That's... of dubious usefulness. For one thing, the two concepts don't really relate all that well. The Simcity meaning is basically 'demand for these types of zones' whereas in TLF, as far as I can tell, it's more of a general planetary socio-economic health measurement. Not to mention the generally questionable idea of lifting a term from another game that, for all we know, could even upset some lawyers at EA.
Anyway, that aside, further questions. It seems, from my limited play time so far, that once a race starts to dislike you a bit, your only options to raise your popularity with them are the very slow long term projects. Is that correct, or am I missing something? And is that the expected way to play the game? Like oops I'm at -50 with these guys, guess I'm spending the next 20 years of game time raising my influence by 0.3 per month on fast forward? I don't have a feel for how I'm supposed to be managing time really, is spending many years on fast forward just an expected part of the game? Is there any kind of hard time limit that I should worry about?
I guess I could really use a hand holding 'do this, now do this' sort of tutorial like AI War has. The pop up messages are helpful, but as far as suggestions on how to play, there was pretty much just 'do one of those quests, then go help out some races' and that was it.