What causes you to lose 2 influence per turn with CS?

Was just playing a game and after repeatedly feeding a CS money I noticed my influence was dropping 2 per turn in all city states. Does anyone know what caused this? The city state is friendly type, has no religion (nor do I, there are 2 religions founded on the map so far), and nobody has completed or even entered patronage. At least the one I was feeding money to.

Early in the game I stole a worker from a city state, and I got a permanent -20 resting point with that civ. Fine. Did that also permanently give me -2 influence per turn with all other city states, without notifying me of that side effect?

Probably. Several reports lately indicate that multiple DoW's on CS increase influence decay.

If you got a -20 resting point you did something more than steal 1 worker from 1 CS. At a minimum, you either stole 2 workers from the same CS or 1 worker from 2 CSs. There is a "one bite" rule for CSs; 2 or more "bites" result in loss of CS meeting gold (from all CSs), -20 resting point for some CSs (usually the one you abused and a neighbor or two), and often accelerated influence loss with that CS (and sometimes other CSs).

A little clarification - you don't need to steel 2 workers, just to DoW twice and more. Even if you make peace immediately without causing any harm, the 'bite' is registered.

Good point.

I stole one worker with one DOW; made peace immediately after and didn't DOW a city state again, nor was I at war with any players for the remainder of the game. I was playing a team game with a friend, we had 2 of us on a team, so maybe that counted as two DOWs. My partner also did not DOW a city state, my stealing a worker was the only known act of war in our 90 turn game.


A quick rant:

First, that's just poor programming for a team game if so.

Second, why didn't they just make city states defend their workers, rather than put in these ridiculously punitive penalties for declaring war on a city state? You know, force them to build a warrior first and always move the warrior with the worker. That would be a much better way of going about things than just saying "Well, you declared war on a CS once, you have to completely abandon the strategy of allying them for the rest of the game." Ugh, just awful design.

Last, why didn't they tell me about this in the prompt? I was fine with a permanent -20 resting point with one mercantile CS. I was not fine with a permanent double influence loss with all city states, the worker is not worth that, we would just have reloaded and I wouldn't have taken it. Complete waste of hours of time due to lack of information delivered to the player. Extremely disappointing.

OK, one more point: with all of the other exploits available to accelerate yourself (selling stuff to AI, selling gpt to AI, buying gold and DOW, letting barbs pillage sold luxes, etc) it seems bizarre that they targeted city state worker stealing as an "exploit" to "fix." What about all the other exploits? They are a lot more 'exploity' and less interactive than stealing a worker. Just a bizarre choice for a "fix" in my opinion.