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[Roland Johansen]

Shouldn't the vassal effect on diplomacy decrease over time. I'd say that after a while, the vassalised nation is becoming part of your nation and getting less independent relations that would affect yours.

It already does. All diplomacy* has decays already, they are just set ridiculously high. (high = low probability of forgetting). As time wears on, the AI will hate your vassal less, and thus, you less.

* Not really all. That's why I made a realistic diplomacy modcomp.

I know about the diplomacy decays. I've modded them also.

What I meant was that when a vassal has just been vassalised, then the average diplomatic relations seem reasonable, but when it has been vassalised for 1000 years, then only the masters diplomatic relations should count. The vassal's territory is at that point probably seen as part of the same nation.

It's a pity that vassal cities don't slowly become part of the masters civilisation when controlled for long enough. If that were the case, my suggestion would be very logical. Now, it is a bit contradictory to the fact that ingame, the vassal cities always remain very different from the home cities.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

I'm not sure what modification you're talking about so if one assumes I'm defending the code then my answer would be yes.

My original point was that the way the game developers coded the vassal attitude averaging was based more on laziness than on any real appreciation for the consequences of their actions because they just took the existing team partner code and extended it to include vassals.

Vassal states are pretty good already.

Benefits:

• +1 in every city
• Can demand resources
• Can use territory for healing and other military benefits that come with having home territory (e.g. defense in cities, paradrops from forts etc.)
• Can have foreign trade routes under Mercantilism
• Military assistance in conflicts
• Free defenders whenever you gift a city to them (e.g. colonies).
• Vassals population and land contribute partly to your score towards Domination victory
• Vassal does not need to be killed for Conquest victory
• Can tell a vassal what to research (true for teammates and perm allies too of course)

• Ok, I'll give the +1 Happiness.
• Or I could just conquer them and take those resources for myself
• Or I could just take those cities and do all the same things
• Or they could just be a part of my country and I would be able to have trade routes with them anyway
• They're usually so weak and technologically backward, that they just get wiped out or they don't play any role at all. I would much rather have those cities producing my own troops that'll be better and can be controlled by me (and thus put to the best use).
• Free defenders are good, but that's really only relevant to colonies.
• True
• True
• I personally have never had a vassal contribute anything to my research because they're usually far too technologically behind and have far too few cities to research anything with any kind of timeliness.

Drawbacks:

• I could have had more cities instead.
• Vassal might still use espionage against me (I think this is improved in BBAI though)
• Sometimes vassal screws you by doing something like build a spaceship part in a small city

Please add to the list...

• You take an automatic diplomatic hit from all players in addition to the attitude averaging.
• The culture in the cities you conquered from your vassalized player will continue to be a problem, but if you just wipe them out, you get a clean slate.

No, I don't. I disagree completely. When it's a choice between dissolving one nation's national bonds and recognition on a world-wide stage, or merely subjugating them, I think I would rather see a friend live then die.

So your official stance then is that the UK and USA actually had higher opinions of Japan and the Third Reich when they made puppet governments out of Manchuria and France rather than annexing them directly into their countries... And not only a higher a opinion of them. But a higher opinion based entirely on their opinions of China and France.

How about a more RL example. You have a pet, that you love. I'm a repo man, and you haven't paid your taxes. Would you rather I kill the pet, or sent it to the local animal shelter? That's the differeance.

How about another example... Your sister decides to marry a man you know to be a violent drunk and a thief. Do you like him considerably more now and love your sister considerably less? Or are you now even more wary of him now than you were before because he can now potentially hurt someone you care about?

Fine, then expose the potiental attitude shift the AI decision making process. That's what Better AI is all about, right?

You're still making this about the vassalizing player and their decision, and that's not what my point was about. My point was that such potentially drastic attitude changes for a third party based on a decision by one player (who may be an AI player too) that does not really affect the third party, may be detrimental to the third party. A human player can analyze on a case by case basis the real impact of one neighbor vassalizing another. The AI, on the other hand, does a simple averaging of attitudes. This necessarily puts the third party AI player at a disadvantage to a third party human player.

Really, you prefer stronger allies? I'd rather have a lot of weak allies I know I could kill later on.

This is not an argument for attitude averaging, this is an argument for slapping a master player with an across the board diplomatic penalty for having a vassal, which the game already does and no one has been suggesting getting rid of.

