FtM Politics: how does drift work?

[bbasgen]

I'm trying to understand the political mechanics in FtM better. Generally, it looks like we have two ways to influence politics via ministers: support ruling party and internal drift. I'm not clear exactly what internal drift does or how it works. Beyond this, I'm wondering what the other factors of the political system are. Via Intelligence, you have support ruling party and counter-espionage. The former has a fairly direct consequence: it will raise the organization of the party in power. This in turn appears to have some effect on party popularity, but not as much as one may think. It appears that internal drift is the primary factor in popularity, but I'm not sure how it factors in. Counter-espionage, in theory, will help on occasion preventing other nations from supporting their ruling party, so I can see how that should be thrown into the mix every once in a while.

My current use-case for politics is Japan. It appears possible by around 1941 to eliminate the fractured government malus, which is frankly a minor point anyway, and get part organization into the 80% range. I suppose this leads to the final question which is: do political parties really have that much impact on gameplay in FTM?

[azedalis]

Counter Espionage always tries to remove the other spies of the coutry the spies are in. When CEing in your own country you are killing spies sent to your country, On another country they are killing off the defending spies. The idea here is kill off most/all of the defending spies before prefrorming another spy mission to that country.

Internal drift is the normal drift caused by the parties in their government. So if like USA you are mostly democratic it will drift toward the Allies. If you do support our party as Germany in the USA, The American Bunn party should increase slowly causing more of a tendency to internally drift toward the Axis.

Yes they do, infact if as Germany, you can get USA to join the Axis if you start early and get them into the Axis before Pearl Harbor. But that is really gamey.

[Kovax]

Trade will cause small amounts of drift. I prioritize trade with unaligned countries over members of other factions, or sometimes my own faction, to draw them in.

[bbasgen]

Trade will cause small amounts of drift. I prioritize trade with unaligned countries over members of other factions, or sometimes my own faction, to draw them in.

Ah, I'm asking about political drift rather than diplomatic drift. Internal drift shows up as a modifier on the political party popularity screen.

[cogitor]

Ah, I'm asking about political drift rather than diplomatic drift. Internal drift shows up as a modifier on the political party popularity screen.

My best guess is a boost in popularity of the party closest to the ones of your diplomatic friends. If internal drift is tooltipped in red, it probably works like that...