New Vassal State Information

[padillah]

I hope there's a way to tell who's a vassel to whom. It would suck seeing you are more powerful than Issabella only to realise she has Elizabeth and Fredric as vassels.

That would be uncool.

Tom P.

[Solver]

There's certainly no reason to suspect Firaxis would hide the info... it would be like hiding defensive pacts in vanilla.

[Watiggi]

Solver, DO you get any tribute and research (and techs) from the Vassal?

[Solver]

You can try to...

[monkspider]

Hmm, sounds good.

[Watiggi]

Oh, don't tell me. Is the AI rather lame in that department still?

[Thedrin]

Or it can spark a war like trying to get a resource from the vassal.

[Solver]

Originally posted by Watiggi
Oh, don't tell me. Is the AI rather lame in that department still?

Where exactly is the AI lame?

[Watiggi]

The score aspect of it doesn't interest me, so from a gameplay point of view, really the only benefit the master gets is extra happiness - and it costs maintanence to have it! Hmmm. I think I would rather exterminated them and be done with it.

[Solver]

The other benefit, as you said in the first post, is that you get the vassal help you in wars.

[LordShiva]

It seems one of the complaints with the vassal state system is that "it would suck to be a vassal."

Well, duh. That's how it should be. Becoming a vassal of someone else should not be a viable strategy, at least if the objective is to win.

Don't be a vassal, be a master!

In conclusion, being a vassal is for hippies

[Watiggi]

Originally posted by Solver


Where exactly is the AI lame?

The AI being a little ehh tight a$$ed. I have noticed that the AI would rather die than give you anything - that has been my experience anyway. The AI just seems strange when it comes to giving in - it would rather hold onto a tech than give it to you in exchange for peace.

Does the AI bow down more when they capitulate?

[Solver]

Yeah, sometimes they're unwilling to give you tech for peace, I've noticed that. Think of it as their method of annoying you - you've already beaten them to death, and they can't get back into the game. So at least they're not going to make your life any more easier.

[Simplicity]

This explanation seems unfortunately very strange to me. The only benefits of HAVING a vassal are:
1) You don't have to bother to hunt down the rest of their cities.
2) You get increased happiness (odd... since you don't even get this if you completely conquered them).
3) A weak war ally.

While the benefits of being a vassal are:
1) The guy with the big stick is protecting you.

You can intimidate your vassals to get techs, resources, etc from them, but frankly you already could do that.
Does the AI fear rejecting a threat from a master more than it does from a random opponent?

The AI tends to be fairly silly in this area already. ("You'll take Music from my cold dead hands! I don't care how many units you have standing outside my last city!")...

I also worry that the AIs won't be able to use vassal relationships to do a better job at world domination as opposed to always going to the space race. Vassal relationships don't seem to really increase the power of the master all that much...

[Simplicity]

I guess what I mean is that the AIs at a certain difficulty level all play at that same level. So their wars tend to end in stalemate after stalemate.

AI(x) - AI(y) = 0. (Their power is the same).

But if you had a vassal, I would hope that would somehow add to your power (via tech or SOMETHING). Such that AIs could then use this in other conflicts.

AI(x) + AI(z) - AI(y) = AI(z) (which is already going to be weak since x crushed z already.