Can a master run spy missions on a vassal?
- Thread starter RedFury
- Start date
awesome! thx
In a current game I have capac and mansa as vassals, both are fairly small but teching well.
I'm going to switch to an Espionage Economy so I can concentrate on domination and just steal techs off them cheaply.
I figure stealing from (capitulated) vassals has a few advantages over non-vassals:
- you can direct their research, beeline if necessary, then steal it.
- you'll always have open borders regardless of how much they hate you. OB severely reduces the risk of spies being caught and also lowers mission costs by 20%.
- they cannot declare on you.
This actually has some pretty good implications. It means the -modifiers for your spies being caught in their territory mean nothing. With two reasonably tech-decent vassals you can direct them on different techs, steal the most expensive from vassal 1, trade it to vassal 2 for their tech, then trade the two techs to anyone else to get stuff you may be missing.
Using this method along with maybe 10+ cities and some sensible vassal beelining, I think it could be possible to keep up with the AI's with little more than the espionage buildings (44 EP per city.) This allows you to focus the rest of your economy on hammers for domination and gold for upgrades and/or rushbuy.
edit: I realized a downside of this will be that when you go to war, so do they. Meaning they will focus less on research and more on building units. So it still pays to have at least 1 decent non-vassal AI to steal cheaply off.
In a current game I have capac and mansa as vassals, both are fairly small but teching well.
I'm going to switch to an Espionage Economy so I can concentrate on domination and just steal techs off them cheaply.
I figure stealing from (capitulated) vassals has a few advantages over non-vassals:
- you can direct their research, beeline if necessary, then steal it.
- you'll always have open borders regardless of how much they hate you. OB severely reduces the risk of spies being caught and also lowers mission costs by 20%.
- they cannot declare on you.
This actually has some pretty good implications. It means the -modifiers for your spies being caught in their territory mean nothing. With two reasonably tech-decent vassals you can direct them on different techs, steal the most expensive from vassal 1, trade it to vassal 2 for their tech, then trade the two techs to anyone else to get stuff you may be missing.
Using this method along with maybe 10+ cities and some sensible vassal beelining, I think it could be possible to keep up with the AI's with little more than the espionage buildings (44 EP per city.) This allows you to focus the rest of your economy on hammers for domination and gold for upgrades and/or rushbuy.
edit: I realized a downside of this will be that when you go to war, so do they. Meaning they will focus less on research and more on building units. So it still pays to have at least 1 decent non-vassal AI to steal cheaply off.
KeloGBites
Warlord
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2009
- Messages
- 274
Smart move, but beware. Vassals that are pissed off, will run spy missions against you as well. Last game on Emperor I capitulated Elizabeth. So she insisted on doing nothing but running a ton of spies to cause revolts in the cities I took from her.
This is interesting. I was under the impression that from 3.17 onwards your vassals didn't spy against you, regardless of their attitude. Are you sure the cities weren't just revolting because of the vassal's culture pressure? (even though you control the BFC, the vassal's tile culture still exists and can exert revolt-pressure on your cities.)
KeloGBites
Warlord
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2009
- Messages
- 274
Nope, it was maybe 200 turns after the cities were captured and the tile showed 100% of my culture. Not to mention random improvements being sabotaged right along the border with the vassal.
KeloGBites
Warlord
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2009
- Messages
- 274
No problem, goodluck.
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