Policy Risk and Reward

The idea is for policies to have risks and rewards that affect a planet's population moving them toward or away from an ideology while also increasing production for a resource.  Polices would be placed in three  categories: stable, metastable, and unstable. 

Stable policies are the safest policies and the easiest to pass. However if they are used to frequently your empire stagnates because no risks are taken. 

Metastable policies  have good payout. They can backfire but certain criteria must be met and the backlash usually hits only one planet. Defending the weaknesses of a metastable policy or finding your opponent's policy weakness can be another battlefield to fight on. 

Unstable policies have the highest risk and reward. Unstable policies come with a rating determining how severe the backlash will be if it occurs. If an opponent finds you're running such a policy he can easily cause it to backfire. Usually there is only one criteria to meet in order to cause a disaster. Unstable policies can also fail for no reason or catastrophically fail. The chance for catastrophic failure increases after using unstable policies consecutively.   

Backlash from an unstable policies failure can cause damage to a percentage of your planets, a number of planets, a race(s), an ideology, resource production, or a political alliance. Basically backlash can end up destroying or damaging any resource the policy holder controls.   

Planets remember backlashes longer than payouts. Consecutive negative hits to a planet will add permanent multipliers to any negative modifiers. Planets can still be happy after several policy disasters but will be less loyal. 

Payouts will also give multipliers to positive modifiers but they fade eventually.