Why accept vassals?

[Blaupanzer]

Voluntary vassals are stuck for the next ten turns, like any treaty. Post that, they can leave if they wish.

[wodan11]

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.

Yeah, that was the one. It surprised me because (a) it never occurred to me to check since capitulated vassals pretty much never break free, and (b) I collapsed it 50% due to cultural pressure alone.

[Felch]

I like spinning off colonies into vassals. It's just kind of fun knowing that you have a posse with you, even if they're mildly retarded.

[joncnunn]

This is the case of a peaceful vassal. The main advantage is unless your vassal is eligible for UN / AP himself, he'll always vote for his master.

This will help avoid unexpected diplomatic losses (without having to go to war and conquer the guy first).
And you pretty much need a vassal to ensure a diplomatic win; (it disappears if you single handedly can win without any support.)
If going for conquest victory, that's one less rival to conquer. (Vassals count towards this.)
And if going for diplomatic victory, you'll get credit for half his land and population towards that as well. (Granted not as much as taking over the land yourself, but you get it right away)

I'm not sure if the Celts are on your landmass or not, if not your maintenance costs will be a lot lower with him being your vassal than it would be if you conquered his lands.

Even if on the same landmass, yes your maintenance costs go up when taking a vassal, but not as much as they would if you conquer them.

There is also the time savings of not having to conquer the person to consider so you can work on conquering someone else (or whatever.)

To be short and blunt, I'm having a hard time understanding why, from a strategic point of view, taking on a vassal state is a good idea. I've read the technical descriptions of what vassalage does for you, but I've not really seen a good description of why this is necessarily a good (or bad) decision. So if some of the veterans here could please explain the pros and cons of vassalage in pragmatic terms instead of game-rule terms I would be appreciative.



To be verbose about it, I am playing an Epic game, largest map, with 15 AI civs. There is only one other civ on my continent who is extremely pleased with me, so I am not worried about homeland security. The contient to the east has 10 civs on it, including the number 1 and number 3 civs (I'm #2). #1 also has control of the AP and has been using it to coerce his religious allies into war with his neighbors, so I am a bit worried about being on the bad end of a world war if I can't nullify the AP before he builds up a decent navy. I am the only civ with gunpowder, but they aren't that far behind.

The contient to the west has 5 civs and is not a technolgical threat. I already knocked one civ off the continent. I am currently at peace to build some city improvement back home before I gear up to take the next one out. Everybody else there seems to hate Washington for some reason, he seems like the next best target. Taking him out also gets me closer to the Chinese who are my real target. The other civs share my religion and have been friendly enough with me that I don't really fear a sneak attack, so I will deal with them at my leisure.

So, for no reason that I can discern, the Celts have asked for vassalage. They aren't at war. They don't have a huge military, but its strong enough that they can defend themselves. They are the biggest, most advanced, and most well defended civ on the content. We hate the same civs, so any war one of us starts, the other may be likely to join. In short, we would make good allies until there is noone left to conquer. In terms of benefits, he has no resources that I need and I don't need the extra happies. I can't take any techs from him since I'm more advanced. The only real benefit worth considering is the score boost - but then I would get that eventually if I do decide to run over him later. On the minus side, I have to pay more maintenance fees (although I'm not really clear on how much more) and I have to go to war if somebody comes after him. I'm not saying its a bad deal, but I doesn't really seem like a good deal either. So what are the real benefits of taking him in and do they offset the costs?

[ben04]

Last game I won a conquest victory by making everyone my vassal. The main advantage was that you can use the same army to conquer several rivals.

March in to his land and conquer his main cities until he capitulates. Then gift him your military techs and then liberate the cities that you just conquered. Do it in that order because each liberated city gets 2 free drafted units. If he has good techs then he will have up to date units that can actually defend the city. That way you will not need to leave units behind to defend the just conquered land.

Heal your attack stack with a medic and you can move towards the next civ. You can use your vassals roads. Most likely his culture will reach into enemy lands so you can position your stack a lot closer to the enemy before the DOW than if you had wiped him out.

The first civ was pretty hard to convince that vassalage is the way. After I had a couple the others fell fast. I've seen the Greek empire capitulate after only 3 rounds of war and only one fallen city. The Greek were number 3 by points and had a slight tech lead on me. (Lucky me, that he capitulated because a few turns after that he had infantry while half of my stack was still composed of muskets...)

