James I said:
What about the dangers of Flipping?
No enemy cities left.......no Danger.
I used to love leaving "vassal states" in Civ 2, but i never risk it now.
I've never had this problem. Unless I'm a weak 3rd rate Civ that is struggling to stay in the game, to which I have no business having vassals anyways (unless they are extremely weak).
Vassals are best to have when you hit your 'groove' so to speak and is a middle power aiming for the power leaders or if you're in a particularly good game, you are the power leader. The scope of size of how I involve myself with these vassals is highly situational based on how the game plays out so it's hard to give rules.
Generally Vassals are Vassals because they are much weaker than me on all aspects, militarily, culturally, etc. Usually they are small in size which means they just don't have the geographic scope to have a lot of resources or luxuries in their borders and is probably too small to keep up with the tech race (bling bling for me
) If you have a strong culture relative to thevassal, flips is generally not an issue although it has happened before in one of my games (it was a conquered russian city).
It's all highly situational. If you're playing larger maps, or even on standard with 8 Civs, there will usually be some small Civ hanging around that you can turn into your vassal without much trouble. If you create your own vassals by turning a rival into your vassal trough conquest, I suppose there's the danger there.
I generally play the Japanese on the higher difficulty levels and with cheap temples and Japan's affinity with a building/warmonger hybrid playstyle, cities I take are fully decked out with a temple in short order and I start building libraries soon after. Since there's lot of peace between short spurts of war, I have the luxury to do this. If you're a pure warmonger, then you probably don't need vassals or want them anyways.
I just like a lot of trading, manipulating, and basically having small weak civs grovel at my feet
