1.19 is a huge nerf to vassal play

[Milith]

The Denmark patch comes with a massive change to how Liberty desire is calculated based on vassal development.

The idea was to streamline liberty desire by removing the 100 development and 300 development thresholds which didn't make much sense, and make it linear instead. The result however is a huge nerf to vassal play, see for yourself:

It's a lot harder, borderline impossible to keep a mid sized (150-250) vassal happy even if you're a lot bigger than them. I don't think having huge vassals was that strong in previous patches (can't pick their ideas, AI army management is erratic, they're awful at dealing with local autonomy), but the constant addition of new vassal interactions made it a pretty fun way to play the game, so I'm sad to see such a massive nerf.

Should liberty desire be scaled down?

 

[gronak]

I wouldn't mind as long as you could get a CB on your vassal to make them loyal - show them who's in charge - that doesn't make you lose stability for declaring on them. It is just a pain when that stay around 70-80% liberty desire, but won't declare an independence war or anything and you can't do much to lower their desire.

 

[TaranSF]

If 300 was supposed to be the cap from before when vassals get to the point where they are almost unmanageable shouldn't the scale for liberty desire be six development per liberty desire percentage point. That would make the 300 development be the tipping point since it would set the vassal at a default 50% liberty desire plus other factors and it would scale up from there, albeit at a smaller rate. From this here it looks like every 4 development increases liberty desire by a percentage point. That seems far too high in my opinion, unless vassals are supposed to be super small. Since that is a whole 100 development lower then the previous scale.

 

[Vetgirig]

Presume they did it so more players select Espionage ideas and the -10 liberty desire. Also so more use the feature to develop in vassal to keep LD down. Sadly that also increases vassla development and thus the liberal desire.

 

[eon47]

I wouldn't mind as long as you could get a CB on your vassal to make them loyal - show them who's in charge - that doesn't make you lose stability for declaring on them. It is just a pain when that stay around 70-80% liberty desire, but won't declare an independence war or anything and you can't do much to lower their desire.

I like this idea from a realism standpoint at least, since historically, contention and occasional violence between vassal and liege was common. However, winning the war would need to pacify vassals long enough to prevent them from feeling like a nuisance, and some additional benefit to these skirmishes would probably be called for to keep players happy.

 

[User4035]

I like the concept of liberty desire to scale with development. ....But this implementation doesn't seem to fun.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Relative development values need to matter.

If it doesn't, the change to scaling is meaningless to the complaint of the previous system and simply nerfs the mechanic.

A 250 development subject going disloyal to a 5000 development subject just because is absurd, especially when this adds a bigger malus than "relative power".

 

[bbqftw]

I wouldn't mind it if a strong 300+ development vassal, with good hold of its internal affairs, strong army, and stable was difficult to keep in line.

But right now, large-scale vassal feeding involves dealing with vassals that are borderline failed states because they are incapable of managing stability, pick incorrect national focus, pick useless idea groups (any non-brain dead human player is going to pick religious or humanist over things like diplomatic if its incapable of maintaining high religious unity with its current missionary strength / tolerance), are incredibly bad at prioritizing paying down war exhaustion, and have no concept of disaster avoidance - and this problem only increases as you grow the vassal larger. Large vassals require an enormous amount of babysitting right now - they are really not an "I win" button.

I suppose vassals should be less than singularly focused coring machines (as I assume client states are supposed to represent). But a vassal with a minimal army where I need to kill half a million rebels because it decided it wanted to buy a diplomatic tech level instead of paying down war exhaustion when it has 10+ of it and decided to put on some non-administrative national focus shouldn't be boiling over with desire for independence just because it nominally controls a lot of land and is completely dependent on its overlords ability to suppress its rebels.

 

[FB5813]

Relative development values need to matter.

Agreed. It's rather bemusing that relative development levels do actually matter when diplo vassalizing (economic base compared to x) but the moment they become a vassal it doesn't matter at all.

 

[bbqftw]

Another separate argument is that this doesn't even solve the problem it was aimed at.

Presumably the mods looked at someone like Path's AAR, where using deus vult strats he is able to maintain multiple loyal 500+ dev supervassals using grant provinces interaction. Fundamentally, this is the only sustainable way of maintaining said supervassals (as you need WC-level prestige generation to prestige bomb otherwise - pretty unviable for normal playthrough). The problem is that grant provinces is actually so strong that it still outpaces liberty desire growth.

Here is one example from a 1.18 game - here is a 570 development Novgorod I am maintaining:

with some pretty minimal mil power expenditures, this guy is still completely loyal.

So TL;DR - want to maintain some casual large vassals while roleplaying - get out of here!

want to do abusive religious + influence grant province supervassal strats - no problem!

and it just absolutely screws over people without cossacks DLC vassal interaction. Better play privileged RCC tags every game if you want to expand at something faster than snails pace.

 

[Milith]

To be fair, in 1.19 your 570 dev Novgorod would be at 65.7% liberty desire (570 development -> 142.5 liberty desire) so it does sort of kind of make this kind of extreme vassalfeeding harder although you can still make it work.

 

[bbqftw]

It's the only way to make it work. WC-pace blobbing is pretty much the only way to maintain supervassals.

The problem is its exactly that WC-peace blobbing style that this nerf was intended to curb (probably).

