Paying tribute a viable option?

[Alexander Seil]

It seems that giving up your monthly income for survival is a viable tactic in Rome. Looking at how aggressive that 5 superpowers are, I'd say you're better off picking a side and not trying to pretend that you can resist Rome/Carthage/Syria/Egypt/Macedonia. At least if you're not Suebi (or one of the 5). Quite a stark contrast from EU games, where players hated being vassals to anyone. I'll take the Seleucid racket any time here :rofl:

 

[Snall]

I find it works very well, but I get them down so I only give up like .1 gold or even .05 gold or something.

 

[Calantyr]

Agreed. Who cares about a measly 0.5 gold per year if it means getting a non-agression pact with one of the monsters? *shudders*

 

[unmerged(77207)]

If you are Suebi you need to be making everybody else around you pay you tribute until they go under -150gold and they can't. Then annex them. Assassinations will help you get no badboy for declaring wars. You get +2 a month and lump sum of 50 from each (as long as you occupy their province). Say you get three of them and thats not too shabby you can build up quite a big army. Just beware in a bit over 4 years they will hit the low point.

The reason Suebi is great is because you can have all your armies attacking and only need to sort out peace when one of your two provinces falls (plus by the time you attack it takes them forever to get to your provinces - this is normally their allies anyway).

 

[hjarg]

much2much, you get BB if your assassin is caught. But yes, it is smaller amount then DoW without CB. Riskier too- AI might also not chop the head of assassin off.

 

[Secret Master]

To be honest, even I've whored myself out to the Seleucids one time. It really hurt my vanity, but it did buy me time. And they only wanted 1 gold a month.


To be honest, though, I've found that once I am a tribute state of a major power, they stop fighting so many wars, making this option less useful for snagging provinces from the big boys.

But maybe that's just in my one game paying off the Seleucids, so I wouldn't put much stock by it.

 

[Alexander Seil]

My idea is to basically exploit the time they're not busy annexing me (while I'm paying tribute) to build up an army and then turn on my overlord.