What Determines AE on Vassal Release?

[Morgan Wight]

I could have sworn I've annexed and released nations to reset AE in the past, but on the last occasion I attempted this, the nation came back to life with their previous AE of ~200. Does anyone know if this was a patch change or bug?

edit: The title is a bit confusing. I really meant release nation into vassal.

 

[Morgan Wight]

Any ideas? I'm wondering whether I should annex Ming and incur massive AE (reaching a total of ~500) that will hopefully be wiped out when I release them, or to cut my losses and vassalize them (going to ~350 and then returning cores).

 

[TheBloke]

I could have sworn I've annexed and released nations to reset AE in the past, but on the last occasion I attempted this, the nation came back to life with their previous AE of ~200. Does anyone know if this was a patch change or bug?

edit: The title is a bit confusing. I really meant release nation into vassal.

Generally, Release as Vassal should result in a nation with no AE.

But what you see has been reported before, as well. Please see this thread, where in particular Schmoekoeksklok experienced the same issue you are having: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?740065-Vassalize-militarily-or-annex-release

You will see from that thread that despite trying several tests, I could not recreate his results: I was unable to release a vassal that still had AE. So we remain unsure exactly what causes AE to sometimes remain with the vassal.

I'm pretty sure that that's a bug, because 95% of the time (at least for me), a newly released vassal has no AE. So you shouldn't expect that to be the general case.

Can you detail the exact circumstances in which you released a vassal and they still had AE? It would be useful to build up more data on when it happens so we can try and isolate the factor(s) that cause it.

 

[Morgan Wight]

Ah, I see! I must have encountered the bug then.

Unfortunately it was a few days ago and I don't recall the circumstances in detail. However, one thing did stand out to me at the time: on this occasion I paused the game on the precise day the annexation was accepted and released while still paused. I had never done that previously.

 

[TheBloke]

We assume/hope it's a bug, anyway - it's certainly a very minority case and there's no obvious logical reason for why it should sometimes leave AE and sometimes not. It certainly should be a bug - I don't believe a released vassal should keep AE.

An existing vassal won't incur new AE, so it would be highly inconsistent if they were intentionally left with their full existing AE after release.

 

[Schmoekoeksklok]

Ah, I see! I must have encountered the bug then.

Unfortunately it was a few days ago and I don't recall the circumstances in detail. However, one thing did stand out to me at the time: on this occasion I paused the game on the precise day the annexation was accepted and released while still paused. I had never done that previously.

That's what I thought could be the problem as well, but now I wait for the next month to tick before I release them and it still happens regularly.

I'd do a bunch of tests to find out the actual cause, but I really have no idea at this point

 

[TheBloke]

That's what I thought could be the problem as well, but now I wait for the next month to tick before I release them and it still happens regularly.

I'd do a bunch of tests to find out the actual cause, but I really have no idea at this point

What I do find interesting is that, when we talked about it in the other thread, you were able to go straight off and re-create it in a new test. Judging from the time stamps, it took you less than an hour to re-create - including the time to post about it.

Yet I haven't had it happen even once, and couldn't re-create it in more than an hour of specifically trying to; using the same nations you did it with (Maya, and Aztec, Inca, Creek.)

I wonder if there's some particular thing that you and Morgan are doing during conquest that I'm never doing, something seemingly unimportant that could be (sometimes) the trigger. Or it might be specific CBs or something like that. When I tested for it specifically, I used no CB.

Last time I did wonder if it was related to allies (because in your test, Maya who kept their AE on release, were allied to Aztec. I don't suppose you recall if Maya remained WL when you DOW'd them? Maybe WL changed to Aztec - and that could never happen in my tests because I always used no CB.

It's probably something along those lines: some particular trigger, like WL changing or a specific CB. Definitely a minority case.

 

[Schmoekoeksklok]

The reason I did it like that was so I'd get a bunch of AE and three vassals at once and expected the bug to show up on at least one of them through pure chance. It wasn't really a controlled test, just a series of stabs in the dark.

There were no warleader changes though, and warleaders can actually change with no CB, it's just that you can still seperate peace with your target since there's no wargoal

Anyway, I'm trying to recreate it in a more controlled way now. But either though it almost always seems to show up on Mutapa while playing the game normally, I can't seem to replicate that at all.

 

[Morgan Wight]

Well I went ahead and let two months tick by before releasing, which worked, but surely that "remedy" was a placebo! It would be nice to have some rule of thumb for avoiding the bug, but I guess we need to figure out what causes it first. You would think that all the location(s) storing a nation's AE values would revert to zero immediately upon annexation, so perhaps adding that to the annexation code would be an easier route to addressing the bug than trying to discern the peculiar circumstances which cause it.