So you started your journey and would like to become mayor ? You already checked here and there and most answers were to use bribe ? Well, guess what, this is mostly true !

However, what most other information fail to let you know is that there are a few ways to help you reduce the cost of gaining approval, secure votes for your characters during election and also waste less time to gain approval.

The first thing you'll need to understand is that to climb the politic ladder, you'll need a LOT of money. To give you a real example, in my last play where I became mayor, I spent roughly 100 000 gold in bribery.

I would advise reaching at least the title of citizen (costing 6000g) allowing you to own 7 businesses before thinking about politics. This is to allow you to get enough income to pay briberies without wasting to much time to gather the money before the next bribery.

If you are curious about the mechanism and would like to test my guide, I would advise to play as a rogue. Even though they have the worst growth for charisma, rethorics and empathy, they are the class which offers the most businesses which can run without materials. Thieves dens and beggars will be your biggest sources of incomes and secured at all times, even if you run out of money after a big bribery. Moreover you don't need the AI to control the business which saves you a lot of time to focus on politics. So get the title of citizen asap and improves your building to the max before starting your politic carrier.

Another important thing to know is that the approval bar (blue bar below each NPC), which you need to get favors and votes for the seats you seek, works at the family level.

So let's say you are family Mercer wanting to befriend family Borland. If you ask Grandpa Mercer to bribe Grandpa Borland, then they will become friend. As well as their sons, wives, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and all people within those two families.

This is a huge help when several members of one family have seats in the council. You can then focus first on this family to pay less bribes and have several people approving you at once.

However this is not enough to secure the vote. Even at max bar, I still add them vote for somebody else. To help them stick with you, you will have to send an official alliance to this family.

To do so, you will need to send one of your character tyo your main residence where you'll see an icon to send the relation invitation. Select the alliance option and select one of the member of the family you want to befriend. Once this is done, they should appear as friends in the "important units" tab. Note that sometimes, they can ignore or refuse your demand but you can try again later, even though the delay to ask for alliance is quite long.

Since the approval is handled at the family level, you will need to optimize the action your family takes.

This means that even if only Grandpa Mercer wants to become mayor and he needs the help of family Borland and you already used Grandpa Mercer bribe action, you can still ask Aunt Mercer to bribe the Borland family too.

This will help your whole family to befriend other families without wasting too much time waiting for your main character to get the bribe action available again.

If you have 3 characters, you will be able to improve relations with other 3 times faster.

While you will mainly use bribery to befriend people, there is another way : Artefacts.

Artefacts are items you can craft or purchase at the market which can be stored in your character inventory and which will display a new icon in your character menu to use them. They all have different effects which you can learn by holding right click over the artefact icon. Some effects are temporary (timer displayed in the top left) while other are permanent.

There are quite a lot of them and I did not have time to test them all. However I noticed 4 of them already which could also save you some money and time :

- Amulet : This is the cheapest and easiest one you can get. It's actually crafted by the rogue's vagabond camp (level 1). Very easy to make and when you use them, you will get +2 approval from all NPC passing close to your character. (which is why I advise to play as a rogue)
- Perfume : I always buy them from the market since I mostly play Rogue, but you can craft them as scholar. It does the same as an Amulet except the effect is more powerful with a +5~ approval gain.
- Poem : Also at the market or crafted by the scholar, you can use this artefact on an NPC only if he is of an equal or lower status as you. Increase approval but I forgot the amount.
- Sweetmead : Also at the market of crafted by the patron. When you eat it, you gain a huge charisma bonus for some time which is quite useful to get votes.

There might be other artefacts I did not test yet which can help you get approval. Let me know if you know some of them, I'll add them later.

And don't forget the golden rule : Family teamwork !
Artefacts have long cooldowns, so use them on your 3 characters to triple your approval gain !

While you have maxed out the approval of a family and allied with them, they can still vote for somebody else. This is simply because you are not the only one trying to climb the ladder and other family will also befriends the same family you target.

To prevent this, the game offers some mechanism to discredit a family.

The first one a found is the artefact found at the martket or made by the scholar "Flower of discord".
With this item, you will select two targets and it will makes them lose approval towards each other. Quite effective.

The second one I know of is to locate the town crier (located in the market, he has a exclamation point most of the time) and select the new option which appears in your character "Character assassination" This is not a real assassination, only a reputation assassination which you should use to lower the global approval of a family toward everybody else.

Although you have max out the approval bar for one family and befriended them, they might still vote for somebody else. In case you did not have time to set up a discorde between your two targets, you should know that you should still use the option offered to you during your argumentation.

The options offer you to threaten (require some evidences), bribe, compliment and seduce.

Compliment and seduce can only be used on the opposite gender of your character while bribe will give you more approval.

Even if you maxed out the bar, you can still use those options to make the target change his vote in your favor.

The game also offer several mechanism to discover evidence against somebody which would allow you to threaten the target.

To get this action, you'll need to buy the upgrade "spyglass" in you house level 1 and hire some bodyguard from your house. Use them to spy other until they find out their bad deeds.

You could also try to kidnap your rivals by using your thieves just before elections to secure the position.

However after my several runs to the office, I found these options to be too inefficient to rely on them. But this could be a fun way to try to go at it. This game offers so many ways to play that you can decide how you want to do things your own way.

You should now have a better understanding of how you get approval from NPC and secure your situation. By getting allies, you will also get protection from other dynasties which often tries dirty tricks on you.

I remember on 2 different runs, the jailer of an opposing dynasty capturing and torturing my Grandpa Mercer over false accusations just to be able to imprison him for life... At that time, I didn't know how to befriend other families so I was on my own. Now that I understand how it works, my family is safer and my runs are more efficient.

I hope it will help you reach the top !

I'm open to any suggestion if you see some improvements to be made in this guide !

Have fun in your future run !