You're looking at it the wrong way. It isn't whether the other civ is a potential ally or not, it has to do with whether they are still alive to fight another day or not. Your looking at it from the wrong standpoint.

No, I'm not. You're just not listening to me. If someone I like is now under the control of someone I hate, I shouldn't like the person I hate more and like the person I like less. Because if war comes, my friends will declare war on me regardless of my opinion of them. And this isn't even taking into account the fact that they might "live to fight another day", but a positive attitude isn't based on any kind of real love or loyalty. It's based on what that player can do for me. And a crippled, rump state under the control of an enemy can't do much... This is a game after all.

If you sign with a mutual enemy, the AI will average it's hate toward the enemy vassal into your diplomatic stance. It does have an effect.

My original post:

But in the game, I can sign a peace treaty with a mutual enemy, and they AI couldn't care less aside from losing the "mutual war" attitude bonus.

Why not? Since you are the one arguing for change here, and Firaxis obviously agrees with me, you need to give a convincing argument to win me over.

Why shouldn't the game be coded to mimic the most extreme examples in history at the expense of the more typical? Do I really have to answer that?

Probably not. But that doesn't matter. Firaxis DID code it that way, and players have gotten used to that game mechanic. Better AI's goal here isn't to go change game mechanics whenever they feel like it. The goal is to improve the AI's behavior.

It's not a game mechanic because the only thing it affects is AI attitudes... at least, it's no more of a game mechanic than any of the other things this mod has changed. It only concerns AI behavior, which is exactly what this mod is about. Why wasn't the way Firaxis coded all the other stuff considered to be gospel, but this is?

Those aren't flaws, those are features.

Fine. Vassal states already has built-in negative features.

The way vassalage works doesn't need to be changed here. If you want to change it, do it in your respective mods, but Better AI isn't the place for altering game mechanics. I think Jdog just needs to expose the diplo penalty hit to the AI decision making, to help decide if they want to take a vassal, and to expose it to the UI, for players to see.

This is probably the only thing I can actually agree with. It's definitely not something that has to be done by BetterAI. It can certainly be done in individual mods instead, but I do think there is potential problems for all the third party AI civs whose attitudes are being altered by another player's decision to accept a vassal.

 

[Afforess]

The reason we have this disagreement is because you are seeing it entirely from the Master's standpoint, and ignoring the vassal completely. Take vassalage from the vassals standpoint. Being the vassal of a much larger nation is a huge advantage. Sure, you're basically a parasite on a much larger creature, but that larger creature can protect you, and you in turn, help it achieve victory. Those negative features you gripped about, are now good things. Your enemies are less angered at you now. Sure, you pay for it with a + in every city, but that's a small price to pay for still existing at all.

Your changes, if adopted, would make vassalage so pointless, as to remove it entirely.

 

[MartinHarper]

If Germany capitulates France and then declares war on Russia, Russia starts disliking France ("you declared war on us"), even though France had no part in that decision. Instead, Russia should only dislike France if French troops start attacking Russian troops.

Further, if France likes Russia more than Germany, then French troops should not attack Russian troops. In fact, French troops should desert less important French cities in the hope that the Russians will take them and thus reduce the French to <50% original size, thus allowing them to break free. If the Germans want to keep control of those cities, they will need to send in German troops to do so.

tech trading ( in case of no brokering is diferent OFC ) is probably better suited for the current average model, because , with the current 3.19 rules , if you tech trade with a vassal, the master ( and probably the other vassals as well ) will receive the tech fast enough.

There's no particular reason for a capitulated vassal to give any techs to its master. The master cannot threaten war if the vassal doesn't hand over the tech. The vassal might well trade it to the master for gold and/or tech, but this is true for any civ that we trade techs to. Tech trading need not treat masters and vassals specially.

 

[phungus420]

The problem stems from the fact Firaxis implemented vassals very poorly. It's really as simple as that. The only way to truly fix things is to rebuild the idea from scratch; the current setup is just too flawed to really work, period.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

The reason we have this disagreement is because you are seeing it entirely from the Master's standpoint, and ignoring the vassal completely. Take vassalage from the vassals standpoint. Being the vassal of a much larger nation is a huge advantage. Sure, you're basically a parasite on a much larger creature, but that larger creature can protect you, and you in turn, help it achieve victory. Those negative features you gripped about, are now good things. Your enemies are less angered at you now. Sure, you pay for it with a + in every city, but that's a small price to pay for still existing at all.


