You are the Emperor (space empire).

* Planets have Loyalty.

* You have various imperial officials: (civil branch) planetary governors, imperial court, (military branch) army officers, fleet officers.

* There are court factions (5 of them), each civil servant (no military) supports one of them. The influence of a faction is based on how many officials support it. You want these factions to be more or less equally supported (there is "unbalance" variable which hold how unbalanced these are overall).

Question:

Now, I need to make the loyalty/faction's balance of power do something Like usurp/coup attempt chance of some sort?

At the moment I have this (but I'm not sure if it's so good and looking for alternatives/polish/etc): All loyalty is summed up and then there is "rebel support" variable which is derived out of it. Once rebels collect sufficient points a big rebelion starts (it's not specified who the rebels are, they are generic and supported by various sources).

It sounds like a great mechanic, but I'm not sure what the question is. One thing that immediately comes to mind, however, is that the player should be given some power or control over the situation -- influencing officials, assassinating them, etc., to maintain the balance of power.

There's really no question in your post, but I assume your looking for suggestions.

Loyalty can be linked to corruption. I assuming you're collecting taxes or some kind of currency or material. Taxes/materials can decrease on a sliding scale based on loyalty. Once loyalty is low enough, say like below 50%, there's low taxes and an increasing chance each turn (are you doing turn based?) that a rebellion will occur.

I've played some space empire games where the rebellion mechanic was kind of crappy IMO. You'd just suddenly get a notice that a planet has rebelled. It would be better if there were some kind of events that would begin to occur before a full rebellion occurred, even if i was just some kind of simple notice. "A minor rebel faction rose up on this planet, they caused some damage, but were crushed. Taxes have been reduced by 75% this turn" or something like that.

Edited the first post to make the question more clear :)

Overall, I have this mechanic but... Or are you saying I should keep it as it is now?

corruption

Curruption is a separate stat and a separate mechanic :) So, Loyalty and Corruption are different things in this game (althrough high corruption means possible rebels get a bonus to funding due to common people being annoyed).

are you doing turn based?

Yes.

Maybe I will also post the link to the blog which has all the basic stuff/mechanics explained http://silverlemur.tumblr.com/ (in case you are bored or something :))

I've played some space empire games where the rebellion mechanic was kind of crappy IMO. You'd just suddenly get a notice that a planet has rebelled. It would be better if there were some kind of events that would begin to occur before a full rebellion occurred, even if i was just some kind of simple notice. "A minor rebel faction rose up on this planet, they caused some damage, but were crushed. Taxes have been reduced by 75% this turn" or something like that.

Exactly, exactly :) Rebelion should not pop out of nowhere. There has to be some secret organization that prepares it, they should slowly collect the funding (which you can slow down by imperial police forces vigilence), they should have rebel bases, etc.

I don't think rebellion should be obvious in its presence.

Rebellion should start small, minor political movements start to challenge you openly, student rallies turn violent, minor political leaders get assassinated, an ever increasing escalator of rebellious actions. If you spot them early you can easily nip the rebellion in the bud but do it too soon and you're seen as a tyrant. Imagine the news headline "300 students killed on betelguese prime today when a peaceful student protest about taxes was violently suppressed by police forces".

Leave it too long and you struggle to maintain order at all. Imagine the opposite headline; "emperor stands by as prime minister of betelguese prime is taken hostage by rebel forces".

The game should give you hints and when and how you respond to the hints, if at all should influence the populations opinion of you and your leadership.

My two cents inserted.

One note: I'm more interested here about the loyalty than about the rebelion. So, if you have ideas for loyalty that is not connected to rebelion, don't hesitate to post

Same goes for "unbalance between court factions", it does not have to lead to rebellion.

Of course rebellion is perfectly acceptable

First oon the matter of rebellion l once tried to design a game similar to Master of Orion 2 and thought that it would be nice to focus on maintaining an empire in a changing universe rather than limitless expansion, one thing I came up with:

In a large empire empire communication is very important, far away parts will culturally drift apart and there will be situations were regions are isolated due to war natural disasters, harsh winters etc. (there is even the possibility that certain techologies while known are not used in a particular region and such there practical use is lost) so if an area was seperated there should be a stat that decides if they rejoin your empire , a stat that prevents part of your empire to break away if they diverged to much

(so you would have loyalty and divergence counteracting another and random events, wars testing loyalty )

Besides outright rebellion, taxes and troop recruitment could be effected or invoke larger penalities, resouces from a regions could stay in a local pool instead of a global, maybe for every order you give you have to pay a certain amount of political influence and the cost increases with low loyalty or/and you have to deal with requests of local leaders:build something(money resources), provide security(binds troops to a region),promote local culture(spend research) etc

I think you can go to a separation of governor (appointed by Emperor)-mayor (selected by people/appointed once again) , people uprising may demand change of governor/mayor in favor of the faction they more like.

And for rebellion, it may cripple war and economic efforts as stated above before and/or lead to things like assasination/murder of officers / grand theft / loss of control of planet if not suppressed.