Tributary>territory.

[Gnostek]

A 3 dev province as a territory gives you at most 0.35 cash income, probably closer to 0.1 thanks to autonomy, wrong religion/culture. Also it gives you 7 manpower a year at best (70 manpower to the pool, renewed in 10 years).

A tributary, on the other hand, gives you 2ducats/year or 300 manpower, provided their LD is manageable.

Is this intended? Are tributaries supposed to be this powerful? As the timurids, you can start with 20 tributaries and basically roflstomp the world with 6000 manpower/year ON top of your own generation.

 

[Dominion]

It's a new feature and therefor - following tradition - completely bugged and not balanced.

 

[Canute VII]

This is a rather interesting way to look at tributaries. PDX should take notes.

 

[Gnostek]

I mean, as it stands right now, the best way to play a horde is to expand like a snake, bordering as many people as you can and then make them tributaries. It's insane. Something like 80 tributaries is feasible.. by 1500! And they don't get AE. It's just too much goodness. The only problem is they tend to eat each other. Still, tributaries are the way to go until you have reached all the corners of the world, or until a tributary can be broken in 4 other tributaries.

 

[Hessian Mercenary]

Not to mention that they are easily kept loyal because relative army strength is calculated individually and they have a base -5 LD modifier on top, and you can farm them for prestige and monarch points

Tributaries seem to get AE btw, it's just so small you'd need to go on an absurd conquest spree to notice it, so yeah it's completely neglectable

 

[Canute VII]

Tributaries should get even more AE than normal (similar to HRE). Because the emperor is supposed to protect the status quo rather than to conquer.

 

[Gnostek]

yes they do get AE but it's a -90% modifier, so conquering stuff that gave me like 400 AE on independant nations, only gave me 15 AE on tributaries or so.

 

[ponasozis]

yeah tributary system is broken

free monarch points
free gold
free manpower

literally most important things for free

 

[durbal]

Yup. It's a broken system and I've made posts about other issues with it (mainly the gameyness of becoming a tributary to eat other tributaries while the overlord can do almost nothing). Did this same thing in India as Ceylon and never really needed any mercs.

 

[Gnostek]

Hello everyone! We began with tributary> territory, but on the answer to the following question lies the key to my run.

After I passed 7 HRE reforms, what would be better, HRE vassals or HRE tributaries? I mean passing the reforms then releasing new members. Releasing vassals is instant, releasing them as tributaries means you wait for diplomat travel time (non-negligible if we're talking about 80 members).

Let's see the pros and cons of both:

HRE vassal: "fights your wars", but not really, since these wars will be in asia. You can, however, seize their land, so you can grant land to one vassal, then seize it if it suits you, and so on.. Also, they can transfer trade power.
Tributaries: they give you either money, manpower, or monarch points. However, you cannot seize their land.

Seizing the land is more important than it would seem: it basically means you can grant the bridge in the caucasus-central asia to your vassals several times, to feed them India/Indochina. However, I am unsure on wether I'll be able to do the in-n-out thing, because it requires tons of prestige, and event 80-100 prestige a year does not cut it.

I think I'm gonna go with tributaries on the inside, and vassals on the edges, specially for those tags with RCC (greece, bulgaria, the hordes, the anatolians, and the theocracies).

The idea, obviously, is to expand really fast, feeding land to my subjects to avoid being at nasty levels of unrest.