[Absalon]

One aspect of civic diplomacy is raising levers. When you first start out, it can take a while to raise a lever by yourself. Most levers start at 10 and you need to raise it to 40 to trigger the buff. That's a minimum of 30 sucessful parleys. But while you are parleying the levers are always moving back to their starting point, roughly 1 point every 2 or 3 minutes. So realistically, it might take you 40-45 parleys to raise the lever by yourself.

As you increase your presence with each station (soldiers, domestics, nobles, etc.) you will be able to move the levers more per parley. At 75 presence, you become known, and can move the levers 2 spot per parley with that particular station. At 225 you can move the levers 4 spots per parley.

All that being said, there really is no reason to raise the levers and get buffs on test unless you need one of the civic card buffs. If the devs add more content related to the levers and what they trigger, then we may need to get more people involved to test it, but for now it shouldn't matter.

The trade route parleys aren't in yet, but they won't require multiple people. They are sort of like the writs in that you have to parley with npcs to spawn the NPC you want.

If you haven't tried diplomacy yet, I would suggest trying it on Live first. That way if you have any questions you will be able to find people to help you. On live, join the diplomacy channel (/join dip). That's the best place to get your questions answered in-game.