If you ran out of popularity in older version you'd get a simple gameover screen and had to start over. There wasn't any sort of special scene like in Secrets of the Bastion. In the current version you can't advance towards victory and get fewer construction options if you're ranking too poorly with the public, but you can't lose the game.
Since the battles felt complicated for many players and a few events required losing to an enemy at some point, I decided to make it impossible to fail completely.