really interests me, because you get a situation where the solution to too much military dictatorship might well be more military dictatorship.  This still leaves you really vulnerable, as the momentum of your juggernaut becomes stopped by your own people, and all this unhappiness is ravaging the population and influence of your systems, and since you're busy fighting your own people rather than external factions, those factions can up their Influence, or take advantage of your dwindling military might to defeat you.  To me, it creates an interesting situation that I can intuitively understand, while at the same time appeals to me as a player.

The anarchy mechanics, though, where if too many of my systems are unhappy then the opposite political party is elected, doesn't create an interesting situation, but rather backs you into a corner.  First, because everyone is unhappy, your Influence is in the toilet, so your ability to enact new laws or influence elections are pretty low (though, of course, as a dictator, these things aren't really a problem, but they're more devastating for other government types), and there's no real easy solution to a systemic problem like this.  It's not like I can go "Oh!  Everyone is unhappy?  Maybe I should lower the taxes for a few turns to earn their gratitude again." You just get locked in eternal anarchy.

And even then, it just doesn't really matter.  What I start doing at that point is ignoring politics.  Does it really matter if I have Jingoist Paradise or Trusted Broker for these ten turns?  No, not really.  I'll just ignore all of that and focus on the thing that matters, which are the revolts.  I can deal with those directly, while I can't deal with this anarchy directly, except to dictate that we're going religious and enacting that religious law about contentment. There's really no other option at that point (or so was the case with my craver game).

If you removed this element completely... I just don't think I'd miss it.  I don't think it would shape my play.  I don't think I'd gleefully take advantage of its absence, anymore than I really worry about it being present.  When it does occur, I have a hard time picturing what's going on.  Ostensibly, my government was toppled, but here I am, still running my empire, just with different laws. The revolts are more serious because they actually CAN topple my government, in the sense that if left unchecked, I could lose the game.

What does this mechanic try to add? I suppose it's a penalty for not paying attention to your empire, but it's a penalty that's both too severe (you can't escape it once you get into it) and not severe enough (It just impacts my laws, which I can live without), and once it comes into play, there's nothing you can really do about it except ignore it.  If it's going to exist, it should do something, and you should be able to do something about it.  Imagine if a coup fleet showed up that tried to conquer the homeworld and, if it did, it changed your government.  Then I could fight that fleet.  Or imagine if we had some sort of espionage mechanics and those triggered so I became aware that there was a plot against me and I could move against it, and if I lost, the lead senator was injured (which makes sense anyway, if he's being deposed) in addition to the Political party and/or government changing.  Then, once the event triggers, I could do something about it, and if I failed to do something about it, I would be dealt an actual blow.  Or, alternatively, discard the mechanic.  I personally think the Food/Influence penalty paired with revolts is enough.

wilbefast wrote:

It's possible we'll make propaganda provide approval too  This would enable dictators to play for time a bit more effectively.

Yes, please. This sounds like a good idea and inline with what propaganda would do in this situation "IRL". 

Mailanka wrote:

If I might offer some thoughts from left field: I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of a revolt mechanism, but I was confused by the inclusion of the anarchy mechanism, where your whole empire overthrows you (or, at least, the ruling party).  Of course, some of that is because it's a first attempt, and it'll be revised latter, but let me pitch a completely different idea: dropping it altogether.  Let me pitch this hypothetically, not because I dislike it or because I think you should get rid of it, but to provoke discussion on the topic and to think about what happiness really means for an empire.

Well, the people do love the king you know? It's about replacing the corrupt government who are clearly manipulating the innocent king into making the wrong decisions

Currently, if a system is low in Happiness, it cripples your Influence and Food production.  That makes sense: if people do not like your empire, they leave your empire, and your empire will have a hard time promoting itself ("Come to Cravertopia!  We have the most ruthless slave drivers and we promise to eat you when we're done!  Hello?  Anyone?"). I haven't checked in awhile, but there was a time when it impacted your science; is that still the case?  It doesn't impact your industry or dust, which rather makes sense.  You can squeeze the peasants and still build your grand fleets; people don't have to approve of you while they're dying in your mines.  But in this version, happiness isn't actually all that important.  I can just crush my populace and conquer the galaxy, and I'll be doing it with military power rather than Influence (though it makes me vulnerable to influence, as well it should, and it makes it hard to replenish my manpower, as nobody wants to die for my cause).

