What should Influence be used for?

[Pancakelord]

???
Your military might has no influence on Influence, it affects diplomatic weight, it costs no influence to build a mighty fleet or invasion armies. It only costs influence to claim systems but you don't actually need military might to make claims, just to enforce them.

Are we playing the same game?

We aren't, it seems. I'm referring to power projection in the beta.

That said military might might be a slightly too strong a word lol.
I saw that it is basically #ships / #sprawl. So ftl-drive less and component-less naked corvettes still contribute power projection link

 

[Zyrusticae]

• "Soft power" = Passive ethos/policy spread beyond your borders - devote influence to target nations to get them to adopt your ways of thinking. Overlaps with what operations could do, right now, but if done alongside a political/religious rework, might have enough "substance" to be its own thing.

I want this SO BADLY and I am hoping beyond hope that the next expansion introduces something along these lines. The lack of "culture" as a form of influence is a massive hole in the game as-is and the beta makes this extremely obvious with the lack of ways to spend influence. This would also be a wonderful way to add more flavor to xenophile/egalitarian playthroughs as the people spread their unique culture to other empires.

I can just imagine patterning one's empire after the Artisan Troupe - just about the same thing except an entire empire just devoted to sharing music, holovids and all kinds of wild performance art. It'd fill me with joy to finally be able to realize that dream. Why shouldn't we be able to recreate Macross in Stellaris?