Of all the new game concepts added in BTS this is my least favourite. I'm sure many of you have gone through the same thing I'm about to describe and some of you probably think its as frustrating as I do.

I'm playing on Monarch difficulty as the yanks and its very late game. I'm in second place in terms of score behind (yes you guessed it!) Mao of the Chinese. His score is more than twice mine :/

This isn't the annoying thing though, the annoying thing is that he has 7 vassals of the 15 remaining civs on the map. There are 2 civs who are independent and the rest are vassals of other civs.

So perhaps I was a bit late and should have enslaved some rubbish civs earlier in the game. I am playing with conquest as the only victory condition after all.

Anyway my question.... How the hell are you supposed to conduct any military campaign against anyone when declaring war on one feeble low-end civ will result in half of the planet declaring war on you?

How am I supposed to undo all these vassalties? Is it even possible or is it a case of once they're vassals they're the only ones who can denounce it?

This is a very frustrating game mechanic that really should have an on/off switch or at the very least some type of ingame mechanic, perhaps using a spy that allows you to overthrow a vassalty/sow the seeds of dissent amongst an enslaved nation.

Thanks.

there is an option in the startup screen
if you want to play with vassals or not.

You can turn the whole vassal system off if you create a custom game instead of the "play now" feature.

The short answer is, you should not have let it get like that. That's why I like the feature. It forces you to start a war so you can enslave some civs to come to your rescue if need be.

The only other solution is to try to take Mao down. Strike the head of the monster so to speak. His vassal network will collapse if you can hit him hard enough.

Ah ok, lol.

Thanks :)

Should be an option for a spy though don't you agree?

Nah, not really. If you've set the victory conditions as only allowing Conquest, then you really should've planned on that kind of behavior from the AI. For this game, _alphaBeta_ had it right. Go straight to the heart of the chinese empire (i.e. it's capital and major production cities) and the capitulated vassals will soon be able to leave his control. The peaceful vassals are less likely to quit so soon. You have to go for their population centers in this case.

If conquest is your only win condition it doesn't sound like you are palying aggresivly enough or mao would not have any where near that number of vassals as they should be dead or yours, plainly that late in the game its looks like a lose anyway, but yea vassals are a pain sometimes and you can turn em off

My advice would be to either conquer the other 7 civ's out there then begin WW3 or create one major invasion force and send it into Mao's territory hopefully raising his capitall and as many other cities as possbile, hopefully you can push the % numbers in the right direction for some of the vassals to break off.

Otherwise the old standby advice of nuke the hell out of him would be an option.

I don't like how my cities all want to join my vassal's civ. If any thing it should be the other way around since I have higher tech and culture than my vassal.

Only bad thing about the "No Vassal States" option is that you cannot create colonies either :(