Approval affects all the FIDS, it's just that industry and food and tied to system approval while dust and science are tied to empire approval.

Revolts add an interesting new mechanic in that if you do not keep your people happy, they will eventually attempt to liberate themselves and wage war upon you.  Fascinating!  For example, if you capture too many systems, the recently captured systems (which I would presume already dislike you, but this is currently covered by an "ownership mechanic" though I'd rather see a lingering hatred for the conqueror, or the reverse if it's an influence win), which lack some of the happiness facilities that the older colonies have, might start to rise up in revolt.  Your empire, if it grows too big, might start to splinter.

It would perhaps be interesting to better integrate the ownership, approval and influence capture system, perhaps using some kind of "culture" metric representing how much a system feels an affinity with your empire's culture. A newly captured system will have a foreign culture, so low approval. Investing in influence production would help turn things around more quickly, and influence capture would effectively be when a system is so culturally aligned with your empire that it leaves its owner to join you instead.

It may be a little late in development to make such sweeping changes though

This creates a few interesting scenarios.  First, it creates a natural consequence and a stop to military expansion.  You might have to stop and reclaim lost worlds, or spend valuable resources temporarily suppressing revolts. 

Ideally when manpower generation and consumption is a bit better calibrated we'll have this kind of trade-off between invasion and suppression. We'd like manpower to have an influence on ship efficiencies in space- as well as ground battles, so managing this trade-off will be even more important in the future. We'll also be working to make manpower flow easier to understand, as currently it's rather hard to tell what precisely is consuming it and why.

It also involves active interaction: You need to either build new buildings or introduce new policies to make them happy, or you need to keep really large fleets in your home systems to stop these revolts.  

This is the intention of the current system: laws like "Safe Skies Bill" (orbiting fleets generate approval) do help maintain approval. We'd also like to test Propaganda providing an approval bonus at a cost of influence...

The anarchy mechanics, though, where if too many of my systems are unhappy then the opposite political party is elected, doesn't create an interesting situation, but rather backs you into a corner.  First, because everyone is unhappy, your Influence is in the toilet, so your ability to enact new laws or influence elections are pretty low (though, of course, as a dictator, these things aren't really a problem, but they're more devastating for other government types), and there's no real easy solution to a systemic problem like this.  It's not like I can go "Oh!  Everyone is unhappy?  Maybe I should lower the taxes for a few turns to earn their gratitude again." You just get locked in eternal anarchy.

And even then, it just doesn't really matter.  What I start doing at that point is ignoring politics.  Does it really matter if I have Jingoist Paradise or Trusted Broker for these ten turns?  No, not really.  I'll just ignore all of that and focus on the thing that matters, which are the revolts.  I can deal with those directly, while I can't deal with this anarchy directly, except to dictate that we're going religious and enacting that religious law about contentment. There's really no other option at that point (or so was the case with my craver game).

As mentioned previously, we do plan to make sweeping changes to solve this dead-lock.

If you removed this element completely... I just don't think I'd miss it.  I don't think it would shape my play.  I don't think I'd gleefully take advantage of its absence, anymore than I really worry about it being present.  When it does occur, I have a hard time picturing what's going on.  Ostensibly, my government was toppled, but here I am, still running my empire, just with different laws. The revolts are more serious because they actually CAN topple my government, in the sense that if left unchecked, I could lose the game.

Hmm... We feel it would be too punitive and frustrating to be completely eliminated because of rebellions. It is possible of course: the pirates spawn by rebellions could entirely destroy your empire. 

