How Best to Enjoy the Vassal Mechanism

[Will9]

Originally posted by Solver
They need to have 50% of your population AND land.

I had 6 cities they had 4 (18 civ map).

[Solver]

Land != cities.

Anyway, even if they do meet the requirements, it means they CAN break away, not that they necessarily will.

[Will9]

Hapshepsut became Mansa Musa's vassal and then had to declare war on me, his friend. Is the AI programed to take this into effect?

[Thedrin]

Originally posted by Will9
Hapshepsut became Mansa Musa's vassal and then had to declare war on me, his friend. Is the AI programed to take this into effect?

Is this a hypothetical or did it happen? Not a good game mechanic if it is the case.

Also, its Hat-shep-sut. By the standards of most of the spellings of that name here you get an A+.

Edit: And any word on whether a vassal forced to go to war and then losing enough land to declare freedom remains at war or can it automatically sign peace with the aggressor.

[Will9]

It happened. I am waiting Hatshepsut to to free herself after the time has expired. (I took two of her cities so she probably will once she can.)

[yin26]

Originally posted by Will9
Hapshepsut became Mansa Musa's vassal and then had to declare war on me, his friend. Is the AI programed to take this into effect?

Do you mean *her* friend? This makes perfect sense, otherwise having a vassal would not have much meaning. There is, however, an issue of the AI sometimes not always seeing that agreeing to a particular war also equals war with x, y, z vassal. You might not encounter this. Solver caught it, and it's being fixed.

[yin26]

Originally posted by Thedrin
Edit: And any word on whether a vassal forced to go to war and then losing enough land to declare freedom remains at war or can it automatically sign peace with the aggressor.

I was trying to thing about this, actually. Don't quote me on this, but I think I've seen a vassal in this situation become the vassal of another. Certainly, once free, the vassal can call for peace independently.

More fun that that, though, I saw a freed vassal immediately declare war on his master! Man, that was good times (I was the guy taking it to the master). Suddenly the vassals units turn from my land and join forces with me. Fun stuff. So, yes, that is one answer to your question.

[yin26]

I should also report that in my current game I got situated right in the middle of the map...with 5 civs around me. I managed to bit into one, got hit by another (took two of her cities), then got hit by another (took one of his cities). All this fighting left me hardly able to focus on infrastructure, so it wasn't long before I started slipping on the tech race.

Anyway, I played the religion game right (for a change) and sided with the right guy at the right time. Cyrus had the biggest army by far, and by careful manipulation, I got him to be friendly with me. So psycho Catherine attacks me *again* (even though we are the same religion, she just hates me). She has a vassal, France, who has joined in. But Cyrus has already taken one of Russia's cities, so at this point I'm just looking to see if I can survive.

In other games with an easier start, I would have also had at least one vassal of my own by this time, so it's easy to see the potential for total (or near) world war. Throw in the occasional (and carefully cultivated) Defensive Pact with the Top Dog, and there is some real fun to be had.

EDIT: Small update -- With Cyrus' help, I took two cities from Catherine (I think Cyrus took 3 or 4). This caused France to break free from Catherine. While France didn't immediately offer me peace, I did pay him 100 gp to obtain it. Not the ideal I was hoping for, but Catherine is now facing a 2 v 1. It's this back and forths that I find much more engaging in Warlords.

EDIT #2: France attacked its old master (Catherine) 2 turns later! Ha! Now she's 3 v 1. That same turn, in fact, France capitulated to Cyrus, so perhaps that's how the DoW came about. Anyway, Isabella decided to attack me (I'm really pretty dead at this point) with her vassal. My Defensive Pact is still in force with Cyrus and his vassal, however, so now the world is one big nasty mess. Love it!

I'll most certainly die this time around or survive in some mangled form while Cyrus takes the win. But there is so much more energy to the game now that I hardly care.

EDIT #3: Sorry. One of the things still lacking in Civ 4 are timely annoucements of the situation. What happened is Catherine turned herself over to Saladin for protection. He already had Isabella as a vassal. So *he* DoW'd me, and the wiley Catherine now has us back to a 3 v 3!

[Cort Haus]

What does the Warlords box taste like, Yin? Have you tried it yet?

[Louis XXIV]

Originally posted by Solver
Humans can not be vassals of AI. Humans can only become vassals in multiplayer games.

