Crighton
Emperor
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2006
- Messages
- 1,136
As to the maintenance cost of vassals...
I am just guessing, and I have not done any tests or whatever, but my guess is that your vassals cities are considered your cities for the purpose of the 'number of cities' maintenance cost in YOUR cities. You don't pay their maintenance costs, but in each of your cities, you will get increased maintenace. However, since that cost has a limit (I think it was 5 gold/city in my last game, on a standard size map, at Noble difficulty), if you are large enough, then vassals will not cost you anything.
Again, I don't know for sure, but this seems to fit what I've observed.
Frankly, I think you found the answer. My best saves all ended up being too large to put up for download (and then I got sidetracked with way too much personal business, trust me the pity factor would be high). But this explanation does make quite a bit of sense since in every test case I went through me having (or not having) vassalls, regardless of size, didn't do a dang thing to my economy one way or the other.
Of course, this explanation would encourage creating a few profitable high production cities and skullthumping the bejebus out of everybody else since it really isn't going to cost you much if anything once you reach a large enough size. . . . .
As for why I don't consider ally flipping "broken."
These people are not your friends, they are you're rivals and there can be only one winner. You're real "Allies" in the game are the ones who are most usefull to you and your objectives (unless you're going for the Diplo Victory, in which case playing nice can be an option).
And both in pre and post patch I've been forced into peace because my rival snagged the bugger as a vassal, which is just as irritating, though probably less, than being forced into war.