What does this mechanic try to add? I suppose it's a penalty for not paying attention to your empire, but it's a penalty that's both too severe (you can't escape it once you get into it) and not severe enough (It just impacts my laws, which I can live without), and once it comes into play, there's nothing you can really do about it except ignore it.  If it's going to exist, it should do something, and you should be able to do something about it.  Imagine if a coup fleet showed up that tried to conquer the homeworld and, if it did, it changed your government.  Then I could fight that fleet.  Or imagine if we had some sort of espionage mechanics and those triggered so I became aware that there was a plot against me and I could move against it, and if I lost, the lead senator was injured (which makes sense anyway, if he's being deposed) in addition to the Political party and/or government changing.  Then, once the event triggers, I could do something about it, and if I failed to do something about it, I would be dealt an actual blow.  Or, alternatively, discard the mechanic.  I personally think the Food/Influence penalty paired with revolts is enough.

You'd be surprised what a difference balancing makes - I honestly don't think there's an issue with the system in itself, it's just that the way approval penalties are calculated and even the way election winners are determined causes revolts that feed themselves. We're working on it!

wilbefast wrote:

We'd also like to test Propaganda providing an approval bonus at a cost of influence...

With influence instead of production ?

This is interesting, this would mean an influence sink, I like it !

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

wilbefast wrote: We'd also like to test Propaganda providing an approval bonus at a cost of influence...

With influence instead of production ?

This is interesting, this would mean an influence sink, I like it !

Me too, that's a wonderful use for it.

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

wilbefast wrote:

We'd also like to test Propaganda providing an approval bonus at a cost of influence...

With influence instead of production ?

This is interesting, this would mean an influence sink, I like it !

That's the idea, yeah. An influence upkeep could also reduce the growth of the influence area, depending on whether we base it on the gross or net influence income (currently there is no difference between the two so...).

vahouth wrote:

@Wilbefast

How about a short term law that deals with anarchy but could cost in life and/or infrastructure? 

A martial law?

Interesting thought - "Mass Happiness" is currently used as a fall-back against Anarchy but it's only available to Religious governments. It might be worth generalising this kind of tool to other politics so players always have tools for preventing free-fall.

This is the kind of solution we're currently looking into

(just a quick post to say I edited the previous post enough now - it is stable, I think I killed all the fox in it :) )

If you feel confident about those cycles, you could add another cycle-system like "global warming" in your game (too much industry = negative grow).
This would fix industry = panacea in this game :)

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

what about calming revolts by paying with influence ?

This would make sense I suppose - after all you can capture others' system with influence so why can't you keep your own? There is one thing that concerns me though: we had, at a time, too few things to do with influence; I think now we may be getting to the point where we have too many

I feel that strategy games are most clear when a resource is the reification of some means of action: the FIDS are defined more by what they do than what they are. If influence does too many disparate things it'll be harder to grasp, conceptually.

Ok, now for the very very nerdy part (sorry. Warning, half of this will be giberish for 95% of people, and I have strong chances of being wrong here too) :

I'm supposed to know the ingeneering tools used to balance such a revolt - feedback automatic system but I was maybe the worse student in my school about this at the time :/

This is like tuning a PID controler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller). See Ziegler-Nichols's gif and imagine the red threshold is the revolts starts. When the curve is growing, revolts are growing, and when you go down of it = people are calming.

Currently, the system anarchy - strange governements is divergent so when it passes the threeshold, on top of the curve happens anarchy and the curve is getting down. It's working like a Lokta-Voltera differential system (fox vs rabbits).

Less fox = more rabbit then more rabbit = more fox. And then less rabbit. Then less fox, then more rabbits again.

I get the gist

In game design our tendency would be to think more in terms of feedback and oscillation in cybernetic systems - see this article for a simple explanation. Confusingly we also talk about signs and feedback, which is a completely other thing (more to do with communicating information about the possibility space).

This is because the only attenuation system you have is "religious law. I kill all the rabbits : stop NOW".

There is harmonics that resonate in your system because of the new governement and crowd control means, so the curve is getting up again and does not stop : oscillations are self-induced. It's like passing the threeshold then sin(x) to the infinity. There is no attenuation.

An army crossing a bridge with lilting steps or what happenned in AZF in Toulouse 15 years ago or what happened in the 2000's for cruise controls etc etc etc are all big failure of this math (there is a big list of industry failures on this. Lastly, Samsung batteries charge / discharge cycles, then grenade, can be seen modelized like that too.).

