Mercenaries are the norm in my armies so only in extreme circumstances I would make such a trade. Btw the majority of the AI fleets are just as useful for me.
Vassal feeding too easy?
- Thread starter Demusch
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Diplorelations were never a limiting factor imo.
Lagging in either tech doesnt really hurt the game at all.
The vassal units can be useful at war...or they can be a liability. Not all vassals are western vassals with decent military NIs that keep up in tech. In fact, most are not that. Also, to this day vassal units do not consistently follow the orders you give in the subjects screen, so they still get caught out, still don't consistently attach, and are often markedly inferior to your own troops. That's not to say it isn't useful, but your representation isn't more fair than me ignoring it previously. Vassals are useful in that capacity, but there's a lot to be said for direct ownership. The 1.8 income bug doesn't help this equation either, since you don't actually get more income from ideas/governments that are supposed to give it right now (the difference between the economy tab for an iqta with influence ideas and the actual income at the top of the screen can be pretty glaring).
But for example in my Mewat game, I'm military tech 8 and no vassal or ally is over 7...lots of 6's. The Timurids declare tribal conquest, also tech 6 at first but quickly 7 with 60+ regiments to my own 22, plus some vassal and ally stuff. If I had 10 regiments of my own stuff and an additional 20 in vassal units, I'd have probably lost the war rather than winning it and taking stuff outright. Winning wars like that takes exacting control and micro-baiting on scorched earth etc.
Being able to afford better advisors sooner, controlling important centers of trade ASAP, having defensive depth with control over features like scorched earth and fort level, this kind of stuff doesn't matter to a revoked Austria or France, but sometimes it does. Sometimes you want exploration and then you don't have influence for a while unless you stack up DIP groups, which also precludes trade if you go both unless you want to stack up 3. Maybe you'd prefer religious, which can save more DIP than the -25% bonus from influence due to the CB and provides a good bit of stability on its own. Maybe you're fighting against people with a pulse, and you need military ideas or you'll get walked on by people who have military ideas and wind up losing your vassals.
Vassal feeding is not necessarily a trivial choice, especially not in environments where the player is actually contested.
You want to catch up in both eventually, because ADM and DIP 22 are both really, really good and can potentially make up for delaying expansion a bit to get them, depending on context.
Diplo relations were the limiting factor, just because you wouldn't want to put yourself in a scenario where you have so many vassals that you can't actually get diplo points anymore.
Lagging in admin tech leads to less idea groups, which, while not necessary, kind of sucks for a lot of the game. It also leads to getting admin efficiency later in the game, which does suck quite a bit as well.
I lag pretty hard in Diplo every game I play, like right now with Castile, closing in 1550ish, I have 10 Admin, 12 Mil, and a whopping 3 Trade. Since the price is down to something like 75 I may actually take 4 soon. I don't need the trade bonus, I dominate Sevile, 100% and even the English Channel (I inherited Burgundy and expanded a bit) with my trade ships. I rake in the money, but way, I have 3 diplo ideas to start, because Influence is awesome, Exploration is necessary for downtime and Diplomacy is awesome for all my HRE Elector vassals, and I am still carrying Aragon until I can get back to 100 Legitimacy and I want Byzantium.
I am often between -1 to -3 dip points, I try not to go more than that, still right now -4 with Styria, Denmark, Poland, Lith allies and Aragon, Palinate, Trier and Cologne as vassals/pus because I will soon be fighting a coalition of France and most of the HRE, including a large Milan and a large Hungary when the King of Lorraine dies.
Dip is just the least valuable if you can dominate your trade nodes without it. On the plus side to get rid of those excess mil points until I get to Admin 14 I have massive manpower heh
Euro major powers are somewhat a fringe case for stacking 3 in a row. I usually tank it at first too, but eventually I let neighbor bonus and ideas discount catch me back up, because I really like the imperialism CB and client state setup.
Well, yes, after those three groups, no reason to stay at low dip, I also converted all the Dutch provinces. I wasn't able to tank 3 with Byz, it was close but just didn't have the money in my last game to buy all those buildings but here it's no problem. I really can't think of any reason to rush this anymore since you don't need 7 to colonize.
To all those who think vassal feeding makes the game easy, the easy answer is to don't do it. Depends what you are looking for in a game, but the one thing I always try to do is don't do anything that the AI wouldn't do. At the end of the day it is your game, but I just look for a challenge when I play, without cheats or taking advantage of a weak AI, & a human will win anyway with equal circumstances against the computer opponent.
It's a valuable monarch point, just generally not for tech. Tech 22 is the exception, honestly, but you can afford to lag behind on diplo tech for long periods of time and just ride the neighbor bonuses. The rest of your points get lodged up in being over relations and peace deals off of wars created with CBs that aren't Expansion or Holy War (many wars early on started through conquest, or wars between colonial powers started by a CN, for example).
seems fair to me. you still pay for it,just differently.
now 1.3......lmao that was OP as hell,but oh so fun.
now 1.3......lmao that was OP as hell,but oh so fun.
The only argument I can really see for vassal feeding being OP is that the AI is completely unable to do it. If the AI could be taught to do some limited form of vassal feeding based on culture groups or what have you, it would be great.
