Why accept vassals?

[Boracks]

Just won a conquest game where I vassalized all the remaining civs. Quicker than destroying them all.

[wodan11]

They are useful as trade partners. I haven't yet tried it but 1 tile island in the middle of the ocean could open some good trade opportunities. Drop a settler, found a city and declare independence. Enjoy the juice intercontinental trade route that provides 3+ commerce.

It takes 2 cities to declare independence. I believe they also have to be on the same landmass.

[mkorin]

In my opinion, accepting voluntary vassels is always a bad idea. There is defenitely a maintenance hit, the manuel is very clear about that. Also, in my experience they cut and run as soon as a war starts. It's funny they stick with AIs until the bitter end, but will abandon the player as soon as they can. I take capitulated vassals just to make a conquer victory faster. As to the research trick. My vassals are usually so far behind me or fall behind me that their research is worthless and they will not always trade with you after you've beaten them to a pulp and forced them to be your vassal.

Mike

[slnz]

In my opinion, accepting voluntary vassels is always a bad idea. There is defenitely a maintenance hit, the manuel is very clear about that. Also, in my experience they cut and run as soon as a war starts. It's funny they stick with AIs until the bitter end, but will abandon the player as soon as they can. I take capitulated vassals just to make a conquer victory faster. As to the research trick. My vassals are usually so far behind me or fall behind me that their research is worthless and they will not always trade with you after you've beaten them to a pulp and forced them to be your vassal.

Mike

In the latest BtS patch (3.19) your vassals always trade techs with you, regardless of their relation score. As for the research help, the point is to gift them nearly all your techs and tell them to research a non-urgent tech that you can skip for a while (i.e. Military Science, Fascism etc.). Even if they take 4x longer to tech it than you, they will eventually and it's of some help.

[rah]

Hmm, with the new patch and the trade with them under mercantilism, I may have to rethink my position on this.

Gotta love Poly.

[mkorin]

I'm using the MAC version which is 3.18 and says final release. Hopefully they'll give us the 3.19 patch as no cd and vassals that act like vassals should would be a huge benefit.

Mike

[wodan11]

gift them nearly all your techs

Gotta be careful about that. The bastages will trade your techs around like the clap. Your enemies will have them before you know it.

(Unless you have brokering turned off, hint hint.)

[slnz]

Well, obviously. I only do that if I have a tech lead or ~tech parity, so the enemies have nothing to trade in return for my techs from the vassal. (Tech parity is usually enough 'cos the enemies don't trade away their monopoly techs and I tend get those techs before they become common knowledge) Or if everyone who matters hates the vassal. In other cases I gift the techs very carefully to just give the prereqs for the tech I want him to research.

Sometimes the brokering can work in your favor, as well, if you tell the vassal to tech something and he trades for it from someone that wouldn't trade it with you, and then brokers it over to you.

And no, I don't play with tech brokering off Brokering makes the game a bit more dynamic, albeit a bit easier because the human can exploit brokering much more than the AIs with their petty diplomatic grudges

[EPW]

nm

[Blaupanzer]

Vassals do cost you money and gain you happiness. The money cost is due to the 'number of cities' penalty to city expenses. The game counts the vassals cities in that cost formula for each city in the main empire. Each such city also gets one happy face for each vassal. The vassal's cities are penalized one happy face due to the vassal condition. You may place planes in vassal cities as though they were your own and your workers can work vassal lands.

All this was true prior to change 3.17. I play with vassals off now, so recent changes such as directed research are not known to me.

[wodan11]

"Life is not fair" should never be used as an excuse to not try making it fair.

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

[Jaybe]

You may place planes in vassal cities as though they were your own and your workers can work vassal lands.

You can base only 4 aircraft in a vassal's city, regardless of airport status.
Your workers canNOT work vassal lands (other than communication lines, which you can do anywhere regardless).

With tech brokering off, I have no problem with having vassals enabled. With tech brokering allowed, I tore my hair out* with my vassals indiscriminately selling techs I had given them!

* See that hat in my pic/avatar? That's because of the thinning of hair caused by my pulling it out in civ-rage.

[trev]

I have always accepted offers of vassalage, voluntary and capitulation. I have not found any volutary vassal that breaks the vassalge for freedom again. As far as techs go, I gift them techs that bring them up to a level just below the average AI, never techs more advanced than that, mainly military ones, primarily so they can be useful militarily in joint wars. I have not found a downside to vassalage yet, and several times have won games through vassalizing everyone.

[wodan11]

I have not found any volutary vassal that breaks the vassalge for freedom again.

One game I had a vassal stuck on the south end of a peninsula that I dominated. After an early war, he had just one city, his capital. Stayed that way about about 1,000 years during which I put some incredible culture pressure on him (I was going for a CV). The culture was so much that he actually broke free and DOW'ed me (despite me being 10x him on the power graph).

I had to dig out the docs to find out yep, one of the break free conditions is if the vassal loses a lot of territory, or something like that. I was pretty surprised.

I have not found a downside to vassalage yet

The main downside IMO is that given a choice between me having another good city or two and not having them, I'd rather the former.

[slnz]

Voluntary vassals don't have any break-free conditions, they can do it whenever they feel like it. Capitulated vassals have those conditions (one of which is that they lose 50% of their territory). You can check those at any time by mousing over them in the score screen.