There, it's like passing the threeshold and then x.sin(x) to the infinity (oscillations are growing until the thing explode).

So you have to be very carefull with the attenuation you give the system, because it's entering the system as a command and this may explode depending of the system's equation (in your case, the revolts would be spreading on more planets, I guess)

In discrete systems, you have solutions that does not need lots of computation (you don't want a big computer for something like an Aibo, because energy-quickness-weight-etc but still you don't want him to break his leg when he makes one step. So, you'll want him slow enough so he computes a good correction with his small CPU).

If you've got an ingeneer in Amplitude that knows this (search for "fresh" electronic background), maybe ask him how to modelisate your system ?

(I'd recon this is the "big bertha to kill a fly" solution - but this would help to tune the crowd control laws instead of :

a - duplicating an hard "invisible wall" religious law for any political party, or

b -tuning laws (saying things like "-20% to disapproval at the expense of X industry points or Y food"). Then finding out that a "-20%" doesnt solve many problems, using days of test / failure with different cases of revolts, and having a recurring string of players saying the revolt system is divergent in their save. (there, you may still have the religious law as the hidden rabbit in the hat, but somehow you also want this not to be the universal solution)

Here you've lost me somewhat I afraid  I'd agree though with the idea that players could use a few more immediate action tools at their disposal to deal with approval crises. Do note that the current plan is to have more laws that all ideologies have access to: as a result we'll be sure players always have a certain number of options. I'm not sure divergence is necessarily a bad thing in the absolute though - convergence means setting everything up, flipping the switch and waiting for things to, well, converge. Divergence means needing to keep your eye on things. It's a question of how much planning you want the player to be doing, and how much juggling.

This is extremely infuriating.  

The game is unplayable past any basic stage and It has been approximately 3 weeks since I purchased the game.

PLEASE FIX THIS TRASH BUG ASAP!!!!

/pulls hair out and sets it on fire

Try to change government for, for example, Republic. Less disapproval due to lack of representation + more parties in Senate, which causes less parties without representatives. And did you notice options to deal with rebellion?

Jackal2233 wrote:

Great job with update 0.23 overall, however there seems to be an infinite loop in the new rebellion system:

It starts when an empire has all 6 political parties, and the empire rebellion level forces the empire into Anarchy. Since Anarchy follows with Dictatorship, there is a HUGE approval penalty due to the population feeling under-represented. So then it rebels again, and again - both politically and planetary, which also makes the ability to change government impossible due to the constant switching between Anarchy/Dictatorship and the inability to change governments for 10 turns per switch.

I'm unsure if this is a bug, an oversight, or intented. Save file here:

AutoSave 5245.zip

If intented, how is one supposed to counter this? I tried making the planets produce propaganda but it never works since the government keeps switching every 2 turns.

Update 0.2.3? Update to 0.2.5. That might fix the problem. My game is on 0.2.5. I ran your save. I didn't have anarchy issues.

Complete non-sequitur, but Dictatorship and the Infinite Rebellion would be a sweet name for a Smashing Pumpkins cover band

Jackal2233 wrote:

It starts when an empire has all 6 political parties, and the empire rebellion level forces the empire into Anarchy. Since Anarchy follows with Dictatorship, there is a HUGE approval penalty due to the population feeling under-represented. So then it rebels again, and again - both politically and planetary, which also makes the ability to change government impossible due to the constant switching between Anarchy/Dictatorship and the inability to change governments for 10 turns per switch.

This is a bug, yes - the approval penalty from under-representation is supposed to be disabled during anarchy. We will fix this for the next update

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

@willbefast : I think he talks about Anarchy switching your governement, not about this force / add problem in governement.xml.

If you had 50% one party in democracy then anarchy makes you switch to dictartorship of another party

=> you would have a lot of representatives from your democracy counting against your forced dictatorship : you would have 50% of a democratic senate counting against your new party in a dictatorship (so disapproval x15 instead of x5) => anarchy => yo-yo effect.

After elections, if you dodged a second anarchy, the situation is back to normal only if you choose the old party in place, or if you choose religious + content law.

