Are puppets irrelevant and can we make them relevant again?

Fluffball

Prince
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Sep 22, 2011
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I have been thinking of making a post about the state of puppets in the game for a while as they used to be an integral part of the game but as the game has evolved they have become increasingly pointless and actually predominantly worse than the other options.

This turned into a rather longer than intended post so i have have tried to break it up a bit and highlight specific sections so it is less wall of text but this was a retrofit to get around having to rewrite the whole thing.




Major causes for puppets being effectively irrelevant in the current game.


Happiness.

With the current happiness system you could have infinite happiness yet only be receiving the amount of happiness equal to the population of built cities or annexed cities with a courthouse.

One game i had a couple of years ago after the current happiness system was implemented showed me how bad puppets were and created a sea change in the way i dealt with conquering where (i can't remember exact figures so these are only rough from general memory for example purposes) i was in the late game having conquered a lot of cities and really struggled for happiness most of the time. Traditionally at this point i should have been swimming in happiness and i was doing everything possible to add as much happiness as possible, building landmarks (including in other civs lands), expending great admirals for new luxuries, building all the happiness generating buildings i could, allying new city states for new luxuries but nothing seemed to help.

I then started studying the numbers and something really didn't add up, i was very close to the city rebellion stage at something like 350/450 happiness yet according to the happiness breakdown i had over 600 happiness from all sources.

Short version is i annexed all my puppets and all my happiness problems disappeared and my empire was extremely happy.

As puppets are meant to be a way to expand without having to deal with crippling unhappiness but with the trade off of getting limited resources from them this 'balance' no longer exists.


Vassalisation.

Unless you need something specific from a city you are better off vassalising a civ as soon as possible so you can really limit the amount of cities you need to actually own.

With the fact that the AI won't pay for strategic resources unless it really needs them this has really knocked access to strategic resources down the list of uses for capturing a city also as I find myself swimming in them as a conqueror thus really the only reasons to conquer a particular city anymore are location, city state quest to get a huge chunk of xp, it being the civs capital/holy city, capturing a specific wonder and luxury resources. It usually takes 3 cities to reach the threshold to vassalise a civ, possibly 4 and i can usually achieve all my war aims in those 3/4 cities. If i have to capture a city for another reason, or if i captured a city for a city state quest and don't really want it i often just hand it back to my vassal or give it to another vassal if i really don't want it.


Vassals vs puppets

Yields from vassals and puppets
I now actually try a leave a vassal as big as possible as it is very beneficial. You get 20% of their yields and as they are the AI they get big bonuses, especially as you go up levels thus 20% from an AI vassal city will be much more than 20% from a puppet city and you don't have to pay any gold maintenance for the buildings in the city (while getting 25% of the gold instead of 20% for a puppet if you increase taxation to the maximum which there appears no real reason not to do so), you don't have to manage the land around the city, guard or defend the city thus a vassal city is vastly superior to a puppet city.

I usually leave tech trading on so i can give my vassals modern tech so they can actually defend themselves as well as be able to build more infrastructure and thus provide me with more resources from tribute as well as up to date units when they tribute units. After leaving vassals in a good condition i found they provide even more. My last warmonger game i had 3 large vassals with whom i was signing research agreements which were worth doing as one was keeping up in tech and science production and two were actually ahead of me in tech and I was actually buying techs from them and because one had more social policies than me i was able to leech significant extra culture from them via trade routes as they had more social policies than me.

If a strong vassal borders an enemy they can be very useful in battle also with them often being eager to join the fight, protecting a flank or even being quite aggressive to the point of conquering cities where as if you leave them weak you have to defend them also.

Increased yields from policies
There are two policies which increase yields for puppets and vassals respectively. Martial Law increases puppet yields by 20% and Iron Fist which increases vassal yields by 25%. It is not a straight comparison as Iron Fist comes much later than Martial Law and both have other benefits but Martial law only providing 20% extra to puppets but being earlier certainly does not make me consider puppets as more attractive compared to leaving my vassals with more cities.



I still do use the puppet option situationally on an interim basis as they can be a short term stop gap for happiness while conquering, sometimes at the start of the game before courthouses are available or if i am close to the 35% barrier when i capture a city but will then annex a city as soon as it's resistance ends and i have a bit of spare happiness to deal with the additional unhappiness while the courthouse is built, if i am going to give it to a vassal in the future or I think it will be potentially recaptured before I can secure it fully.


