Bug Description: When using the Aestate Clickable power, you do not generate influence based on the number of connected Territories that are in your cultural sphere. Instead, it appears to a) Count connected cities as "1 Territory" and b) only counts territories that are NOT in your cultural sphere. 

Remedies Taken: N/A

Game Settings: Single Player

Speed: Normal

Difficulty: Any

Players: Any

Map Size: Any

Era: Any

As Title, I've reported this several times (And I have a bug report in the last beta on this issue.) Essentially, the Clickable Aestate power does not generate the amount of Influence that I'd expect. This bug has existed for well over a year now and I'd love to know what the developer's intention with it is. If this isn't a bug, I'd love to know that too - maybe the tooltip is wrong? However, it feels like the intention of this ability was to work like the Influence version of the Merchant's power which "invests" in resources.

In that case, picking a Resource that hasn't been built yet builds it, expanding your options for trade. Wheras, investing in a resource that is being traded yields $ for every trade route. So, the more traded a resource, the more money.

If we use this corollary, for influence, you can either bring a wayward region under your influence, "Building" it as it were (for low inf gain). Or you can "invest" in one that's really solidly in your influence for massive Influence gain. However, in practice this works the opposite - picking a territory that is solidly inside your sphere generates far far less influence than one that is outside it. Coupled with the restriction that you must control the territory, this means that as the game wanes on you generate fewer and fewer influence with this power, which I feel is intended to work the opposite of how it does. 

Thanks again for reading - Happy to provide screenshots/saves again but it's the same bug I reported last time :)

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After talking about it on Discord, one of the users (@Shakee) was helpful in referring to the code in question, and stated that the lookup seemed to be "religious" dependant.

"well the formula in mod tools is straight forward: (Variable.NumberOfAdjacentTerritories + 1) ^ 2 * Source.EraLevel ^ 3 * 15 "

As you can see here, Random Province out in the boonies, provides tons of Inf bonus. It's next to unclaimed things, outside my sphere.

This province is solidly in my sphere, touching everything that's mine. Generates 1/4 of the influence.

Thanks for reading!

Okay. The amount of influence gained from the aesthete action is depend on the religion (foreign) majority of the territories around the target.

In this example the influence gained from the action decrease from 60 to 15. The only change is I took over the religion majority in the upper territory.

And it seems to be counting only Animism as valid territories.

BEFORE

AFTER

So... some Update.

The Influence is dependent on the used Religiontype (Animism, Atheism, Polytheism...) on the territory. I wrote "Animism" because indexwise animism is 0. Which is the same index as the first player (the game checks if the empire index is == religion index)... If you play as the second player, the empire index is 1; which corresponds with religion index "Atheism". Yes that's right. If player two chooses to use the ability on any territory adjacent to "atheism"; he get's more influence out of it. :D

A List:

Hi Tyor,

to note, I do not have a save game anymore from the above screenshots. So here is a new game.

here are the save with following version:

Save Files:

Save Files.zip

There are 3 saves in it: Avrone is the name of the Territory name where the ability is used on (second to the left)

Before: +60 Influence from the territory north of it, which is animism

Middle: +135 Influence for territory to the left and north (if you setup one more City, the left territory of Avrone will have a religion change to yours after 2 turns and the influence will decrease to 60, like in save before).

After: + 375 Influence, after changing to Secularism. All others also have an sharp increase which were previously stuck at 15.

(This screenshot made after Securalism, just marked the territory which is mentioned)

Middle Save:

After everything is secuarislm:

Hello Kaerbear and Shakee!

First thank you very much for your saves and the great details of your reports! 

Good news, both of your issues with influence can indded be reproduce on the Beta version but appear to be fully fixed in the next update (which is a releaf because indeed the result were a bit wild)

For the Aesthete boost in relation with certain religion: the influence doesn't change if the religion changes and also it now follows correctly the formula Shakee linked above.

Regarding the inconsistant Influence gain in your save Kaerbear, it does also follow the formula.

Thank you again!