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.
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.