@noliar The final form of the diplomatic system is unknown, but there's no version of civ quest where important diplomacy is simply abstracted below the gameplay layer. (Unimportant diplomacy, yes.)
Another possible system, I suppose, would be where the Ymaryn have several diplomatic stances as slots, costing Influence to change or, if controversial enough, to maintain (Important diplomatic calls would still come to a vote).
@asonia The higher-ups
do matter. My point was that there is less for the Ymaryn to prepare for (no popular revolt) upon deprioritizing Prestige, not that there is nothing to prepare for.
Even my original point was that the Ymaryn don't care as much about Prestige as the Khemetri. I would have thought this was uncontroversial, as the Khem collapsed into civil war while our people celebrated our intelligent capitulation (fake-edit: to the point that, in the update, we only avoided riots because of our capitulation). But oh well, I suppose I didn't word that as well as I possibly could.