With the same stack of units I managed to conquer 3 civs in 20-30 turns. I did not have to build defenders. I did not need to upgrade the stack. Thanks to an unholy number of CR3 trebuchets I had nearly no looses.

I suppose I did get lucky that the AI didn't have enough flanking units.

Another thing I tried with the first couple of civs was actually keeping the good cities and only leaving the bad ones to my vassal. You will get the entire BFC event if you have nearly no culture in the city. The only problem were nearly constant riots. Is it possible to get rid of riots in cities without having to build lots of culture? I havn't tried to position a large stack of archers in there.

There are however also a few downsides to this strategy. As the AIs aren't crippled, get good techs and have no war to spend hammers on they tend to go towards a cultural or space victory. As they are your vassals there is nearly no way for you to stop them.

It's actually an interesting strategy. Choose your best neighbor, make him your master, tech him up an gift him units so that he goes conquering. At some point he will be beyond the point where the other AIs can bully him. Now lay back and go for a cultural or space victory without having to car about military. Too bad humans can't become vassals.

[joncnunn]

Each military unit in a city acts as MP which reduces the chance of revolt. It appears that more powerful units are marginally more effective, but raw numbers of bad units trump quality there (while leaving the good units free to fight on the front lines.)

Usually for conquered cities I have them build nothing but culture improvements for a while in addition to using it to heal units for a while. Later if it's to far away and revolts are still an issue, obsolete units arrive as MP.

[ben04]

Thanks, I'll try putting a stack of cheap defenders in there next time. How many do you think are enough?

Building culture is not an option when only keeping that jucie capital in the middle of an 8 city civ. I've tried that and failed miserably. Not even world wonders produce enough culture.

[davypi]

Thanks all for the replies. A few comments:

Yes, there is hit to your maintenance costs. I had a save point right before they asked to join, so I played about 10 turns each both with and without accepting the vassal. They maintenance cost went up enough that I had to dump 10% more of income into taxes. I was also a bit pissed off that they refused to trade maps with me. (Hello? If you want protection, you've got to give me intelligence.)

My worry about using vassals as tech researchers is that if I give them my techs and then they choose to break away, they get a lot more in return from me than I got from them. It seems even more unfair that they can break off the relationship at will, but I can't break off the relationship with them. Maybe some other time I will play it out further than ten turns to see what the bigger differences are, but for now it just seems like a mechanism for less developed civs to leech off of the bigger ones.

[joncnunn]

The exact amount depends upon the ratio of their culture to yours.
Just go to the city in question and mouse over either the culture or nationality, I forget which. If you see on mouse over a # followed by a % revolt chance; that is the current per turn chance of revolt.
And you don't have enough there and need to add at least one unit to reduce the chance to zero.
Building things like Theaters does indeed work, it takes some time to get started but over time it will decrease the number of units you need. Worse yet if you don't build any culture items, your MP needs will increase because your rival's nearby cities are adding cultural pressure as well.

Even better though if you have Sushi's or Creative Constructions is add the corporation; they tend to add a lot of culture every turn.

Thanks, I'll try putting a stack of cheap defenders in there next time. How many do you think are enough?

Building culture is not an option when only keeping that jucie capital in the middle of an 8 city civ. I've tried that and failed miserably. Not even world wonders produce enough culture.

[joncnunn]

Daypi, you get free line of sight within your vassals territory just as if you owned it; so you don't really need constant updates of their world map to defend them.

I also think the people are talking about gifting up their capitulated vassals with techs and not the ones free the break away.

[Theben]

One reason to accept vassals is that by not doing so they might capitulate to another, stronger, civ.

[Blaupanzer]

Or capitulate to a civ that is just behind you in power and research, catapulting the two of them into a headache for you. Either civ you could take, now you sent a volunteer right into the arms of a rising enemy.

[Hauptman]

Vassals also make excelent border states. When you have a huge continent and do not want to conquer it all, take what you want then vassalize whats left to protect you from everyone else. Supprise DOWs now have to attack your vassal, thus saving your tiles from harm.

And , even more importantly, they give a great buffer zone against spies. With Vassal lands in between you and everyone else, the occcurance of spy meddling drops considerably.

[Dis]

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.

Is there a screen you can check to see what techs the ai's are trading each other? I have no idea how to check if they trade my gifted techs or not.

[joncnunn]

Dis, not directly. But sometimes it can be inferred by the tech screen if you already have all techs used in the trade.