Opportunity costs of puppets over other options

Micromanagement
Even though they are puppets you have to deal with them still. You have to defend them and while puppets seem better at building walls they tend to be very slow to build defensive buildings in general which makes defending them harder. Puppets tend to focus on food and gold tiles (to prevent them costing you gold like they used to) so to get them built back up quicker and to stop them growing further and producing more unhappiness i would usually send in a team of workers to get rid of all the farms (or pillage them beforehand) at least so they are more likely to work good tiles and built as many villages as possible but just last night i had a puppet which had both an academy and a manufactory and wasn't working either. Therefore overall puppets often require a lot of additional micromanagment to work around their nuances.

Tile blocking
As touched on in a recent post by @Hund you can't trade tiles with puppet cities thus if you have a puppet by owned/annexed cities you can't swap tiles even if the puppet isn't working them or even worse they aren’t even in range of that other city. Of course if that city was a vassal city you can’t work those tiles either but at least you aren’t even teased and if you really wanted those tiles you could take them with a citadel.

Religion
Puppets are a weak choice for establishing and spreading a religion as they don’t build religious buildings. If your conquering civs of another religion they may already have some religious buildings and potentially means you can then have two lots of religious buildings in a city or even just being able to spread your religion there and add your buildings to provide defense against the spread of other religions and spreading pressure but this only works if you annex the city. Or you could vassalise and convert your vassal which has other added benefits as once you get your vassal to adopt your religion they will actively keep it themselves so you don’t need to expend faith on keeping their cities your religion as well as them buying your faith buildings which adds pressure and defense for your religion thus bolstering its strength and helping to defend your cites by adding pressure to them while making other civs expend faith keeping your religion out of their cities. As vassal/puppets are by their nature border cities they tend to get the most pressure from other religions and most likely to be targeted by other religions prophets or missionaries and most in need of additional religious buildings and defense.

Gifted units
As puppets don’t seem to build buildings like barracks, and why would they as you can’t train units there, this becomes an opportunity cost when a puppet is the nearest city to a military city state as when they provide you units they are spawned at the nearest city and use that city to provide any bonuses such as additional xp therefore to get trained units is to annex that city and build the appropriate buildings.


Potential advantages

Tech/policy costs
The only advantage to puppets these days is they don’t increase the tech/policy cost or reduce your tourism. Really I only see this counting for tourism as that is the one thing you really are restricted in creating but for science and culture in particular and while I haven’t done the exact math for specific thresholds which would be quite complicated i generally find you gain as much as you lose when you annex a city especially in the long term where you can then focus that city on building science and/or culture buildings with it often neglecting culture buildings as a puppet.e.g. a city in my current game I kept as a puppet for a period of time as I forgot to annex it was building late game buildings while ignoring early game culture buildings which could be built in as little as a single turn.

For the long term benefits of annexing over puppets my judgement is based on comparing later game policy and tech levels of my various games where I never seem worse off in my wider games where I conquer cities even if not going full warmonger and sometimes feel like i am more advanced than my taller games.

Tourism
Even for tourism a lot of cities are situationally better once you get later game buildings which give you tourism from the culture of generated by tiles and buildings. The AI being smarter about moving its great works has certainly made this more of a decision as you really do have to look at the tourism output of the city if your really going for tourism where as before just going on a conquering spree late game (and just annexing everything) could easily give you a tourism victory as you would be capturing so many great works in the process.

Heavily forested or jungle cities in particular can add a significant amount of science, culture or tourism when annexed compared to being puppeted.

On the flip side of tourism where i am more looking at defending against AI tourism, annexed cities far outshine puppets as your defense is based on flat culture thus having 100% culture is better defense than 20% and then of course as already mentioned culture buildings seem to be forgotten by puppets so you can (a) build them in the first place and (b) focus on building them if your getting heavily influenced. Again vassals are superior than puppets as AI cities tend to be much stronger than puppet cities and they build culture building thus 20% culture from a vassal is superior to 20% culture from a puppet.






Trying to keep puppets relevant
As one of the best aspects about this game is it is a game of choices, therefore trying to think of ways to keep puppets relevant and make them a choice you might want to take, having them being able (if you have spare happiness) to provide at least as much happiness as they produce unhappiness so they aren’t just a happiness drain would be a start.



Potentially adding something to the completion of policy trees which allows you to do more with puppets. Initial thoughts;


Tradition allows you to assign specialists in puppets and gain great people points.


Progress allows puppets have happiness equivalent to the amount of unhappiness the can generate.


Authority increases their yields by a set %.


Fealty allows you to purchase anything that can be purchased with faith in puppets.


Statecraft allows you to purchase diplomatic buildings and diplomatic units in puppets.


Artistry allows you to purchase cultural buildings in city states and receive full culture from puppets.


Industry allow you to purchase production and gold producing buildings in puppets and receive full gold amount from puppets.


