(9-62) Puppet City Rebalance

[azum4roll]

Counterproposal of:

Y

[DLL] Thread '(9-NS) Reducing Supply and Building Maintenance in Puppet Cities'

Jan 6, 2026

Proposal:
Puppet Cities provide 20% Supply from all sources and require only 20% of Building Maintenance (Venice get 50% Supply and Maintenance) - same as for current yields.

Martial Law (Imperialism) gain -20% penalty (current number - can be changed by other proposals) to Yields and Supply, in exchange of 20% (same) increase to Building Maintenance in Puppet Cities.

Rationale:
Not everyone understand why ordinary players receive only 20% of yields produced in Puppets but ought to fully sponsor Building...

• Yngwie
• Replies: 42
• Forum: Failed Proposals

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Thread '(9-62c) Puppets Have Their Penalty Lowered To -75% (From -80%)'

Jan 13, 2026

Motivation
Long ago in this mod, puppets used to have a -70% penalty to all yields and were deemed too strong over annexing. The penalty was increased to -80% and puppets have since been deemed outright worse than annexing.

I propose an intermediate penalty between these two values, which hopefully finds the balance point between puppeting and annexing.

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Proposal

• Non-Venetian puppets have their penalty to all yields reduced to -75% (from -80%).

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Implementation Notes
This uses existing database code only.
Reminder: make sure Venetian puppets are...

• Legen
• Replies: 3
• Forum: Failed Proposals

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Related to:

Thread '(9-62a) Integrate Civilian Puppet Purchases'

Jan 11, 2026

Motivation:
Personal I don't like Work Boats, but one of the main reasons for that is you sometimes get skewered because the only way to get them to your resources is to annex a City on the relevant coastline.
I think we can do without this, and in fact it is already possible in the code. Balparmak's tweaks mod has it for Workers and Work Boats.
I don't think there's any good reason not to make this default in VP.

You can go further and think about Faith purchased units (Missionaries) and the belief buildings (Church, Cathedral, etc.), but this has a much larger balance implication so...

• hokath
• Replies: 12
• Forum: Passed Proposals

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Thread '(9-62b) Remove Puppet Urbanization'

Jan 11, 2026

Problem: Puppet cities are unintuitively bad right now with some mechanics that feel like oversights. Even if we increase the cost of having more cities, I still think these changes would be healthy. If puppets are too strong afterwards we can always tweak the yield reduction more. This is a bigger issue for multiplayer, newer, and more casual players because they tend to love puppeting any conquest for time and effort reasons. I know I try to puppet when I can in multiplayer to shorten my turn timers, and would like it to be less of a self-nerf.

The fact that puppets cannot produce...

• ElliotS
• Replies: 18
• Forum: Passed Proposals

• 

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Current puppets:

• -80% Gold, Science, Culture, Faith, Tourism, Golden Age Point (-50% for Venice puppets)
• 0.5x supply from population (Venice puppets exempted)
• Cannot buy tiles (Venice puppets exempted)
• Cannot choose production (Venice puppets can invest and purchase)
• Cannot build wonders and limited buildings (Venice puppets can invest to force build them)
• Cannot start projects (Venice puppets exempted)
• Cannot gain local Happiness, Unhappiness from needs, religious unrest, famine, isolation, and pillaged tiles, but have fixed Unhappiness equal to 1/4 of Population, as well as Unhappiness from Urbanization (Venice puppets exempted) (this is changed by (9-110))
• Cannot gain Great Person Points (Venice puppets exempted)
• Cannot assign citizens (Venice puppets exempted)
• Tiles cannot be worked by other owned cities (Venice puppets exempted)
• Are not included in city count for tech cost, policy cost, golden age cost, supply, and tourism modifiers
• Do not increase Empire Size Modifier

The -80% is a yield modifier and is additive with all others, which means positive yield modifiers are extra useful on puppets (+10% food from Temple of Artemis is effectively a 1.5x food on puppets).
This also means Martial Law's "-20% Yield penalties of Puppeted Cities" now reads "+20% in Puppeted Cities". Not very useful unless most of your cities are puppets.

On the other hand, puppet cities are weirdly better than annexed small cities for supply, as there's no reduction to the supply given by buildings while the supply reduction from city count excludes them. Venice particularly benefits from this and is currently the civ with the most supply, even surpassing France.