Your changes, if adopted, would make vassalage so pointless, as to remove it entirely.

Afforess, you spent most of your posts talking about the master player's relationship with the outside world too, so please don't give me this business about us arguing from two different perspectives now that you apparently have no rebuttal to my specific points.

The AI's incentives for accepting vassalage don't change just because diplomatic attitudes are weighted based on the master's diplomacy. Currently, if the master is generally well-liked, your presence in their empire will merely increase the likelihood of war with a third party, which will, in turn, increase the likelihood of yourself becoming a casualty. But either way, you still have the protection of a much larger empire. And since vassals are no longer sovereign states, the attitude of other players towards them specifically don't really matter as much. It's the attitude towards the master civ that becomes much more crucial. And that is true with or without the proposed changes.

And those negative features I "griped" about had to do with the negative impact on the master. Not the vassal. The advantage for the vassal has always been and will always continue to be protection. But it's also largely a pointless protection because a vassal is essentially removed from any real chance of victory, and they're not team members of the master civ, so they don't share in a master's victory even if they help contribute to it with their population and territory.

The changes would not make vassal status pointless for the vassal, and they certainly wouldn't make it that way for the master.

 

[r_rolo1]

There's no particular reason for a capitulated vassal to give any techs to its master. The master cannot threaten war if the vassal doesn't hand over the tech. The vassal might well trade it to the master for gold and/or tech, but this is true for any civ that we trade techs to. Tech trading need not treat masters and vassals specially.

True in theory, but the practice is somewhat diferent. First a master-vassal is also a DP, so there is atleast one more diplo bonus in the equation ( not mentioning all the resource trade bonus the AI masters get by giving all the resources they have to vassals ... well, that is besides the point anyway ). Second, a vassal in average will have more willingness to tech trade with the master due to the nullifying of the "too advanced" and the diplo-related tech trade stoppers. Ok, maybe treating things as automatic may be too much, but it should be considered that a vassal will most of the times trade it's techs to the master.

In the end phungus is right: the vassal system in Civ IV is a horrible mess and probably do a complete revamp would be less work intensive than trying to patch things further. But that is outside of this mod scope

EDIT Just looked at the text again and it looks I wrote something diferent from what i wanted to say. Where I say "but it should be considered that a vassal will most of the times trade it's techs to the master" it should be read "but it should be considered that a vassal will be more willing to trade it's techs to the master compared with a free civ with the same diplo status"

 

[MartinHarper]

Thinking about this, I see the need for two attitude calculations. They are:

• SmallTeam - Everyone in the permanent alliance - this would be used for most things, including tech trading, UN votes, espionage weighting, resource trade, map trade, choosing between events, generating a greeting comment, and deciding whether to apply culture pressure.
• BigTeam - Everyone in permanent alliances, voluntary vassals, and defensive pacts, but not capitulated vassals. This would be used to decide whether to go to war, whether someone has declared war on a friend, and whether to accept peace.

Both of these could be weighted averages by population.

It's also largely a pointless protection because a vassal is essentially removed from any real chance of victory, and they're not team members of the master civ, so they don't share in a master's victory even if they help contribute to it with their population and territory.

They don't share in the victory, but they do get a higher score than they would if they were eliminated.

It should be considered that a vassal will be more willing to trade it's techs to the master compared with a free civ with the same diplo status

I agree with that. Mind you, removing the diplomatic trade blocks seems like Worse AI to me: a human vassal wouldn't behave like that. I think this is a pretty small effect, especially since the current AI doesn't even take tech proliferation into account. Therefore I still think that tech trades should be based on the attitude to the player, not to the team, in a master/vassal situation, or in a defensive pact situation.

Looking through the code related to this, I found an interesting behavioural quirk in CvCityAI::AI_cityThreat. The calculated threat of nearby civs is based on:

switch (GET_PLAYER(getOwnerINLINE()).AI_getAttitude((PlayerTypes)iI))

In other words, it is based on our attitude to the other player. It should be based on the other players attitude to us (or our BigTeam). Further, if the other player is a vassal, it should be based on the attitude of the master, since it is the master that might declare war. Also, if random personalities is off, then the threat should be based off the player's published NoWarProb at that attitude level.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

The problem stems from the fact Firaxis implemented vassals very poorly. It's really as simple as that. The only way to truly fix things is to rebuild the idea from scratch; the current setup is just too flawed to really work, period.

