The Swert said:
But oh wise one, you didn't solve the mystery of the stubborn Netherlands even after i posted the link. How can we live on without your omniscient answer.
Sorry, that got buried in the avalanche of interesting screenies that soon followed. Probably I had clicked into the forum for an MP issue and didn't remember to scroll back later when in for SP things.
Diplo-vassalization is not a guarantee. Without the save file, I cannot reach a conclusion as to what is hampering the effort. It can be influenced by a number of things. Those things are listed in the FAQ. A number of the things listed as potentially affecting it by posters in your request for help thread were specifically eliminated as having any true effect through extensive testing.
One thing the thread didn't address was relative incomes. I see no mention of this in the thread. Netherlands often have an inordinately high income, thanks to their provinces, their domestic policy sliders, and so forth. So it may have been that their income was disproportionately high. Can't tell, of course. I am assuming you made a great number of attempts.
Should be noted that diplo-vassalization is acknowledged to be the hardest to accomplish, harder than diplo-annexation. Still, if you have a save file from that situation around, and email it to me, I'd be more than happy to see if I can figure out where it was going wrong.
One side note on this for readers: the game has one acknowledged "bug" in this area, a noted tendency to freeze the random number generator, so that it produces the same result time after time. You can see this best sometimes by trying to reload a game and retry an attempt to bribe good relations; the same increase in relations occurs time after time. When you suspect this is happening (a battle you reload and retry has exactly the same result, down to the number of casualties), turn the game off entirely and restart it. This should reset the RNG. Unfortunately, it also results in DoW's from the suddenly awakened AIs, as well as a bunch of your merchants getting kicked out of CoTs by those same suddenly awake AIs.
