Alright, so i just recently stepped up from Vanilla to BtS

and i.. am ... LOVING IT, OMFG I JUUST PUNCHED A HOLE IN MY WALL!!!
Right... well. here is my question to you Mr. Pro.

What is the benefit of Vassals? Like, why not just destroy Ragnar with my stack of Janisarries... But no, i had to be myself and curiosity got to me, so I vassaled him.. So now i see his stuff, big whoop... I want ur cities gimme gimme!!!!

Then I went overseas in like 5 galleons, and landed in Frankfurt, just to take it, and then vassaled Frederick as well.. Ok, now Im like ultra power ful, and Ethiopia is really starting to piss me off...

But my main question!!! Vassals... pro's and con's.. please discuss. k thnx

+1 :)

Ability to take away resources from them.

Someone who votes for you//your way in most situations in AP/UN votes.

I'm not a big fan of vassals, though. They tend to give you negative Diplo, and I live/die by that around the time I can start getting them.

Pros of Vassals: It saves you the effort of micromanaging their remaining cities, and of taking those cities. It might also push you over the Dom limit if you're near it already. They give you additionally happy, you can take their resources, and they -have- to vote for you unless they can vote for themselves.

Cons of Vassals: There's little they can give you you couldn't take for yourself, they hurt your relations with other AIs, they're still around so the good cities you took are unhappy due to motherland issues, they're often useless in warfare (you beat 'em, didn't you?) and if you give them enough techs to get up to par, they'll turn around and sell those techs on to your rivals.

Summary: Vassals are very rarely worth it. The primary use is for a blitz conquest win, I suppose, where you can build up an army, attack until they capitulate, and move on fast.

You win faster...

There's actually some uses ontop of what's been discussed above:

Pros: You can direct their research which can save you the trouble of research pretty worthless techs. If you aim at a diplomacy game (via AP or UN), having vassal is pretty good as they'll vote for you in a vote for diplomatic victory unless it's the vassal you're running against.

Cons: To be of any real military/research use you can't beat the vassal down completely, you need to leave them with some good cities/infrastructure or they'll never be able to contribute much.

Overall, I feel vassals are worth it if the circumstances is right, but it all depends on the situation in the game you're in.

I tend to conquer on the mainland then, rather than waste time going after an enemies islands I'll just vassalise him instead and move onto the next enemy. Eventually I can win a UN victory by having a lot of backward islanders vote for me, but they are not much use otherwise.

Some folk will leave take strong vassals to allow them to defend themselves, help out in war and a make a worthwhile contribution to science development - recently did this one game and felt it was good.

AI vassals aren't very helpful directly, but there's still a number of reasons you might want to take them.

1. You have a military lead, and want to use it for as many opponents as possible. In this scenario you would just vassal as many as possible with your current advantage - sometimes this means everyone. If every opponent left is your vassal, it's conquest! Doing this can save you a lot of time capturing cities that actually might not help you until the game is over or close to being over.
2. You are invading overseas, and have less military than is necessary. Liberate cities about to be hit by the AI to a random AI colony - this gives your colony 2 free defenders out of nowhere. These defenders add up quick - magically generating 10 rifles or infantry can shred the AI stack at little cost to you (other than giving up cities you just took and might have lost anyway).
3. Vassals...HAVE to vote for you in diplomatic votes, unless they are eligible themselves. Taking a lot of vassals is a good way to win the AP or UN victories (so much for them being peaceful).
4. Vassals make good shields and staging points for further military endeavors.

All that said, they're not INCREDIBLY useful, but as they stand in the game there are times you would want to accept vassals/capitulations and it's pretty balanced IMO.

Its all about speed. In the same time that you could completely conquer one opponent you might vassalize two. And rather than struggling to rebuild your economy and get new cities working as a net positive you can go straight to war again with your next victim. Soon two vassals becomes three, three becomes four etc.

