Vassal or not Vassal?

[ChaosSlayer]

Vassal or not Vassal?

When playing with Vassalage on, as soon as a single AI gets a slight lead forward it goes to war with its neighbor, the neighbor AI takes some loses and quickly capitulates. Result - Aggressive AI took a min losses and got a huge chunk of imperial power back. Now he immediately goes to war to a 3rd AI who is now facing 2 opponents = even faster capitulation. And this crap snowballs pretty fast.

On other side, once you start taking chunks of the Alpha- AI, his vassal quickly fall off, and you can vassal them yourself and quickly win the game. Given you survive up to that moment.

When playing without vassalage AI tends to go into lengthy and and off wars, which either keep them on equal or sometimes lead to total extermination of one side, which then leads to a singular super power AI, which can be very tough/long to deal with.
(I play marathon games)

What do you think?

 

[georgjorge]

Deity/Normal/Standard here. I have different experiences with vassalage. Even with it on, AI are often just too stupid in war to take their opponents' cities unless they have a HUGE advantage. I can usually prevent capitulation by bribing them off if it really looks like they would get too much of an upper hand.

The game is certainly less prone to AIs getting superstrong with vassalage turned off, as it forces the AI who has more troops to go through every city of their opponent, possibly without much siege so they will take ages. And often you yourself want to finish off the first two or three targets instead of going for vassals anyway. But the game will take longer.

There are two really annoying things about vassalage though:
1. peace vassaling (looking at you Mansa) for an instant 5+ additional techs to backwards AIs
2. waging war together with another AI, taking city after city while your "partner" just suicides his troops, then the target AI vassals to him and you can't continue the war.

 

[Bandobras Took]

2. waging war together with another AI, taking city after city while your "partner" just suicides his troops, then the target AI vassals to him and you can't continue the war.

That is the thing that ultimately turned me against it.

 

[Fippy]

Well i need Deity for Civ to be challenging (unless playing sgotm or so ), that's no secret..like both of you describe, AIs are too silly otherwise.
Also Mara makes the game easier, Vass is fine on deity cos you often have to think when you stop wars (other AI might take your opponent as vassal, and you might have more on your hands than you can handle).

It's an overall problem with AIs having no real focus, they often go into pointless wars.
With vass on i feel like they have a chance to achieve something.

 

[rah]

I usually play with it off because it's just stupid sometimes, but difficulty aside, it is DIFFERENT, and variety is one of the things that made IV great.

 

[6K Man]

Vassal or not Vassal?

When playing with Vassalage on, as soon as a single AI gets a slight lead forward it goes to war with its neighbor, the neighbor AI takes some loses and quickly capitulates. Result - Aggressive AI took a min losses and got a huge chunk of imperial power back. Now he immediately goes to war to a 3rd AI who is now facing 2 opponents = even faster capitulation. And this crap snowballs pretty fast.

On other side, once you start taking chunks of the Alpha- AI, his vassal quickly fall off, and you can vassal them yourself and quickly win the game. Given you survive up to that moment.

When playing without vassalage AI tends to go into lengthy and and off wars, which either keep them on equal or sometimes lead to total extermination of one side, which then leads to a singular super power AI, which can be very tough/long to deal with.
(I play marathon games)

What do you think?

Agree with your last point. I never used to vassal AIs other than in the late stages of a game; I’d rather take AI cities for my own instead of having a usually ineffective sidekick for the rest of the game. I turned them off a while ago, and found that a little more than half the time, one or (rarely) 2 AIs absorb all their neighbours and get yuuge. It’s a fun challenge to conquer a 40-60 city AI, as opposed to a 20 city AI with 3 vassals that can’t coordinate a defense.

(not that the single AI is much better at coordinating a defense, but it’s better than the alternative)

 

[gaash2]

Used to play with it on but haven't played with it on in a while... I don't like when I'm kicking someones ass and they go crying to mommy and get vasalled by someone.

 

[NineOneSix]

In my latest game Genghis Khan was getting crushed by our mutual neighbour Mao Zedong. Since I wanted to take both of them out (of course) I was preparing to dogpile on Genghis when he begged to become my vassal. So I let him keep his land in the end and took all of Mao's. If Mao was a player how pissed would he have been

So yeah, sometimes as a player you can benefit from this phenomenon. But the AI has to play so badly that it suicides it's stack and then start losing cities to another AI.

It was such a weird game that I even got good use from Ballista Elephants unique ability and had several over 20XP. The AI kept sending stacks into the field with several HAs/Knights at me, one catapult suicide to stall it and then the buffet commenced.