But since the elements that lead to disapproval may not have changed (especially if over-colonization or over-pop), any other change than religious + content law lead to the same unrest as the democracy (3x less representatives but * 15 instead of *5) => yo-yo effect again

I think the issue you're describing here comes down to a large problem of political opinion becoming too spread, leading to limited support even for the winning party and a majority of people being uphappy, no matter the results (just like in real life).

This is something we're going to be tweaking for the next update: we're thinking of maybe having a sort of multi-round election system where the parties with the least support are eliminated and their votes are redistributed across those parties which are "closest" on the political spectrum. This would lead to fewer parties which a have higher support.

The issue of the approval penalties could be handled in a similar manner, with penalties depending on the distance between the population's desired political party and the "closest" party to have elected represetatives. So for instance a Pacifist will be very unhappy under a 100% Militarist dictatorship, but far more accepting of a 100% Industrialist one.

Ridiculi wrote:

Complete non-sequitur, but Dictatorship and the Infinite Rebellion would be a sweet name for a Smashing Pumpkins cover band 

That would be a nice name indead ! Is there rockers in Amplitude ?

I play the ukulele but this is not very rock-n-roll  You should talk to Tichau.

Yes, you are right - you can't change Governement , because there is always Anarchie !   But ES 2 is in alpha !

Great job with update 0.23 overall, however there seems to be an infinite loop in the new rebellion system:

It starts when an empire has all 6 political parties, and the empire rebellion level forces the empire into Anarchy. Since Anarchy follows with Dictatorship, there is a HUGE approval penalty due to the population feeling under-represented. So then it rebels again, and again - both politically and planetary, which also makes the ability to change government impossible due to the constant switching between Anarchy/Dictatorship and the inability to change governments for 10 turns per switch.

I'm unsure if this is a bug, an oversight, or intented. Save file here:

AutoSave 5245.zip

If intented, how is one supposed to counter this? I tried making the planets produce propaganda but it never works since the government keeps switching every 2 turns.

This is a good problem to have because it makes this game so unique from the rest. It is a defining characteristic and I applaude you, Amplitude, and other players who want to improve it.

I noticed this as well on the new update. No way to get out of the cycle outside of just nuking all your systems and starting over :|

Gvaz wrote:

I noticed this as well on the new update. No way to get out of the cycle outside of just nuking all your systems and starting over :|  

Have you tried building approval system improvements and suppressing/seducing the rebellious populations? You only need to keep them tame until an election, then, since you're a Dictatorship you can just vote in the Religious party and pass the "Content approval on all systems" law.  I know it took me a few cycles of Anarchy until I got my systems in check long enough (10 turns) for the next election to take place.

Granted, you will spend the next 20-30 turns building all the + approval improvements on your systems, but you should, eventually get them to a point where you can change the government back to what it was before.

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

It's not (only) a problem of spread.

The main problem is the flow of anarchy -> new gov -> anarchy -> new gov -> anarchy etc.

Spread prevents you to go in anarchy the first time, but once you're there, you'll be here forever :

- You're in a democracy with 100 elected rep (50 industrialist, 25 science, 20 ecologists, 5 religious) -> 50 * 5 disapproval = -250

- Anarchy because of "whatever problem"

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep (because last time I checked (in 0.23), reps in senate did not update), forced to use science, with 75 * 15 disapproval = -1125

-> Anarchy

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep, forced to use industry, with 50 * 15 disapproval = -750

-> Anarchy

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep, forced to use science, with 75 * 15 disapproval = -1125

-> Anarchy...

A lot of things are going to change in the next update to deal with this kind of issue. For a start anarchy will probably result in an election rather than swapping the political party. The political system will also cycle, so you'll invariably end up in a democracy and so be less vulnerable to approval penalties because you have more parties in power (instead of getting stuck in a dictatorship). We'll be changing the way support is calculated to avoid the late-game political divergences, and we'll be changing how the approval penalties are calculated too, if not removing them entirely for empires which aren't dictatorships (ie. "hey, don't blame me, the people have spoken!").

wilbefast wrote:

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

It's not (only) a problem of spread.

The main problem is the flow of anarchy -> new gov -> anarchy -> new gov -> anarchy etc.