Vassals also increase your team power rating and they get full AI production bonuses. Your first vassal is probably quite weak since they tend to fight to near death. But your subsequent vassals will be more and more powerful since they are more quickly daunted by the size of your teams army. It can create a snowballing effect where if you have a military tech lead and a couple of vassals, the remaining AIs fall after only a handful of turns because your combined power rating is so much higher than theirs.

As an example my last game with Ragnar saw me kill my first victim with Beserkers - Pacal. Then I invaded a nearby continent I could reach with galleys and vassalized Peter. With Peter as my vassal, Monte then vassalized after I destroyed his army. I then built galleons and grenadiers/cannons and invaded the other continent which had three AIs who all had knights/trebs/maces/musketmen. None of them lasted more than four turns, vassalizing to me after I had taken only one or two cities and destroyed their counter attack army with my cannon. With about five turns in between each victim to heal and reposition troops I had subjugated an entire large continent with three strong AIs in less than 25 turns.

To conquer them the slow way would mean much more time for the other AIs to tech to rifling, much more war weariness and a much longer (and hence lower scoring) game.

But my main question!!! Vassals... pro's and con's.. please discuss. k thnx

The AI tends to settle on pretty much any free spots.

If you have a smooth way to erase your opponent that is of course optimal, but when a war gets drawn out it often saves some time not having to chase the last couple of worthless remote settlements.

Basically(what matters):

pro.

diplo - they vote for you by default;
domi - they inflate your power graph; after 2-3 vassals, you'll be surprised how the rest will jump in to vassalize to you after you fired your cannons twice.

cons.

the relations are team based; if you're friendly with x and no wfyabta and crap, with a vassal at cautious, you'll be overall at pleased, so wfyabta and not so prone to do your bidding and etc.
the ai will manage some cities and armies; needless to say this and optimal don't really go together;
what you conquered will moan about "join the motherland" and tend to be rather unhappy cities;
anything you conquered from him and borders his remaining teritory will need... big garnissons in order to prevent non stop revolting;
the biggest annoyance: you vassal a; which borders b. You declare on b and take cities bordering your vassal a. They'll inevitably have some culture from a(you know how it is with cities near each other for a long time). 2 revolutions and they'll join a(since you didn't take them from him, so they can join him). That also means a ton of troops left behind.

Colonial cost can get crippling after more than a couple of cities on a second land-mass. Generally the capital and perhaps one other city are worth keeping, perhaps another with uber resorces. Keep the blinders, and perhaps another if it will mean you dont have to culture-garrison the rest. Gift any others back (after checking the cultural presure reprocussion) and the vassle will lurve you.

Let your vassle found that fur/ silver city and give you the resorce. Best of both worlds. While keping your vassles relativly up to date keep them away from the obsolesence techs for fur/ ivory/ whale and you can continue to have access to those resorces for as long as required.

Buffer zones. If you leave a buffer zone between your new subjects and the next vict... er, neighbour you can avoid the close border penalty, avoid being the loser in an ongoing culture clash and avoid having what may well be a sub-optimal town. You dont have to pay for basic defence, though you may want to place a protected-tech-lead unit or two there to sure things up. Or a bag of them when the time comes for your new neighbour to get whats comming.

Really the -1 you have a vassle diplo hit is often worth it to avoid far worse border tension hits.

Keeping your vassles useful is tricky and sometimes impossible. Where there are a couple of drop-out civ's you can in safety raise them from such insalubrious company since the drop-out will have nothing to trade to your vassles. Esp the dead-end techs like devine right which backwards civs may have. Other tech-gifts are situational, if they hate the other religious block you may be able to gift with impunity, otherwise you may need to take more care. Speaking of the religious blocks, think before gifting liberalism. Very distressing when your vassle goes into FR and starts trading with the previously hated bloc. Also consider the AI upgrade discount. Once you have declared war gifting the mil-tec and a wedge of gold can secure a flank at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining dozens of units. And if your vassle loses a city, meh.