I generally agree, but I'm also not sure what a good alternative would be. What were you thinking should be the way the system works?

 

[Afforess]

Afforess, you spent most of your posts talking about the master player's relationship with the outside world too, so please don't give me this business about us arguing from two different perspectives now that you apparently have no rebuttal to my specific points.

...Sorry, I was pressed for time. I have a very busy life.

The AI's incentives for accepting vassalage don't change just because diplomatic attitudes are weighted based on the master's diplomacy. Currently, if the master is generally well-liked, your presence in their empire will merely increase the likelihood of war with a third party, which will, in turn, increase the likelihood of yourself becoming a casualty. But either way, you still have the protection of a much larger empire. And since vassals are no longer sovereign states, the attitude of other players towards them specifically don't really matter as much. It's the attitude towards the master civ that becomes much more crucial. And that is true with or without the proposed changes.

No Problems here.

And those negative features I "griped" about had to do with the negative impact on the master. Not the vassal. The advantage for the vassal has always been and will always continue to be protection. But it's also largely a pointless protection because a vassal is essentially removed from any real chance of victory, and they're not team members of the master civ, so they don't share in a master's victory even if they help contribute to it with their population and territory.

Then your treating vassals wrong. Vassals still have a shot at victory (Okay, if your playing only Domination or Conquest, probably not, but I'll assume otherwise.) If it is largely pointless for a civ to vassalize because their chances of victory are null (sorry... I love CS jokes), then why become a vassal at all. If your a one or two city state facing down a mammoth civ, you might as well fight it to the last man, and try to cause some chaos while you're at it. "A blaze of glory" comes readily to mind. If that's the type of civ you are arguing against vassaling, then I agree. The AI in that position could do more damage just trying to pillage all of its plots, nuking itself, etc... Metaphorically salting the land, so that no one else could use it either.

In reality, a vassal should be that middle-ish power civ that has pretty good odds of making it to the end, if nothing goes terribly wrong. It still has a shot at victory if a mammoth power implodes, or something crazy happens (Nuclear holocaust between two superpowers). Those vassals still have a fighting chance. And those are the civs that would make more appropriate vassals.

Or I could just conquer them and take those resources for myself

But you would have to wait many turns for that tile to be yours, especially if the enemy had a lot of culture, or had a large defense. Even after capturing the tile, it would still take 3-4 turns for the bonus to come into effect, tops. In 3-4 turns, I could whip out a ICBM and lob it at you, if you needed Uranium.

Or I could just take those cities and do all the same things

The cities would lose all of its cultural buildings, most of its infrastructure, and if it was even worth taking, the citizens would probably be pretty pissed at you. Captured decent-size cities are pretty much unworkable for ~50 turns.



Cities have no trade routes when they are revolting. I believe that works both ways. (But don't quote me.) You could probably extort more from the vassal than the trade routes are worth anyway.

• I personally have never had a vassal contribute anything to my research because they're usually far too technologically behind and have far too few cities to research anything with any kind of timeliness.

You take an automatic diplomatic hit from all players in addition to the attitude averaging.

If that's so much of a deterrent to you, just kill them off. After all, you already complain that they are worthless.

The culture in the cities you conquered from your vassalized player will continue to be a problem, but if you just wipe them out, you get a clean slate.

A clean slate where enemy culture will quickly expand, grabbing a few bonuses you meant to get, or slowly converting your city to the enemy culture.

I'm not sure I get this hypocritical attack on the culture. You complain vassals are too weak, and they complain they are too strong (culturally). What gives?

So your official stance then is that the UK and USA actually had higher opinions of Japan and the Third Reich when they made puppet governments out of Manchuria and France rather than annexing them directly into their countries... And not only a higher a opinion of them. But a higher opinion based entirely on their opinions of China and France.

Puppet Government != Vassal. The original governments were destroyed. Vichy France's government wasn't even remotely like France's old system. Vassals are where the old government bows to the demands of the master. Not where the Master kills of the existing government. You should know this better than I, you added puppet gov's in your older mod.

How about another example... Your sister decides to marry a man you know to be a violent drunk and a thief. Do you like him considerably more now and love your sister considerably less? Or are you now even more wary of him now than you were before because he can now potentially hurt someone you care about?

False Dichotomy. The choice is between death or a meager life, not life or a meager life.