Spread prevents you to go in anarchy the first time, but once you're there, you'll be here forever :

- You're in a democracy with 100 elected rep (50 industrialist, 25 science, 20 ecologists, 5 religious) -> 50 * 5 disapproval = -250

- Anarchy because of "whatever problem"

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep (because last time I checked (in 0.23), reps in senate did not update), forced to use science, with 75 * 15 disapproval = -1125

-> Anarchy

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep, forced to use industry, with 50 * 15 disapproval = -750

-> Anarchy

-> you're in a dictatorship with 100 elected rep, forced to use science, with 75 * 15 disapproval = -1125

-> Anarchy...

A lot of things are going to change in the next update to deal with this kind of issue. For a start anarchy will probably result in an election rather than swapping the political party.

Desynching elections between players in the process, or that would just be just partial elections ?

The political system will also cycle, so you'll invariably end up in a democracy and so be less vulnerable to approval penalties because you have more parties in power (instead of getting stuck in a dictatorship).

This is nice !

We'll be changing the way support is calculated to avoid the late-game political divergences, and we'll be changing how the approval penalties are calculated too, if not removing them entirely for empires which aren't dictatorships (ie. "hey, don't blame me, the people have spoken!").

I wouldn't remove disapproval (tbh, to my opinion, that's almost removing approval aswell) : I really think this is fixable.
You only need to give some more means of control to the player before anarchy begins and avoid spiraling into anarchy, and I do think it's perfectly feasable.

It can be done through laws, because they are a direct player lever.

One week ago, I wanted to make a mod giving approval or disapproval price on top of the inf to each law depending of senate composition, for democracy/federation/empire.
You can promulgate any law, the one coming from the party in power get approval, and the other less approval. The ones from the last parties get disapproval.
If things start to go bad, the player can remove an unpopular law and enact a popular one (corresponding to the population or the senate).

Like just before the elections, to boost a little the party in place by removing non-party-in-power laws and put party-in-power laws. Revolutions starts because people are against regimes and / or their laws imho. So law should get an importance there.

If law gave a small boost to the party aswell, this would emulate what is happening in France / maybe other countries right before the elections : "hey guys, remember we are right/left wing ! look to this new tax law ! yay ! so, vote for us again ? please ?" :D

Seriously, it's like this since I vote (95...).

Anyway : I think you could profit of the unique feature of senate & laws there.

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

I wouldn't remove disapproval (tbh, to my opinion, that's almost removing approval aswell) : I really think this is fixable.
You only need to give some more means of control to the player before anarchy begins and avoid spiraling into anarchy, and I do think it's perfectly feasable.

It can be done through laws, because they are a direct player lever.

Ah, watch out though: if laws can provide approval then more slots means more approval - if the goal is to provide tools to escape the endless cycle of anarchy then we need something that works for anarchies, dictatorships and democracies.  

One week ago, I wanted to make a mod giving approval or disapproval price on top of the inf to each law depending of senate composition, for democracy/federation/empire.
You can promulgate any law, the one coming from the party in power get approval, and the other less approval. The ones from the last parties get disapproval.
If things start to go bad, the player can remove an unpopular law and enact a popular one (corresponding to the population or the senate).

Like just before the elections, to boost a little the party in place by removing non-party-in-power laws and put party-in-power laws. Revolutions starts because people are against regimes and / or their laws imho. So law should get an importance there.

If law gave a small boost to the party aswell, this would emulate what is happening in France / maybe other countries right before the elections : "hey guys, remember we are right/left wing ! look to this new tax law ! yay ! so, vote for us again ? please ?" :D

Seriously, it's like this since I vote (95...).

Anyway : I think you could profit of the unique feature of senate & laws there.

This is an interesting idea  My only concern would be that, because you're effectively replacing the hard restriction on which laws can be voted with a soft approval-based incentive, you're making the political system less chunky: choice of option A or B or C is generally more comfortable and satisfying to the human mind than the choice of X = aA + bB + cC where a + b + c = 1. Creating too many links to and from the approval system may also cause cognitive overload. You should definitely give the mod a try though: see how it play, do a little introspection, maybe try to get some people to test it and see how they feel