The +1 happy may not seem like much but as the game goes on it can compound. +4 when every free civ hates you for declaring on everyone and wont sell your their goodies can keep the WW down at least to the point of not dictating your civics or giving you another few turns before the slider goes deep into the culture. Also nice in rebuilding between wars when you discover that for all the resorces you now have there are still luxuries you dont have that everyone now hates you too much to trade.

Clearly all these things are situational, but all in all they add up to a useful package.

Also, Having your units in their territory counts as having them at home WRT supply costs - that is, it doesn't cost you anything. You can also airlift units into their cities. And if you station air/sea units in their cities, to use as bases/healing for attacking someone, since they also declare war, the enemy can't just walk in and kill all those defenseless units.

However, you can't upgrade from their territory, and I don't think you can airlift from their cities either. And you still can't fix their terrain improvements for them. And they like to wipe out forts you built when the land was still neutral so you could cut across the continent when they took possession of it, even when these forts are in the middle of nowhere.

If the vassal is big, the savings in city maintenance can be huge.

I use them as buffer space and not much else.

Vassals = Resources w/o maintenance. Coupled with corporations, this can be devastating.

Spam the coroprations into your vassal and milk the commerce to the hilt.

The number one reason to take a vassal:

If you don't, someone else will. The most gayassedly annoying thing in the game is for your victim to be handily defeated (rifles vs cannons and infantry for example) yet they can become the vassal of an AI you have decent relations, maybe one you just gave in to their demand for assembly line, and suddenly some other power gets a new vassal and you get a much worse war. Truly killing off your opponent is often a luxury you cannot afford if there is someone who can vassalize them instead.

Even more wretched is the fact that AIs are hard coded for a certain number of turns refusing to talk so even if it wants to end the war and not start WWI it has no choice.

Plus you can economically exploit vassals for pennies on the dollar with corps. Its cheaper sometimes to vassalize, spread corps to all their cites, force them into merc (to take away all trade routes from everybody else, seal off foreign corps) and then demand all resources that support your corps at home. Far cheaper than spending time, money, unhappiness and troops taking every last city, then garrisoning them for 12+ turns until they are no longer in anarchy, waiting and investing for 40 turns until they are actually production positive and still having to garrison/pay support costs the entire time.

Hell if I'm running a corporate economy late game I give cities back to my vassals. I then move on and vassalize two other people in the time it would've taken to finish off my original vassal and consolidate my work.

Vassals are like dominoes; knocking one down makes the next one easier, and so on. I've fought entire wars on the home soil of my vassal while my core cities remained untouched, and then vassalized THAT opponent and used them as a springboard to attack yet a third.

Vassals are also a good "buffer" if you don't want a direct border with another civ yet.
Also, in patch 3.17 The AI agrees to vassalize much faster. Basically you have to eliminate their main SOD and perhaps take 1 or 2 cities. This means you get a STRONG vassal to help you in your wars.
Sometimes when you get a tech advantage it is important to win wars FAST, before other AIs catch up. With Vassals you can take 2~3 AIs in the same time it would take to eliminate 1 AI.
It's a situational thing. Sometimes I prefer to eliminate them completely.
In some cases it is not easy to bring your vassal back to friendly so they won't trade techs with you, in some cases it is very easy to get them friendly again (perhaps liberate 1 city to negate the "you declared war on us" penalty").

Another issue to be careful about vassals: Sometimes, when the AI understands they are weak enough and agree to capitulate, you better accept it even if you want to take more of their cities. If you don't there is a danger they will capitulate to someone else.
The results of that can be devastating - either a 3rd civ will enter a war with you to protect their vassal, or it will force you into 10 turns of peace with the 3rd civ (depending on whether the 3rd civ was at war with the potential vassal or not)

i like having a vassal sandwhiched betwixt me and my next victum, most of the fighting takes place on the vassal's territory (and to be blunt does anyone actually care about the vassal? no, of course not, we just want him to be usefull).