 

[atwix]

Presume they did it so more players select Espionage ideas and the -10 liberty desire.

presume they did it to incite people to buy cossacks DLC in a sale.

Grant province lowers LD and all. If 1.19 LD scaling stays as it is, this 'grant province' becomes must for vassal feeding..

Presumably the mods looked at someone like Path's AAR, where using deus vult strats he is able to maintain multiple loyal 500+ dev supervassals using grant provinces interaction. Fundamentally, this is the only sustainable way of maintaining said supervassals (as you need WC-level prestige generation to prestige bomb otherwise - pretty unviable for normal playthrough). The problem is that grant provinces is actually so strong that it still outpaces liberty desire growth.

heh, I was thinking of him also when reading the OP statement

 

[bbqftw]

"screw that war exhaustion, I am going to buy 50% tech penalty dip tech"

just why? why do you have to make vassal interaction such a miserable experience paradox?

I scutaged a vassal from 18 war exhaustion, in this time he paid down war exhaustion maybe once. So its not like rotating scutage helps either.

oh yeah, they also cancel cores when they get sieged, causing them to flush 50% of their admin down the toilet. so you really have to babysit them and literally place troops where the rebels will spawn so they don't lose half their admin income doing stuff that zero competent players would ever do.

this is the crap we have to deal with, not supervassals providing gigantic amounts of troops to roll over my enemies as is what happens in some devs fantasy world.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

^ That's not the limit of subject screw jobs either. It's better than "one rebellion or siege permanently locks all religious conversion until you reload the game" that we had in 1.9, but vassals are still really bad with that kind of stuff. They rack up heaps of WE they never buy down even if they don't actually get sieged, can't fight their own rebels, yet think their "power" merits independence . They also ignore attach commands on supportive even to 1 size stacks so unless set to passive or something will keep running up unnecessary WE. Tech priority is weird too, same with embracing institutions.

 

[Gratak]

The Denmark patch comes with a massive change to how Liberty desire is calculated based on vassal development.

The idea was to streamline liberty desire by removing the 100 development and 300 development thresholds which didn't make much sense, and make it linear instead. The result however is a huge nerf to vassal play, see for yourself:

It's a lot harder, borderline impossible to keep a mid sized (150-250) vassal happy even if you're a lot bigger than them. I don't think having huge vassals was that strong in previous patches (can't pick their ideas, AI army management is erratic, they're awful at dealing with local autonomy), but the constant addition of new vassal interactions made it a pretty fun way to play the game, so I'm sad to see such a massive nerf.

Should liberty desire be scaled down?

Thanks for saving me the work of doing that plot^^ Was thinking exactly the same... The idea of making it linear is good, but the increase compared to earlier is crazy!

Presume they did it so more players select Espionage ideas and the -10 liberty desire. Also so more use the feature to develop in vassal to keep LD down. Sadly that also increases vassla development and thus the liberal desire.

Actually this makes the -10 LD even worse than they already were previously: The +2 diprep from influence/diplomacy idea groups (which anyway give -6LD) are now more important than ever because you need to integrate those vassals earlier.

 

[lolada]

They could tune these numbers if they are out of control - didn't play with big vassals this patch yet. The change makes sense, those 100/300 breakpoints were weird. I guess it could be worked around to make more mid sized vassals. It makes a lot of sense to make liberty desire relative to overlords power and not just to absolute subject's development - that was nice suggestion above.

Also it would be good idea to make Liberty desire ideas and policies useful. I actually used LD policy on my world conquest, it was quite helpful. Development subjects action to reduce liberty desire is also probably too op at the moment - 5% per click is huge considering you can fith and dump somewhere 30 mil points. Keeping huge Sweden in check with miserly 100-150 mil points is kind of stupid.

Still when you have lots of subjects its a big drain to keep developing them so the policy or that espionage idea helps nicely.

 

[raikaria]

I believe that the point is to sort of say 'If you want large vassals; make them marches or improve your diplo rep' and 'If you want a loyal large vassal you gotta treat them nice'.

There's a lot of ways to improve liberty desire. You can't just make a nation your slave and forget about it anymore.

 

[Vulkandrache]

There's a lot of ways to improve liberty desire. You can't just make a nation your slave and forget about it anymore.

No there are not. If you just want to sit there ar some size and have a vassal or two there is almost nothing of note you can do to keep them happy.
Anything of note, anything with a big enough impact to counter the arbitrary LD vassals get from merely existing requires mass conquest.


And i second

I wouldn't mind it if a strong 300+ development vassal, with good hold of its internal affairs, strong army, and stable was difficult to keep in line.

Behold my vassal. With Quantity, Defensive, Offensive. Holding most of the rich Chinese heartland.
Is in debt like crazy. Cant core shit despite having RCC and Admin Ideas. Hasnt teched up Admin in over 100 years. Has rebels like crazy, WE up the ass. But atleast hes up to date in Diptech. Cant let the opportunity slip to get more LD.

Why are vassals not locked into Admin focus. Why do we not have a vassal interaction that reduced WE.

 

[bbqftw]

I mean, force converting them is rough, but even same religion vassals are liable to self-destructing into internal conflicts.

and the attach command in vassal interacts is "attach when i feel like it and de-attach when not"