There's a building (missionary hall?) that a town can have that generates 1 influence per turn, but i believe it is a 1/faction limited.

Guile trait doubles influence gains from structures.

I did see the mission hall in the tech tree which seemed absurdly low of just 1 per turn and only one bldg allowed per faction. I didn't know about the embassies, but jeez, need to wait until level 4?? I really don't want to have to take Heroic trait or any other trait just to generate henchmen. Already full up with Decalon (2 pts) and Enchanters.

They need to make it so that quests still generate some influence when you complete them, or offer more buildings that help generate influence.

Yeah, it seems like that's the only way to go until Stardock changes up the game mechanic (fingers crossed). Unfortunately that either leaves things up to chance where I may rarely, if ever, have the chance to use Henchmen or I will need to spam Cntl+N until I find a suitable location (which I don't want to do).

As for the embassy option, I looked into that and it isn't a building, but an upgrade of path of your town when you reach level 3 or 4. So that's out of the picture too because there are better choices.

I really hope Stardock notices this thread and realize that we need additional options to generate Influence.  Heroic is fine, but I think completing quests without Heroic trait should still generate Influence albeit not as much as with the Heroic trait (so its value isn't cheapened). Additionally, Influence-generating buildings should be added to the mix so that monuments on prestigious locations isn't the only way to generate influence for the rest of us!

That's my $.02, I guess.

Actually choosing an Embassy some times is the perfect choice. If you don't see a monument you can take from someone else, and you do have a dragon lair just waiting for some influence to use, that would seem the best choice by far. If influence is important enough to need, having to make a choice against something else seems like a good game mechanic to me.

But then again, I am also one of the people who LOVE the random traits on character level up. I really enjoy not being able to plan the whole game from start to finish, and seeing what resources and other randomness can affect my game.

Kalin, embassies only give you one point of influence per turn. and you can only have one in your entire faction. That's just not practical. People will pick heroic because it can be faster (40 influence per quest is pretty fast). I'm just asking for an in-between option. So far, it's pretty extreme difference.  It's not really playing as a custom race if by choosing Men I'm pretty much forced to choose Heroic also to use one of the benefits of basing my custom on Men (vs say Kraxis or basing it on something else).

I would like to see influence be earned by defeating enemy armies/cities in battle as well, especially if I force an enemy sov to flee the battlefield.

And if I make Verga my bitc... ummm, vassal, that should also cause meto earn 10-20 pts of respect...

Maybe winning/losing battles caused a transfer of influence from one nation to the other.

As one hangs its head in shame and the other boasts about it on the diplomacy screen for gold.

No offense, but if there were easy ways, why would anyone choose the 2 point trait? Just the fact that it's a 2 point trait should tell you that it's suppose to be valuable.

Because it's not at impossible? Even if you can't find any monuments... getting a town to level 4 isn't hard at all... What are you talking about?

Legacy of Serrane also gives influence (3) everytime your caravan finishes a trip too I believe. If you like setting up trade treaties, you can get quite a bit of influence (depending on map size and # of opponents) with that 1 point trait.

Or you could just do quests from the quest maps in wanderlust (also 1 point), and eventually you'll get one of those quests that gives 40 influence as a reward.

There's a lot of ways to get it, I don't know why people are complaining...