You're still making this about the vassalizing player and their decision, and that's not what my point was about. My point was that such potentially drastic attitude changes for a third party based on a decision by one player (who may be an AI player too) that does not really affect the third party, may be detrimental to the third party. A human player can analyze on a case by case basis the real impact of one neighbor vassalizing another. The AI, on the other hand, does a simple averaging of attitudes. This necessarily puts the third party AI player at a disadvantage to a third party human player.

I disagree. I have already made my case in earlier posts:

Again, taking a vassal isn't a decision for the faint of heart. If you think the good < bad, just kill them off completely. For instance, your at war with Player 2, and I hate him too, and am 3 turns away from getting my entire army ready for war. Then, you take his capital, and he offers to capitulate. You accept. Essentially, your protecting my enemy. I have this huge army that I was going to use against him, and now I'm ticked off at you for protecting him. Want to guess what happens next?

No, I'm not. You're just not listening to me. If someone I like is now under the control of someone I hate, I shouldn't like the person I hate more and like the person I like less. Because if war comes, my friends will declare war on me regardless of my opinion of them. And this isn't even taking into account the fact that they might "live to fight another day", but a positive attitude isn't based on any kind of real love or loyalty. It's based on what that player can do for me. And a crippled, rump state under the control of an enemy can't do much... This is a game after all.

You are not looking at the situation correctly. Let me lay it out plain and simple:

Player A is a huge, massive civ, with advanced armies. Player A declares war on Player B, and weak, backwards, and small civ. Player C is me, and I am best friends with Player B, who has been trading much needed resources with me. Player B loses a city, and offers to capitulate to Player A. Player A has the following options:

1.) Accept Player B as a vassal

2. ) Finish Player B off

3.) Ending the war, here and now.

Option 3 is idiotic, and Player A would never choose it. Now, I want Player B to live, he has helped me out. If the AI accepts option 1, I would be much happier, as my supply of resources would be uninterrupted, and my friend would live another day. If the AI chose option 2, I would be out of resources, and need to trade or conquer them anew. Which would you logically prefer?

It's not a game mechanic because the only thing it affects is AI attitudes... at least, it's no more of a game mechanic than any of the other things this mod has changed. It only concerns AI behavior, which is exactly what this mod is about. Why wasn't the way Firaxis coded all the other stuff considered to be gospel, but this is?

It's gospel for Better AI. Better AI has a unspoken UG motto, where Jdog prefers, if there is any reasonable alternative to avoid it, to not alter the core gameplay, like this. Usually, Better AI's changes are hidden to most players, except that the AI makes better choices. This action would be a significant step away from that.

In the end phungus is right: the vassal system in Civ IV is a horrible mess and probably do a complete revamp would be less work intensive than trying to patch things further. But that is outside of this mod scope

If we were rewriting the way it was, I wouldn't mind a bunch of changes, but yes, I agree, it's out of the scope of this mod.

Dom Pedro II, before you jump all over that last sentence, the Attitude Averaging is not one of those changes.

 

[phungus420]

I don't know how to fix vassals, I haven't given it much thought. What I do know is that when I first got Warlords I thought it sounded like a cool concept, but then after playing with them in the game, I thought they were very poorly implemented. Terribly even. My theory is that durring the expansion pack planning phase one of the developers thought "Hey you know what would be cool, vassals, like in the middle ages, and we could use this mechanic for capitulation, like an unconditional surrender thing" and everyone was like "Hey that's cool". But then when they sat down to program it they could never agree on a proper implementation and just stumbled around messing with code until their timelimit in the dev cycle of Warlords was hit and they basically shipped a rushly, poorly implemented mechanic that sounds cool. At least this is my theory, because anyone with a lick of sense realizes the current vassal system in Civ4 is utter crap, but realizes the concept is neat.

Edit: And yes properly fixing vassals is out of the scope of BBAI, I suppose that was my main point. Basically to actually get things to work, this is more of an issue for RevDCM. I just don't think under the current system you can really get the diplo effects to make sense, or work better, period; let alone under the restrictions of this mod.

 

[PieceOfMind]

There's no particular reason for a capitulated vassal to give any techs to its master. The master cannot threaten war if the vassal doesn't hand over the tech. The vassal might well trade it to the master for gold and/or tech, but this is true for any civ that we trade techs to. Tech trading need not treat masters and vassals specially.

If I understand correctly, vassals that are furious with their master can still trade techs. I think that was mentioned in this thread.