Proposal (only bolded parts replaced):

• 0.3x Gold, Science, Culture, Faith, Tourism, Golden Age Point (0.5x for Venice puppets)
• 0.3x supply from population AND city sources (buildings etc.) (0.5x for Venice puppets)
• Martial Law now "+0.2x Yield and Supply multipliers in Puppet Cities", so multipliers become 0.5x for normal puppets and 0.7x for Venice puppets. Other parts of the policy are unchanged.

The puppet yield modifier is now a multiplier, applied at the very end of yield calculation (after post-modifier yields) so it doesn't double penalize "yield conversions".
The supply multiplier follows yields to be easy to remember. It's massively reduced as puppet city's role should be a place holder for resources or a temporary military base that only costs gold to maintain. You shouldn't be expecting them to give much yields.

 

[hokath]

So you went for 70% rather than Legen's 75%
You think he's wrong on the logic? Given the proposal to increase city penalty from 5% to 7%, it feels like 70% may be too much.
Hard to say.

 

[Lystrin]

So you went for 70% rather than Legen's 75%
You think he's wrong on the logic? Given the proposal to increase city penalty from 5% to 7%, it feels like 70% may be too much.
Hard to say.

I reckon the proposal is meant to be standalone.

Personally, I just think sth needs to be done about the citizen assignments in puppets. rn coastal (or god forbid island) puppets are way worse than landlocked ones since the governor will work every resourceless coast tile 24/7, generate food (without penalty! the reason I assume the governor is obsessed with food so much) and theres no negative feedback since puppets dont have needs or growth penalties from local unhappiness.

I'm not at home rn - I think it's worth checking if giving puppets a growth penalty could ease the puppet governor's voracious appetite. (it doesnt have a food penalty - since puppet citizens still need to eat, but growth applies afterwards)

As for why - ultimately I think its hard to balance puppets when theres a difference between the output of land and maritime puppets, both in yields and unhappiness.

 

[axatin]

I agree, it's very reasonable to make the puppet modifier multiplicative.

So you went for 70% rather than Legen's 75%
You think he's wrong on the logic? Given the proposal to increase city penalty from 5% to 7%, it feels like 70% may be too much.
Hard to say.

A multiplicative modifier gives lower yields than an additive one because it also affects the additional yields from the additive modifiers.

If a city has a base yield of 100 and a +20% additive modifier, a -75% additive modifier would result in a total yield of 45, but a 25% multiplicative modifier would result in a total yield of 30.

 

[axatin]

Personally, I just think sth needs to be done about the citizen assignments in puppets. rn coastal (or god forbid island) puppets are way worse than landlocked ones since the governor will work every resourceless coast tile 24/7, generate food (without penalty! the reason I assume the governor is obsessed with food so much) and theres no negative feedback since puppets dont have needs or growth penalties from local unhappiness.

Makes sense, the governor doesn't work the other yields because there's a -80% modifier on them. That's not intended of course, I'll look into it. Giving puppets a growth modifier is something we could consider I think.

 

[hokath]

A multiplicative modifier

Aha ok, I missed this part somehow.

I agree, it is unintuitive that positive modifiers can overcome the puppet penalty so readily.

 

[FPXI]

I like this approach a lot and it brings puppets more in line with the role they ought to occupy.

 

[Legen]

A multiplicative modifier gives lower yields than an additive one because it also affects the additional yields from the additive modifiers.

If a city has a base yield of 100 and a +20% additive modifier, a -75% additive modifier would result in a total yield of 45, but a 25% multiplicative modifier would result in a total yield of 30.

It's also a change in how puppets are meant to fit in the Tall vs Wide decision (with puppets not counting towards your number of cities for Tall/Wide purposes, given puppets don't increase culture/science costs).

Because the general idea is that Tall favors percentile yield boosts (e.g. +10% in all cities from Sistine Chapel) and Wide favors direct yields per city (e.g. +2 per city from Progress), the current additive penalty on puppets work well in the long run for empires that are going Tall, since both puppets and Tall benefit the most from percentile boosts. This counterproposal breaks the benefit puppets get from percentile boosts, weakening the Tall approach to conquest.

 

[azum4roll]

+X% yield modifiers in all cities favour neither tall nor wide. Only +yield in capital favours tall.

 

[axatin]

I sponsor this.

 

[Recursive]

Timestamp post to arrange all the threads in a neat order.