So I started playing the nomads again recently, and I cannot emphasize enough that they are ridiculously overpowered right now. The reasons are fairly specific- unreformed pagan subjugation casus belli and the attach allied armies command. I think this was added in after the nomads were in the recent casus belli overhaul, but god does it break nomads. I distinctly remember having to use invasions to grab a single kingdom at a time- and only after your population goes above 75% of your max- before this. Today I played a 769 Kazakh start and rolled ALL OF BYZANTIUM by 799. The entire thing in one war. It wasn't even fair either- however the war-score is calculated it lets you rack up 100% by conquering only a handful of their provinces. Their 10k army was wrecked because even though I had myself probably a 5k horde, I was able to leverage the new attach armies mechanics to stack my nomad vassals' armies to my own and then with mercenaries shatter them. War over.
Winning the subjugation war handed me the Empire of Byanztium title. Every single vassal under that title is now a part of my realm. There are a lot of them. Almost all of them revolt when you start trying to revoke some of the duke's titles- which is no big deal because they're scattered and easily crushed. Now every one of the vassals that rebelled is in my prison.
That's when the fun really begins. Now I am not really sure if these mechanics have been in the game since forever, but they're broken as far as I am concerned. If you are khan you can imprison any of the filthy farming people and nobody from your band of guffawing horse nomads cares at all. If you try to imprison a direct vassal and fail they will raise arms in rebellion and then you have to win a war to put them in jail- standard stuff, every player has experiences this. BUT if you try to imprison a vassal under one of your vassals, they react in only one of two ways- either you successfully imprison them or they flee to another court and the title is passed to the heir. In non-nomadic governments this is no problem- you can't arbitrarily imprison people for too long before everyone in the kingdom hates you. But this is of zero concern to our great khan. He can just go on imprisoning ad infinitum.
Now I love the new prison system, and specifically it's mass ransom function. It seems tailor made for nomads, and makes ransoming actually worth your time once you're operating at scale. When you have all the counts, dukes, etc underneath your direct vassals from taking the byzantine empire imprisoned, and you hit that ransom button, you're looking at 5000+ gold.
And once they accept the ransom you can imprison them again. They have no recourse besides fleeing to another court. For titles where there aren't enough heirs this means that the title will pass to their liege (your vassal) and temporarily stall the cash cow. However when there are two male heirs it seems to bounce back and forth between them, thus letting you attempt imprisoning forever. I call this system the 100% Vassal Tax. AI rulers will always pay to have themselves released when they have the money. This system lets you milk your vassals almost indefinitely for even more cash than liquidating the empire through pillaging- the only barrier is the time it takes to do all that clicking, and the clever use of a macro program works fine in that regard.
Speaking of the liquidation- the amount of money you get from liquidating the Byzantine Empire through pillaging is overpowered by itself. I ended up with around 55k+ gold. This would let me max my hordes with purely horse archers or even heavy cavalry as well as roll around with every available mercenary group. I was able to conquer the entire Abbasid Empire by 816.
The only significant barrier to doing any of this is the amount of time and clicking it takes to manage such large holdings. Nomad succession isn't a major issue if handled correctly (ie: have mountains of gold) and doesn't really even matter since you're allowed to turn it off without disabling achievements (!?).
TL-DR: Nomads are broken now because they also got the unreformed pagan subjugation casus belli added in one of the recent updates which lets them grab entire empires in a single easy war, and there is what seems like an exploit that lets you milk vassals for an effective 100% tax rate.
Winning the subjugation war handed me the Empire of Byanztium title. Every single vassal under that title is now a part of my realm. There are a lot of them. Almost all of them revolt when you start trying to revoke some of the duke's titles- which is no big deal because they're scattered and easily crushed. Now every one of the vassals that rebelled is in my prison.
That's when the fun really begins. Now I am not really sure if these mechanics have been in the game since forever, but they're broken as far as I am concerned. If you are khan you can imprison any of the filthy farming people and nobody from your band of guffawing horse nomads cares at all. If you try to imprison a direct vassal and fail they will raise arms in rebellion and then you have to win a war to put them in jail- standard stuff, every player has experiences this. BUT if you try to imprison a vassal under one of your vassals, they react in only one of two ways- either you successfully imprison them or they flee to another court and the title is passed to the heir. In non-nomadic governments this is no problem- you can't arbitrarily imprison people for too long before everyone in the kingdom hates you. But this is of zero concern to our great khan. He can just go on imprisoning ad infinitum.
Now I love the new prison system, and specifically it's mass ransom function. It seems tailor made for nomads, and makes ransoming actually worth your time once you're operating at scale. When you have all the counts, dukes, etc underneath your direct vassals from taking the byzantine empire imprisoned, and you hit that ransom button, you're looking at 5000+ gold.
And once they accept the ransom you can imprison them again. They have no recourse besides fleeing to another court. For titles where there aren't enough heirs this means that the title will pass to their liege (your vassal) and temporarily stall the cash cow. However when there are two male heirs it seems to bounce back and forth between them, thus letting you attempt imprisoning forever. I call this system the 100% Vassal Tax. AI rulers will always pay to have themselves released when they have the money. This system lets you milk your vassals almost indefinitely for even more cash than liquidating the empire through pillaging- the only barrier is the time it takes to do all that clicking, and the clever use of a macro program works fine in that regard.
Speaking of the liquidation- the amount of money you get from liquidating the Byzantine Empire through pillaging is overpowered by itself. I ended up with around 55k+ gold. This would let me max my hordes with purely horse archers or even heavy cavalry as well as roll around with every available mercenary group. I was able to conquer the entire Abbasid Empire by 816.
The only significant barrier to doing any of this is the amount of time and clicking it takes to manage such large holdings. Nomad succession isn't a major issue if handled correctly (ie: have mountains of gold) and doesn't really even matter since you're allowed to turn it off without disabling achievements (!?).
TL-DR: Nomads are broken now because they also got the unreformed pagan subjugation casus belli added in one of the recent updates which lets them grab entire empires in a single easy war, and there is what seems like an exploit that lets you milk vassals for an effective 100% tax rate.
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