• Or I could just conquer them and take those resources for myself
• Or I could just take those cities and do all the same things
• Or they could just be a part of my country and I would be able to have trade routes with them anyway
• They're usually so weak and technologically backward, that they just get wiped out or they don't play any role at all. I would much rather have those cities producing my own troops that'll be better and can be controlled by me (and thus put to the best use).
• I personally have never had a vassal contribute anything to my research because they're usually far too technologically behind and have far too few cities to research anything with any kind of timeliness.

And if you change vassal diplo how will this change?

• The culture in the cities you conquered from your vassalized player will continue to be a problem, but if you just wipe them out, you get a clean slate.

Culture clashes between vassals and masters result in automatic ownership of the tile for the master if it's in a BFC of his.

If you were instead referring to the culture of a third party being a problem, then it's neither for nor against because if you kill the player instead of vassalising them the third party culture does not disappear.

Anyway, consider this.

Suppose Shaka attacks me but after a short battle I start capturing his cities and winning the war. Then Catherine comes to his rescue, accepting him as a voluntary vassal. My feelings towards Catherine are now worsened, probably to an extent worse than if I just averaged how I liked her and Shaka. Am I wrong to think this? Does an AI (who is partly roleplaying may I remind...) have to ignore every vassal of a powerful opponent when considering its attitude to that opponent? If I really want to take Shaka's cities because I hate him so much, do I have to throw my arms up and say, "Oh well, I like Catherine so Shaka's cities are somehow not something I want anymore."?

 

[MartinHarper]

If I understand correctly, vassals that are furious with their master can still trade techs. I think that was mentioned in this thread.

The current vassal AI will trade techs to its master, even if it is furious. That is how it is coded. However, there is no reason for it to do so. As I said earlier, this "seems like Worse AI to me: a human vassal wouldn't behave like that".

Culture clashes between vassals and masters result in automatic ownership of the tile for the master if it's in a BFC of his.

I think Dom is talking about revolts due to foreign culture, which can still occur from vassal culture. If you have "allow culture flips after conquest" turned on, this can even lose you control of the city.

 

[MadmanAtW]

Suppose Shaka attacks me but after a short battle I start capturing his cities and winning the war. Then Catherine comes to his rescue, accepting him as a voluntary vassal. My feelings towards Catherine are now worsened, probably to an extent worse than if I just averaged how I liked her and Shaka. Am I wrong to think this?

Well, and you're also at war with her now, if she accepted a voluntary vassal of someone you were at war with. So that's a good start towards disliking each other.

This is another place where "vassal" just means to many conditions that should be handled separately. Yes, if someone voluntarily decides to protect a civ that you hate, that should probably be a blow to your diplomatic feelings about them, IMO. But I agree that Capitulation vassals feels more like subjugation- in my mind, it's like you've deposed their previous set of leaders and is more like (to stick with the WWII examples though this one isn't really nearly the parallel I try to use it for here) reconstruction in post-war Germany or something. You've accepted their surrender, now control their research and to some extent their trade if you want to, and the rest of the world watches to see if reforms take hold in the population.

Ok, so that's not very well modelable in Civ. But I do feel like subjugation conceptually, from an RP perspective, shouldn't necessarily gives the subjugator more than just the "we are concerned about your vassals" penalty. Or possibly some Civs (maybe some overlap with the ones for whom Emancipation is their favorite civic, or something) should dislike that you have any vassals period as a separate modifier. However, that's my perspective on how I tend to interpret the capitulation mechanic- what is balanced from a gameplay perspective is an entirely other question. Do cap vassals become too powerful an option without the added deterrent of diplo averaging? (IME and judgement from reading here, it's often more useful to have one Civ who is Friendly to you than to avoid having one who is Furious- as such I consider "averaging" diplomacy to be a penalty to the player as a general rule, despite the fact that vassaling a popular Civ will sometimes raise your diplo with their friends.)

 

[JujuLautre]

I know I did not follow the whole debate, but may I propose what I proposed elsewhere?

A similar suggestion was done before, but I felt like I could propose mine too...

Answering to a new thread about diplo screwing up with vassals because the interface is misleading, I was wondering if this "solution" could be implemented: create a new diplomacy text which would say something like "we don't like your vassals/the people of your team", and appears when an AI refuses something because she is friendly with us but furious with our vassal.

Not sure it's what jdog or others would like to see this in the unofficial patch, but I thought I'd mention that.