It IS powerful though. Combined force limit goes through the roof. AI vassals will bear any amount of WE at no penalty to you. AI will take out as many loans as it needs to spam mercs (and you don't have to pay these loans when you annex them). AI vassals are always there for you to provide generals. What a bunch of champs.
It IS powerful though. Combined force limit goes through the roof. AI vassals will bear any amount of WE at no penalty to you. AI will take out as many loans as it needs to spam mercs (and you don't have to pay these loans when you annex them). AI vassals are always there for you to provide generals. What a bunch of champs.
What is this cycle?
You could sell vassals whatever you wanted in 1.1
Later it was nerfed so they'd only take their cores, claims, or rarely other reasons.
Now it's back to being easy and people are complaining again... ugh.
Just leave it be, it's fine. Besides, Client states would be useless otherwise.
Vassals are one of the best ways to beat players in Multiplayer as well, considering people have a very hard time managing many AI coming at them all at once, especially considering how the ai relentlessly recruits mercs and new troops. I once vassal swarmed a resurgent Byzantium player (had Greece + Bulgaria + a bit of Serbia) and Prussia player (had a good chuck of poland, all of Tuetons, some of Bohemia) as Sweeden. It was hilarious.
You could sell vassals whatever you wanted in 1.1
Later it was nerfed so they'd only take their cores, claims, or rarely other reasons.
Now it's back to being easy and people are complaining again... ugh.
Just leave it be, it's fine. Besides, Client states would be useless otherwise.
Vassals are one of the best ways to beat players in Multiplayer as well, considering people have a very hard time managing many AI coming at them all at once, especially considering how the ai relentlessly recruits mercs and new troops. I once vassal swarmed a resurgent Byzantium player (had Greece + Bulgaria + a bit of Serbia) and Prussia player (had a good chuck of poland, all of Tuetons, some of Bohemia) as Sweeden. It was hilarious.
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Of course, they're also there to throw away warscore and possibly the wargoal if it's superiority, so yeah...
There's a catch.The AE your vassal receives becomes yours.You are simply substituting coring costs for dip point costs.
Vassal feeding is completely broken, though. WC is a joke at the moment even if you don't cheese the HRE, and this is largely the reason. You can just keep feeding your vassals non-stop. The key is picking vassals with terrible mil tech, because you don't want their help fighting wars, you want them to hold down and core land for you. For example, my Timurid vassal spanned all the way from western Anatolia to eastern Ming, sitting at a constant 1-200% OE. Of course they were plagued by rebels, but as a horde with terrible mil tech two of my stacks could handle any number of Timurid rebels--if I'd been coring land myself I'd have been facing rebels at my tech lv, which'd have been a lot more painful. Now I could afford to keep 4-5 vassals at 1-200% OE leading to extremely quick epansion. So what if the provinces start at 75% autonomy post integration--you're so big that you don't need the income or manpower at that point.
Right, and substituting a vastly different process of expansion, one that comes with its own quirks and downsides, as laid out in previous posts. Direct conquest gives you a smoother progression, whereas vassals give you a spike in on-paper military power followed by a significant weakening period just after they're annexed. By no means is vassal feeding clearly superior.
As to whether it's "too easy," that depends on what the OP means by easy. The mechanism by which we can transfer territory to vassals is far more convenient than it was in previous patches, but previous patches rewarded you far more for the effort too -- allowing you to bypass monarch-point costs entirely, allowing you to bypass coalitions. Neither of those perks still applies, and although it's true that coalitions are easier to deal with in 1.8, that development has nothing to do with vassals.
That's only broken to the extent that anyone cares about a nominal WC featuring useless subjects you have no intention to annex. If a WC achievement required one tag, it wouldn't even be a point of discussion. You said it yourself: by the point you describe in the game, you're already unbeatable. Therefore what you describe has no substantive influence on the balance of mainstream gameplay.
Au contraire, it makes a one-tag WC smooth sailing (I'm just wrapping up mine with Sweden). It might take a while to integrate vassals that size, but when you don't need diplomats for other things decades of integration is of little concern. Your dip tech will suffer, but who needs dip tech? Good for roleplaying purposes perhaps)? Deus Vult will save you a fair amount of dip points that can go towards annexation as well.
The feeding is only part of the problem, of course, because your subjects aren't the only ones who'll take anything--so will your allies. Whether you want to set up a huge PU, make an AI implode by forcing 400% OE on it or simply null the AE in a region (make your poor ally eat everything in separate peace deals, and the tags that emerge when rebels inevitably break your ally will have no AE). And that's before we even get started on how broken the HRE is now...
The trolling potential in MP is amazing, however, so perhaps it should stay this way.
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players have oft complained about rebels inheriting their own military tech - this is a fun 'advantage' that comes out of that system.
Curious what super-vassals you picked for Sweden one-tag. Timurids and Najd seem like must-haves, Crimea to eat the north?
The convenience factor of such a feature heavily outweigh the troll potential, in my opinion, especially in multiplayer games.
Besides, the troll factor can be dealt with very swiftly through a house rule (Do not destroy a player's overextension percentage without their consent or you will be banned from our game, or some such).
Vassals should still be able to break away, though, either through declaring war on their masters (preferably during a period of war), or by looking for allies among other vassals and their overlord's rivals and declaring war as a group.