Rationalism allows you to purchase science buildings in puppets and receive full science from puppets.


Some of these suggestions may be stepping on the toes of Venice which means Venice could need a buff but i feel Venice has gone from a quirky civ to play that would be fun to play as occasionaly form something different and would actually quite a good opponent as an AI to an irrelevant civ who is very poor to play and little more than an annoyance as an AI opponent with it's ability to obsorb City States.
 
Lot of interesting ideas here, I'd cosign on the idea that I can't see much reason to make puppets, which makes the option almost non existent.
 
There was a time when puppets were overtuned. If I recall correctly, their yields were high to the point of puppeting being worth more than annexation. I don't remember the values at the time, but it is simpler to just alleviate the -80% yield penalty until puppeting is competitive with annexing and vassalizing.
 
Have their ever really been one? Puppets are, or was, a novelty for certain civilizations such as Venice. But for anyone else? No. You either take control and annex it so you know what gets built and when and that things are worked in a proper manner OR you burn it to the ground and resettle the area or create space for other cities to grow. Capitals are usually always good so they are not an issue, the big issue then remains city-states that are normally put in abysmal locations so you really have to think about if it's worth to conquer them or not since you are then stuck with it (or you take it for the bonus, weaken it and then let some goodie come around and liberate it so you get rid of it).

This having a city where you have next to no control over it? That just isn't worth it. Never have, never will. It got somewhat better, I seem to recall now you could Invest in the buildings in the queue so you had some sort of control over what was built and done. But it just isn't enough. The benefits for science/culture not increasing just isn't enough of a reward or worth it.

If you just want to temporary control the area or use it as some sort of war-effort-forward-base for healing or other bonuses and such you take RAZE and then you raze it to like 1 pop while also locking growth. Once done you remove it from the map.
 
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There was, see this old beta preview from 2018. Some quotes from there:
I believe that the nerf to puppet cities output penalty from 75% to 80% should be a heavy enough touch for this, it translates into a reduction of 20% in the yield output of puppets (from overall output 25% to 20%).

I also agree that puppets were relatively too strong, but I am not sure if nerfing their yields output is really the main issue. I feel that happiness is, but I am not sure on how to address it.

This would be true this patch, the patch before, the patches where puppets are bad, the patches where puppets are even more OP than they are now and so on.

Apparently, all it takes is to change one value or two to set how competitive puppeting is. The yield penalty on puppets (from -75% to -80%), to which yields the penalty applies (that patch excluded food and production from the penalty), Imperialism's penalty reduction and Venice's UA value.

Given how many balance changes have happened since then, it would make sense to experiment back with a -75% penalty value and see if puppeting remains unattractive. We could also consider having different penalties based on yield, instead of an universal -80%.
 
The fact that puppets don't add to the culture and science cost that each "normal" city adds, they are certainly worth it now.

They are supposed to be a way to hold land, without actually getting anything much of value from the city, but little downside.

The only downsides are the fact that you don't control building order, and they cause unhappiness (equal to half their population I believe)

I think if anything, annexing right now, might be slightly TOO good in the mid to late game. You will usually be able to build a courthouse in a couple turns, and then pretty much remove all local downsides from the annex. Though like I said before, the global downside can be massive, particularly if you annex garbage cities.

Vassalage was brought up above, and I kind of agree. It's overpowered now because the AI will do it at a set war score point, rather than before when it would still refuse even if at 100 war score. I like the vassalage system because it's hyper realistic, however it's easy to take on a couple of them early on and then ride the rest of the game out. My answer to this is to add back in AI reluctant factor they used to have. I'm not sure what would trigger it before, but it made taking vassals more difficult. I would also make it so sometimes an AI will just demand to be given freedom out of the blue. Currently they have to have a certain military score to the master to try, but unless you mess up it's really hard to get to this point. Something like a 3% - 0.5% per game speed chance per turn after they are able to demand, they will, regardless of military score.
 
Puppets shouldn't even cause unhappiness to your empire. The empire doing the puppeting doesn't get sad or mad about it. They usually aren't even aware you control them.
 
The only downsides are the fact that you don't control building order, and they cause unhappiness (equal to half their population I believe)

I think it's 1:c5unhappy: per 4:c5citizen:. Or at least when I last played/puppeted a city.

But yeah, personally I'm also fine with how puppets are at the moment.
 
But please, it would be sooooo good if puppets insta-switched to work on global projects passed on the world congress, it feels so bad to never be able to win gold with venice or any civ with a lot of puppet cities, because many of my cities prefer to build gardens instead of working on this particular project that would give us a great reward. In my opinion, if there is a global project available, it should take priority on all puppeted cities.
 