At CFC, Alexman posted that humans can't become vassals of AI to prevent certain exploits. Do you know what they would be (this is more curiosity than anything else).

[Fosse]

Humans can't become Vassals in Single Player? Wow. This is breathtakingly disappointing.

I cannot imagine that the majority of the gaming population is going to understand or care about potential exploits enough to accept that a game feature is restricted from them. If the master/vassal relationship is truly exploitable such that the human player -- playing all by himself -- will break the game if he capitulates to end a losing war, then there must be some large flaw in the implementation of Vassalage. I am stunned that this is true, and disheartened that that the majority of us in the gaming community are left without this option just to tie the hands of the small number of power gamers who would seemingly break their own single player experience. It is unfortunate that the group of players who would likely never dream of ways to exploit such a game option are probably largely the same group of players who don't download mods the way so many of we posters do.

I am very interested to know what exploits Firaxis saw in its new system that were deemed unfixable if left accessible.

[DirtyMartini]

Had my first experience with vassal states today.

Playing as Carthage, Spain to my north, Vikings north of them.

Eventually attacked Spain, quickly took three cities. This is where I would have had to pause to regroup to take the rest of her cities. Instead, I asked her to capitulate. After that, she became great trade partner -- I told her what to research, then traded for it once she got it. I let her improve her remaining jungle cities.

After a bit, I needed to expand again. I would have preferred to take Spain's remaining cities rather than declare war on Vikings further north or Americans to the east. That wasn't possible, instead I used a war declaration on the Vikings to kill two birds with one stone.

I declared war on Vikings-- Spain declares automatically. I took a couple Viking random isolated cities while Viking riflemen took out Spanish musketeers in the Spanish buffer zone. Viking army was ground down a little bit in the process of capturing two Spanish cities. I then swept in and took those Spanish cities from the Vikings and kept them rather than returning them to Spain (a nice new option BTW). Now the decision is whether to let Vikings take out Spain's last remaining city (which I really want) or to push on into Viking territory to force peace or capitulation.

Basically, Vassal states makes my practice of pruning enemies, but leaving them a few cities as buffers against other empires much more efficient. I also think it helps prevent overexpansion as a massive drain on economy -- instead of overreaching and taking too many of an enemies cities, make them a vassal. I haven't checked it out, but I suspect the maintenance increase from having a Vassal would be less than the maintenance increase from conquering those remaining, relatively unproductive cities. Overall, vassals.

Dirty

[Mergle]

Originally posted by Louis XXIV


At CFC, Alexman posted that humans can't become vassals of AI to prevent certain exploits. Do you know what they would be (this is more curiosity than anything else).

I can see at least one. I've got a turtle strategy in which I dig in for cultural/space race victory and try to avoid any wars at all. Generally, only one AI ever gets strong enough to seriously threaten me but often I'll lose because I'm hopeless at warfare and never build enough units if I'm not concentrating on it. But if I could just capitulate to him/her when s/he attacks, I'd probably be able to ride out the rest of the game to victory with ease.

[yin26]

Exactly. You could just capitulate to the biggest AI and ... voila ... you've got an instant army on your side for very little loss. Also, as the human player, you could ignore your duty to help fight alongside your master in wars. You can do that with defensive pacts too, I suppose, but for the vassal mechanism to really work, the AI needs to be able to count on the combined power of the master-vassal relationship reliably.

[Arrian]

Well, I got my first vassal last night in my first Warlords game. I played Caesar b/c of ORG/IMP. I actually didn't hook up iron for some time and fought my first war with axes/cats, crushing America. Got my first 2 GG's during that time, one went to add 2XP to units coming out of my main troop producer, the other sprinkled XP & led one of the units in my main attack stack.

Next war was against the Vikings. I was kicking the hell out of them when they offered to capitulate. I figured I should try the feature out so I accepted. It was pretty lucrative, actually, at least for a little while. I was able to sell resources to the Viks for gpt... every time I sold them one, they would free up more gpt and I'd sell another. Over and over until I was selling 5-6 resources all at 7-8 gpt each. Plus I demanded their only resource from them, the bastard that I am.

This left one other civ on my continent (Mao). A few turns later, he attacked my vassal, dragging me into war. I took Beijing, but was unable (unwilling? ) to stop him from stomping my vassal. I made peace but my vassal had lost most of his land/cities, so he broke away and I killed him

Then I slept.

-Arrian