It Sucks To Be A Vassal [In progress]

[Yakk]

The idea is to make vassal states less of a dead weight on your civilization.

An Empire of Vassals always seemed to be ... more real ... than the standard monolithic Empire in Civ4. But as it stands, Vassals are quite often sub-optimal.

Planned changes:
CvPlayer:: calculateResearchModifier
Grant a +30% bonus to the master of a Vassal State whose Vassal has a technology that they don't have.

CvPlayer:: calculateResearchModifier
-20% modifier to Vassal states in general.

CvPlayer:: doResearch
Vassal states move that 20% modifier's worth of "raw" Research to their masters.

int CvCity:: getProductionModifier() const
Vassal states are charged a 50% premium on the cost of producing units. This is a multiplicative charge.

void CvCity:: popOrder(int iNum, bool bFinish, bool bChoose)
When a Vassal state produces a unit, there is a 50% chance that it also produces an extra unit, of the same type, for it's master. This unit appears in the city in question.

void CvCity:: doPlotCulture(bool bUpdate, PlayerTypes ePlayer, int iCultureRate)
A "share" of culture produced and deposited by a Vassal is converted to Master culture. A much smaller share of Master culture is also converted to Vassal culture. This just effects ownership of tiles on the map (and mix of population in the city, which is just based off of the mix of culture on the tile under the city on the map after all).

...

The effects of this? Having a Vassal state with a strong economy can grant you free units (produced by them) and bonus research. Their cities will become somewhat influenced by your culture (and to a lesser extent, the other way around), and you will find holding on to territory near their cultural zones easier against 3rd parties.

If the Vassal does break out from under you, some of their cities will have a significant population base of your people, which makes conquest of the rebel Vassal easier.

...

I haven't implemented this, but I have found the DLL functions that have to be modified, and a rough sketch how. I'm asking for feedback -- do these things look reasonable? Can you think of other things that should Suck to be a Vassal? (and encourage people to take Vassals under their wing)

I was thinking of actual direct movement of culture points, but that's tricky. Ie: 10% of culture produced by your vassal is removed. Another 20% is turned into your culture "on the plots". The 10% removed is then spread over your cities by weight of their culture totals, and applied "on the plots" as their culture.

 

[Yakk]

Next idea: the idea of a Provincial Capital.

A Provincial Capital lets you split your empire on the same continent. When you split on that continent, cities that are twice as close to that city as they are to any other "capital-like" city go to that province. You can add more cities to the province if you wish.

Building such provinces lets you expand and claim territory earlier, yet cut down on some of your overhead and micro management.

Teaching the AI how to deal with provincial capitols is ... harder. Allot depends on if the AI is smart about placing things like forbidden palaces or not (and use the same logic as the base location for a provincial capitol). Then maybe a bit of work whereby the civilization figures out if doing a split based around a prospective capitol is a good or bad thing...

The first post proposal is easy, but this post contains stuff that is pie in the sky, at least getting the AI to use it effectively.

 

[cephalo]

Will 18 Civs be enough to make this work? I know you can raise the max number but I don't know what's involved. It could be as simple as changing the MAX_CIV_PLAYERS define but I kinda doubt it.

 

[Shiggs713]

yea these ideas seem reasonable enough. It would be a nice modcomp for people to add to existing mods perhaps.

 

[nebling]

Some good ideas there especially the Provincial Capital - I've always wanted to form my own byzantine equivalent. Good luck implementing them. One point; how are you going to limit the number of provincial capitals a civ can build? more than one seems unrealistic.

 

[Shiggs713]

limiting the number of provincial capitals a civ can build is actually the easy part. Its just simply changing a -1, 0, 2 or whatever the default value is, to 1, if you want 1.

The hard part to me is coding how it decides which cities stay with the original civ, and which ones go with the derative civ. Like Yakk said, it also depends heavily if the AI places forbidden palace wisely also... if not, its a big waste of time.

Shiggs

 

[Yakk]

Alternatively, if the AI is willing to grant cities manually to the province, it would work reasonably well.

The Provincial Capitol could just create a single city empire, and rely on granting other cities to that province to fill it out. Players could do this reasonably well -- teaching an AI to do it is harder.

I'm more than half way through implementing the first post, which would make conquest-based vassals pretty efficient. If I also allow capitulation before feudalism (!), then you could have an early Roman empire based off of capitulated vassals... Dunno if it would work economically.

 

[Jeckel]

Hmm, assuming the percentages you quote in the first post will be settable in the GlobalDefinesAlt.xml, sounds like a very cool mod.