For one thing, exploration of the game system is part of the fun. Just fiddle around till you understand things.
Assuming from your post that you don't like that sort of thing, here's a brief rundown:
Merits: Social standing, prestige, clout. You get .1 for every turn that you have positive wealth, you lose .1 for every turn you have negative wealth. You need to spend .1 every time you go to a province that you don't own (I think of it as the authority you need to expend to convince the locals to let you visit their lands). Your total merit, rounded down to the nearest whole number, is also how many votes you can cast in elections (if you haven't seen one, just wait till you get one, it should be relatively straightforward).
You lose no merits in voting. You also need a full merit in order to participate in voting, which is desirable for a number of reasons that will become obvious the more votes you see.
You can also spend 1 merit to deploy all your forces in battle. Your forces work more as a sum of their attributes rather than actually stacking together. I'm not sure exactly what formula is used to compose your army from your various forces, but suffice to say that you should recruit for diversity in attributes (specifically, you'll want to pick up a high-resistance unit).
Votes affect you primarily due to the win conditions. The most straightforward is: You can try to declare yourself emperor, and if you have enough merits plus controlled lobbies (see the "visit lobby" page under "correspondence" for more on controlling lobbies, but you basically need equal favors and a Renascent other than yourself with the same origin [found on their bio page] and same side in the order[stalwart]/influence war) to overpower every other lobby plus roughly 30 independent votes, you win the game!
The other win condition where votes matter is when trying to get the colony population to support all order or all influence (when all colonists belong to the same faction, that faction wins). Several votes will affect the immigration of either population type, and the election will
generally be won by whichever faction has the stronger lobbies supporting it (except, of course, when a lobby goes against its faction with it's proposal, f@c!ing University of Stallion trying to bar it's drop-outs from immigrating and shooting the Order in the foot in the process...). So you generally want your faction's lobbies to be stronger overall than the other faction's lobbies, just so you can win/don't lose the population war. Faction power by lobby tends to snowball, as each win for a particular lobby makes it easier for that lobby to win next time and get even more powerful. Starting out as an adventurer is actually good because you can see how the lobbies and votes work before you have enough merits to damage things by mis-voting. That said, I usually side with whomever will give me a favor for voting for them, if that is a option.
As for sucking at tasks...maybe your character just sucks?
Your starting character isn't Superman: You need time to develop. The more you do, the more attribute increases you'll get, so you'll get better. If you're going for quests, get some Renascents to join you, or you'll never get through them. Also stockpile merits before going on a quest, as you can spend up to 3.5 merits (first challenge .5, second challenge 1, third challenge 2; personally, I try to have 2 merits for the final challenge, as it sucks to
almost succeed in a quest but still fail) toward autowinning quest challenges.
Also...some tasks only lead to failure and weariness. You'll just have to figure out which tasks actually lead to something productive and which ones are time wasters.
You can recruit two types of forces to help you: Renascents and other forces. Renascents are individuals that help with quests and other skill checks. Other forces are everything else: Some are unnamed individuals (such as a single duelist, detective, or doctor), some are groups (such as military units, labor groups, or unarmed mobs), and some are monsters. You can recruit them through correspondence, or for Renascents, by rescuing them by passing a skill test in random territories (you'll be able to tell as they feature names in the task).
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Topic: Anamnesis, text-based RPG TBS awesomeness! (Read 80795 times)