AI and Region spamming

[Skaz88]

I would like a way to absorb vassals/small cities into larger cities. Right now there's major minor nation spam all over the map and they're often right next to each other. It would be less of a problem if there was a way to merge them.

 

[Filena]

Yeah need a raze city-Vassal or a absorbs who not give chaos !

I already have put the game on shelve because AI spam killing my joy with all these city spam 4 square away from my city !

 

[Big J Money]

So what happens mid game when you want to have a presence on the 2nd continent and all you can do is take over a bunch of 7hex towns that give you basically no benefit as they can't grow large enough to create production chains, or to have local production fast enough to create a unit in under 10 turns, and the trade system only allows you to export to 1 region each, regardless of how many export slots you have?

From what I've seen, vassal resources are just a basic function of their population * prosperity. I don't think little vassals are inferior to large ones, but maybe larger ones can grow faster. So if they have a high pop, then I might capture them.

Otherwise, I would personally avoid conquering any little regions with low pop (to avoid the chaos), and focus on taking the AI's core regions, which will be developed and larger. At least in my games so far, the 2nd continent looks just like the 1st continent. The AI has a few good regions and then loads of tiny 7 hex vassals.

In general, I don't think the issue is quite as bad as to make the game unplayable; but I do agree that I'd like to see something that discourages the AI from settling tiny regions anywhere they want, as soon as possible, without any downsides.

Another thing that might help is to base the Chaos gained from conquering a vassal on their population size. Getting 20 chaos from conquering each puny vassal makes them completely undesirable. And getting only 20 chaos for taking an empire's biggest region seems maybe too low.