their nerf was too harsh, it is 10 times lower, I'd have tried something less desperate, like 0.2 to 0.25. But, then again, people seem to love nerfs because they refuse to restart campaigns, they keep the save file from version -50130.32103 to this date... Of course you'll have nothing to spend the influences upon, and it's obvious you'll not notice how difficult it becomes to grind for influence with such a nerf. AI is addicted to passing policies that handicap players that have just joined a kingdom (not all of them, mind you) and you'll basically be struggling with a negative influence per day until you either level up enough (the Charm ****ty policy) or has accumulated enough influence sources.
Yes, it's annoying, and also yes, it can be "beaten". To me, grind is nothing more than a time sink. Personally I prefer to sink less time into trivial things, hence I do miss any sort actual of strategy in BL, and find the grind to be unrewarding, pointless even. If you ask me what I'd prefer to do in BL I'd probably say "not play it", but, since I'm idle due to the ****ing covid thing, I just do it out of boredom, so what do I do with it? Mostly play mercenary and stick to basic gameplay, which is even more boring after a while. Basic gameplay as mercenary is embracing the grind loop, going vassal or independent is embracing the lack of content and dealing with it. Though there was a guy on another thread that has basically taught me how to play BL in the current state as an Independent Kingdom, which seems to be the only way to actually do it effectively, consists of basically going around all missing features and underlying issues by gaming the game, can see it as being fun, but only for a single play, if you start having to repeat that to achieve success it becomes boring too. :*( hahaha
So far the only fun I've had was by adding the XP multiplier mod and basically turn the leveling into something that feels rewarding, though even that is limited by caps, so I've added 1 attribute per level, then it became fun to make the character a jack-of-all-trades, it takes long enough, you have fun fiddling with all combat styles, and then you can retire the idiot and start over (thing is, this automatically turns the grind into a trivial but fun thing to do)
Alas, this mod stopped working on 1.3.0, so, unlucky me, I'm again bored to death with their vanilla leveling pace, which is atrocious btw... I've said countless times that one of the most irritating things in BL is actually character progression... Too much grind, too much, so much that you won't be able to reach level 30, ever. Or it'll take months playing daily... The leveling is atrocious...