How Best to Enjoy the Vassal Mechanism

[Badtz Maru]

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 hope they patch in an option for humans to become
vassals that can be enabled in a custom game, like permanent alliances. Those are exploitable too and removed from the vanilla game because of that.

[Will9]

Originally posted by yin26

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.

I was Mansa Musa friend. I went back to my last save which was just before I declared war on Hatshepsut the first time.

[DrSpike]

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

Nah, I aint being nobody's vassal anyway.

[RobC]

Originally posted by Will9
Well I stoped growth and Egypt grew to 50% of my population. Why can't we be vassals.

I think you are misunderstanding those limits. The potential vassal has to have LESS THAN 50% of land/pop in order to even consider becoming a vassal to you. Once they become a vassal, if they ever grow to beyond 50% of your land or pop (or shrink to below 50% of what they had when they became your vassal), then they are freed from vassalage.

[Will9]

I did that so they would free themselves.

[TheArsenal]

The days of picking the weakest neighbor and plowing over them without any consideration of the consequences is over. The weak AI aligning themselves to the strong seems to be all the rage. It takes me 30 seconds of staring at the screen just to sort the relationships before deciding if I should go to war.

[Qwertqwert]

Well I havn't gotten Warloards yet, but that seems like it gives an advantege to builders instead of warmongers. If you stay out of war, you don't have these problems.

[DirtyMartini]

Originally posted by TheArsenal
The days of picking the weakest neighbor and plowing over them without any consideration of the consequences is over. The weak AI aligning themselves to the strong seems to be all the rage. It takes me 30 seconds of staring at the screen just to sort the relationships before deciding if I should go to war.

More like 30 minutes...

[yin26]

Originally posted by TheArsenal
The days of picking the weakest neighbor and plowing over them without any consideration of the consequences is over. The weak AI aligning themselves to the strong seems to be all the rage. It takes me 30 seconds of staring at the screen just to sort the relationships before deciding if I should go to war.

Exactly! If this isn't a huge change for the better, I don't know what is.

[Tattila the Hun]

Originally posted by yin26
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!

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!

Hold on, does Isabella have a vassal, while being Saladin's vassal, or did the situation change?

Originally posted by DirtyMartini
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).

I seem to recall geting the choice to return cities to their "rightfull" rulers in vanilla Civ4, too.

[Gibsie]

Question: you and an AI have attacked another weaker AI; the war is going well, and your enemy eventually agrees to capitulate to you. However, if you accept that option, do you automatically declare war on your former ally who is still at war with the vassal?!

[yin26]

No, peace is declared at that point.

[asleepathewheel]

One thing you have to be careful about late game is that vassals can still build spaceship parts. So you need to be careful before vassalizing a civ that is almost finished with the SS...

[asleepathewheel]

Another issue I've had with vassals is this scenario:

my civ is roughly tied for the lead in the early modern era, the competitor is on another continent.

I'm at war with 2 civs and am smashing them, albeit slower than I prefer due to 2 fronts.

I've captured most of the 2nd civ I'm at war with and have just taken a city that is still enveloped by the remaining ai ciites' culture.

What happens next? Becomes vassal of other continent's civ. Peace is declared and about 15 tanks that were in the region get teleported to my newly captured city.

The problem? No way to get them out due to culture issues. Don't have airports, a ways away, anway. Can't really go to war with the other main civ, my army is taxed to breaking. Have to just leave those tanks in place and hope that my southern army survives.

Eventually I did declare war on the vassal state, but those tanks would have come in handy in other adventures.

[Will9]

Just add "make peace with" to the peace terms to avoid war the other nation.