Expand Vassal Mechanics

TheImperialWar#5677

allow players and the ai to spin off a province as a fully-fledged faction under your protection. give us the option to decide the name of the faction and its leader from your list of lords. habitability and units the new faction can recruit is based on both your faction and the local province.

the ai will also make use of this mechanic when appropriate, such as low habitability or when defensive/isolationist ai such as dwarfs and wood elves have unwanted lands.

vassals have a new mechanic based on fealty. it is mainly dictated by the relative strength of all your vassals compared to yourself but can also be modified by tribute/support level, relations, missions and spending resources.

fealty changes per turn from 0-100. the more loyal a vassal is, the less likely they will initiate independent diplomatic actions such as declaring war, the more options you have with them and the more weight they put into your requests and war targets.

at low fealty they will stop sharing line of sight and military access and they may rebel along with other vassals. at 100 fealty you can confederate or perform special actions such as creating an expeditionary army near one of your lords.

tribute/support is based on % income and can be set per vassal. it arrives as a random mix of units, gold, research, one-time edicts, temporary buffs, army abilities and items. the higher the tribute, the greater loss of fealty per turn and vice versa.

GloatingSwine#8098

Why are these vassals not worse than just owning the stuff yourself?

Their armies will be less effective and used less effectively, they will manage their provinces less effectively, and all you will get is a percentage of their income, which is worse than yours would be.

The first step in fixing vassals is to make the player want a vassal by making it an advantage.

b_took#1657

Fix vassals before expanding them. A bigger bad mechanic remains a bad mechanic.

TheImperialWar#5677

habitability, role play, unique boons and micromanagement are big reasons.

a large part of the map has poor habitability and high corruption which makes it expensive and slow to build up while providing very little income. you can create a loyal puppet state to develop that land far more quickly and cheaply.

or you have a legendary lord you want to lead an allied faction with, similar to Boris. you now can create a fully functional faction and make the story you want happen.

or maybe the ogres declare war while you're dealing with the vampires. you can spin off a neighboring province with additional support to deal with the ogres while you keep your attention focused on the vampires.

late game when you conquer many territories it may also be easier to deal with a few large vassals rather micromanage dozens of regions.

support and tribute aren't 1:1 income, they come in various forms such as unique edicts and items, unrecruitable units and special army abilities such as healing rains, summon necro sphinx or thunder barge bombardment.

GloatingSwine#8098

Habitability doesn't matter past the point you get a reasonable level of global public order going, there are no unique boons for vassals (especially not ones of your own faction) and your suggestion doesn't create any, and the increased returns you'd get from owning the territory yourself makes managing it worthwhile.

A vassal is never going to be an effective military asset against a significant foe. Pay attention to your geopolitical situation so you can predict when wars are coming and have armies to win them.

The only reason to have a vassal would be allied recruitment and that wouldn't be a thing with a vassal of your faction that you create.

TheImperialWar#5677

it doesn't have to be the most competitive option; in the end it is more about convenience and roleplay rather than optimization. should we not improve auto resolve just because it is more effective to manually fight every battle yourself?

I had a lot of fun in my tzarina campaign with gifting the western half of my empire to Boris and having him lead the fight in the west/north while I focused elsewhere. it may not have been the most effective option but I'm glad that I didn't have to manually micromanage every region and have the ai deal with defending me from that direction.

I saved a huge amount of time and got to focus on the fights that I wanted and that's a tradeoff I personally think was worth it.

you don't have to interact with the vassal system if you don't want to, just like with auto resolve. it's up to you to decide if the tradeoff between min/maxing your campaign and spending your time doing other things you enjoy makes sense.

GloatingSwine#8098

TheImperialWar said:

it doesn't have to be the most competitive option; in the end it is more about convenience and roleplay rather than optimization. should we not improve auto resolve just because it is more effective to manually fight every battle yourself?

If you're going to spend time coding it, it really should be a competitive option. There needs to be a reason to use it for everyone in at least some conditions, not just roleplay or being too lazy to click on some buildings.

Autoresolve is a valuable time-saving tool that everyone uses. Any vassal mechanic without vassals being good to have for their own sake first is not.

Lord_Zarkov#7252

Not convinced vassals of your own faction are particularly useful. Main advantage of vassals seems to be to settle an area with poor climate where it is expensive and slow to build tall or if you’re already allies with them and don’t want to go to war to take the territory.

If they’re your race it’s always going to be inferior to just owning the area.

b_took#1657

Though some factions within the same race have different climate preferences, e.g. Malus Darkblade does Jungles and Mountains.

TheImperialWar#5677

I don't want vassalage to be the most effective option over doing it yourself, at least not all the time. if putting in the time to micromanage dozens of regions and armies was worse than having an ai faction do it the reward for micromanaging needs a boost.

vassals should provide a legitimate and viable way to play the game without being the only competitive way to do so. I don't want to force this mechanic on people who don't want to use it.

that the ai is suboptimal at building settlements and armies should be a reason to improve the ai rather than not to expand vassalage. we all want a better ai regardless if it is a vassal or not.

the recent stellaris expansion made being an overlord over several vassals a fun way to play the game without having it be strictly better than owning all that territory yourself. the ai manages planets and fleets in its usual suboptimal way but is still useful against bordering enemies especially with a decent contribution level. and that you don't have to manage all those additional planets and pops is a huge plus for those of us who don't want to manage 50+ planets but still want to have most of the galaxy under our control.

GloatingSwine said:

If you're going to spend time coding it, it really should be a competitive option. There needs to be a reason to use it for everyone in at least some conditions, not just roleplay or being too lazy to click on some buildings.

Autoresolve is a valuable time-saving tool that everyone uses. Any vassal mechanic without vassals being good to have for their own sake first is not.

I actually want to hear your ideas on how to do that. I'm not going to pretend my suggestions are perfect or even good and that there isn't a better way to achieve them. but so far no one else has put forth an alternative way to improve them.

GloatingSwine#8098

It needs to be something like the new Stellaris mechanic. Vassals would need specific bonuses for being vassals and give you bonuses for having them, which could vary depending on who you were playing as and who the vassal was. They would need to be just as viable strategically against other AI as they would be on their own, with all the aggression and cheats that implies both economically and in autoresolve (nu-Stellaris vassal system steps down vassal cheats by one difficulty, it used to remove them entirely). Currently whatever AI profile gets used for vassals basically turns off their ability to do anything.

Remember that in old Stellaris vassals were a cheeky way to get around megastructure limits (they were never *really* worth using for reducing sprawl).

They would need to have a loyalty figure like Stellaris which would need to be an absolute hard determinant of their behaviour. Right now a vassal with 400 relations when you are max reliability can secede any time you declare war, which becomes more and more likely the more you have (because of their relative strength to the player) and is absolutely terrible when you have low reliability, if you want a nice demo of that go and watch JanetOnOccasion's vassal based Vlad playthrough from like 6 months ago, pretty much every 10 turns several of them secede and the whole theme of the playthrough goes to crud.

There should be absolutely no chance of them just saying no if they are loyal, and it should be obvious if they are disloyal and why.