I don't really care about their yields but I'm with Fluffball on unhappiness. I rarely warmonger, in one such game I was on the bigger continent with most of the CS, Austria was on the other. Needless to say I had to conquer all the CS eventually and puppetted them as razing wasn't an option. Now I'm fine with having unhappiness as a way to slow down warmongering, but this was simply too much. Policies reducing puppet unhappiness come in too late to matter, so you either annex and have to micro horsehockey states, or puppet and suffer. I'm always on the side of less micro, so puppets should be a viable option on the long-run too. Or, we could get an option to subjugate city-states: You can't raze them, you don't get any of their yields, but they cannot ally or make friends with anyone until liberated. This requires coding (sadly almost everyone is on break now), but it would make me happy and wouldn't hurt the balance too much.
 
More simply, we could allow puppets to benefit from happiness, although that would indirectly nerf Venice.
 
Puppets shouldn't even cause unhappiness to your empire. The empire doing the puppeting doesn't get sad or mad about it. They usually aren't even aware you control them.

Exactly my thought too. The complaint they have is "We want equal rights" and I can't help but think "I literally can't control what you build or what tiles you control, what are you complaining about?"

I find puppet cities in a weird limbo where they're just never actually the ideal choice. Since puppet unhappiness is population based, if you have a bunch of small puppets they can cause the same unhappiness as one large puppet city. If you give them resources to grow, they only get more unhappy; if you don't, they're less unhappy but now weak. Perhaps puppeted cities should act as city-scale "vassalization"?
 
I agree puppets are usually bad, and the various little issues you list make them not only bad, but also annoying. I particularly don't like being unable to take tiles from puppets. It would be wonderful if these issues could be addressed but I have no idea how difficult it would be technically.

I think that puppet yields are too low, and they make too much unhappiness. In the past they were perhaps overpowered, but I did find possessing them felt good and fun. I seem to recall the scaling of tech/policy costs with more cities was harsher in the past as well, which also favoured puppets, but I could be wrong. So perhaps buffing them to some intermediate values would be enough.

I would like to see puppets be more distinct from a gameplay point of view. What if they got some yields at higher rates? Gold would be the obvious choice. That would encourage distinct gameplay, where a puppet could be quite good if it can work forests/jungles/villages, and would naturally tip certain policies/beliefs towards puppets, like Tithes and Statecraft. I like the idea of having more policies do something with puppets. I think this could be extended to wonders and beliefs. For instance a wonder that adds bonus yields or GP% per puppet, perhaps up to some limit.
 
I would like to see puppets be more distinct from a gameplay point of view. What if they got some yields at higher rates? Gold would be the obvious choice. That would encourage distinct gameplay, where a puppet could be quite good if it can work forests/jungles/villages, and would naturally tip certain policies/beliefs towards puppets, like Tithes and Statecraft. I like the idea of having more policies do something with puppets. I think this could be extended to wonders and beliefs. For instance a wonder that adds bonus yields or GP% per puppet, perhaps up to some limit.

I always thought puppets were for encouraging a "Tall" playstyle but with a wide empire. Which could work with a "diplomatic" warmonger type playstyle, but puppets would have to have diplo focused bonuses (e.g., lessening the diplo maluses for puppeting cities, forced and voluntary vassalization are easier if you have puppeted cities, etc.). Yields would have to be increased as well, but carefully so Venice doesn't get overpowered.
 
True. One option is to improve yields from puppets to Venice.

I am against anything that continues to drive Venice away from being a "one city empire" civ. This would just push them further down the path of being a multi city empire like everyone else.
 
I am against anything that continues to drive Venice away from being a "one city empire" civ. This would just push them further down the path of being a multi city empire like everyone else.
Isn't Venice too weak now? Venice always had puppets anyway.
 
One recent change I don't like is not being able to steal tiles from your puppets anymore. They used to be a good way to hold down extra terrain and/or a defensive fort that provided a bit of yields without diluting a tall empire. But to do that effectively, you need to be able to take their choice tiles with nearby actual real cities.

Ideally you could even give tiles back to your puppets (this would help Venice a lot) but I'm not sure how you could actually implement that behavior.
 
Isn't Venice too weak now? Venice always had puppets anyway.

I don't find Venice under powered. Not top level, but that's ok.

For some reason people want to keep moving them away from a unique one city civ. If we make their puppets as useful as regular civs then what's the point?

I would actually remove the ability of Merchant of Venice from founding cities if it were up to me. We could then discuss things make them useful and a mostly one city civ at that point.
 
Nothing unique is taken from Venice. Their puppets would be greater, so their UA would be better.
 
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