Masters, Vassal, Capitulation problem part II

[TheMeInTeam]

OK.

I don't think this is in my head now. Masters of vassals seem inexplicably harder to force into capitulation than a similar sized civ. Yes, in the last thread we learned that masters count their vassals power, but your vassals don't count towards your own. Also, we learned that the capitulation target has to have a lower power than the average of all other AIs. So, we now take a game where the conditions at least appear met:

Wang kon has brennus as his vassal. Sal is my vassal but we've decuded that to be irrelevant since he isn't bordering wang .

So like, I have more than 2x gandhi's power here. Gandhi is more powerful than wang and brennus combined. There are three civs ahead of wang in power and my gap is ridiculously larger than the bottom feeders.

Just for more fun, I submitted a save AFTER I took the capitol (making this even more in favor of capitulation). With 2 cities and a teensy piece of my power, he still wouldn't capitulate until I had him down to 2 cities........

Looks like a bug to me. If it's "working as intended", then they intended some utter garbage coding and should really, really take another look at the checks for capitulation.

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[DanF5771]

First question: Why is Saladin still alive?
Wang Kon will capitulate in your 1977 save after WB-deleting one of his Infantries plus making Saladin leave the game via WB.

But I agree that this sucks -- you were very close, still your capitulation plans fell victim to the hard coded default power multiplier 140. I don't think I explicitly mentioned this in your first bug report thread but I remember crunching the numbers in detail here.

So the check vs. the average power level actually goes:
(Power _Wang + Power _Brennus) * (140 + VassalPowerModifier _Wang) / 100 > AveragePower ?

VassalPowerModifier _Wang = 0 like for the majority of the leaders, the others are:

Note that 3.17 made it slightly easier to pass this test (it was VassalPower > 3/4 * AveragePower ? --> DENIAL! in 3.13 ) but they should probably reverse it to VassalPower > 4/3 * AveragePower ? --> DENIAL!

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I left Sal alive because I wanted to abuse the border rule on Shaka. As you can see, however, I changed my mind when I saw I wouldn't be able to further that rule into wang anyway.

I mean obviously I just flattened 2 more cities and capped him, so it doesn't matter in this game. But that's kind of my point ----> however it's currently coded, it's allowing for civs that are enduring complete and utter annihilation to claim they're doing fine.

I should have just finished off sal. Still, that 140 is a bit surprising. The game is practically rigged so that useful vassals are rare without really knowing and abusing the mechanic .

Edit: Which I did massively in LHC Roosevelt, by the way . Not only did I get an overseas vassal, but I used the "land target" thing with a HUGE favorable K/D (aka war success) by outmaneuvering a tech-superior enemy stack in vassal territory and shredding it. But what bothers me is that they capitulate in that scenario almost SOLELY because of the bordering civ, which did practically nothing.

 

[DanF5771]

Yup, a better way would be to scale the land target factor with the vassal's war success...