Or perhaps in BUG ?

 

[Dom Pedro II]

And if you change vassal diplo how will this change?

It wouldn't. But it would remove one more negative aspect of vassals making it them more appealing.

Culture clashes between vassals and masters result in automatic ownership of the tile for the master if it's in a BFC of his.

If you were instead referring to the culture of a third party being a problem, then it's neither for nor against because if you kill the player instead of vassalising them the third party culture does not disappear.

Actually I was referring to the culture inside the city itself that causes the "We yearn to join our motherland" unhappiness. While the most such anger comes from a player's culture you're at war with, there is still some that occurs with any non-team culture (including vassals).

But if I wipe the civilization out completely, their culture everywhere immediately goes to 0. Personally, I never agreed with this since even though they have been destroyed as a national entity, the population shouldn't just magically become the same as the people who conquered them, but that's a discussion for another time.

Anyway, consider this.

Suppose Shaka attacks me but after a short battle I start capturing his cities and winning the war. Then Catherine comes to his rescue, accepting him as a voluntary vassal. My feelings towards Catherine are now worsened, probably to an extent worse than if I just averaged how I liked her and Shaka. Am I wrong to think this? Does an AI (who is partly roleplaying may I remind...) have to ignore every vassal of a powerful opponent when considering its attitude to that opponent? If I really want to take Shaka's cities because I hate him so much, do I have to throw my arms up and say, "Oh well, I like Catherine so Shaka's cities are somehow not something I want anymore."?

Well, its already been stated that this would put you at war with Catherine, but supposing for a moment that Catherine declared war on Shaka instead and he capitulated... you might be really frustrated that the war just ended. I am assuming of course that "you" in this case refers to a hypothetical AI player and not a human player since this is all about an AI's attitude change to a master player. Interestingly enough, under this current averaging system, you would be less inclined to want Shaka's cities not more. Because since the averaging does not examine your attitude toward one and the other. Suppose you like Catherine as much as you hate Shaka. Instead of being Furious towards Shaka and Friendly towards Catherine, you'd be Cautious towards both. So suddenly, instead of hating Shaka, you'd have no opinion towards either of them. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to be saying "I really hate Shaka, but do I hate Shaka enough to go to war with Catherine?" Instead of a flat averaging, the AI should be weighting its decision based on what it wants to do and how relevant this vassal situation is to that third party.

 

[Afforess]

At this point, I'm not sure how productive this discussion is. If we don't decide on something eventually Jdog will be forced to do exactly what the Firaxis Dev's did, and just do the best alternative, a UI fix for players; which isn't enough for most of you. This discussion is rapidly heading towards a much larger change, and most people here are no longer being listened to, so I think opening a new thread would be best (in this forum.) and begin real talks on how to rebuild vassals...

I do agree that if you are going to rebuild vassals from scratch, that the averaging should be changed. I previously was getting Jdog's help on getting AI code for the AI to accept human vassals. I found that that code is already 60-70% there, but the dev's cut the feature at the last minute. Also, a while back, I experimented with vassals of vassals, where a vassal could have other vassals underneath of it, and it worked well, but war declarations got a little hairy. If you guys are serious about re-doing the vassal system, you could potentially add a lot of depth here.

Plus, this thread was meant for QBR, not rewriting the game...

 

[phungus420]

Agree; this discussion should really move over to the RevDCM project. Rebuilding vassals would fit into the RevDCM core very nicely, and fits the theme of that mod. It's also something that's long overdue anyway, it's just very complex, and much like the Firaxis devs, no one has really wanted to tackle it and fix the code/gameplay implementation while still maintaining the general concept.

 

[Afforess]

Call me a flip-flopper, or some other name, but I've had a change of heart.

I dislike the way the AI takes the effect of vassaling, in regards to diplomacy. It should be changed, (maybe to a scaling function of how powerful the vassal is compared to the AI in question.) Also, UI changes would be appreciated too.

 

[os79]

Call me a flip-flopper, or some other name, but I've had a change of heart.

I dislike the way the AI takes the effect of vassaling, in regards to diplomacy. It should be changed, (maybe to a scaling function of how powerful the vassal is compared to the AI in question.) Also, UI changes would be appreciated too.

Hey! Who is your polling experts?!

Just kidding . Fascinating discussion. Glad it moved on *shake head*.

Really, I have to love the devotion to 5 or so years old game !