Had a scenario now where I was in an alliance with a faction that had larger pop then me and who would have won the game if I vote on them
I voted on myself of course to get a final confrontation but there was no backlash from the AI, no negative impact in diploamcy relationship
I have reported this issue before but thoght i might have only not applied because the AI would not have won either way
It makes some sense to not have the penalty if the AI would not win as otherwise there can a scenario where the player would need to vote on one of two larger pop allies but can of course only vote on one. Now if the faction who the player has voted on is the largest faction then the smaller one would get upset at the player for not voting on them even though they themselves voted on the largest ally member
So its ok if the AI does not get upset if the player does not vote on them if they would not have won anyhow but the effect needs to be applied if the outcome is influenced so the player can get a natural resolution for the alliance instead of breaking it up themselves whenever they want and gear up as much as they want (draging on the endgame)
This effect was actually applied for a while shortly after its implementation long ago but havent seen it for quite some time now so would classify as bug and might have been broken by a subsequent change
A nice fat penalty of -50 would ensure that the player would need to confront the stronger ally within 2-3 council votes at maximum and thus ensure a speedy resolution with some time to gear up if needed
Its rare in strategy games for the AI to have a sence that it actually aims to win but here all the tools are given and the pieces are in place to close that circuit
Note: As far as I recall there was a report that an ally voted for the player evne though they had a huge fleet and the player would have rather wanted to fight them. It was then mentioned that the formula for voting on other factions might be adjsuted to acomodate such scenarios and if I recall correctly it was after this that I havent seen the penalty anymore
Maybe the penalty might have been temporarily deactivated for editing and testing of the new voting rule which then never got finished
IMO total pop based voting is ok as it is intuitive on hte voting UI and does represent the rough power level of a faction well