Vassal Questions

[Bluedanube80]

Hi fellow divine Rulers,

I'm not sure whether this thread still is active, yet I will post a couple of Qs which popped up on the vasall-topic.

Im quite a fan of acquiring a vasall or two as early as possible in the game, for apostolic votes on the one side, but also for research progress management. How cool is it to let your vassals research the crappy sciences and trade them at favorable conditions and pursuing your own science path without too much competition?

So vasalls thats me. Now my questions:

- it happens to me quite a lot of times that I beat the crap out of a neighboring AI. At some point I start asking them to every round to capitulate, which they wont do. Then, when not much is left of them anyway, suddenly forced peace is announced on me (by UN e.g.) and suddenly a complete different AI, often far away and never involved, turns out to be the new master of my target AI.
How does that work? How can I avoid that? This really bugs me and I cant come up with an idea how this works.I have the suspicion that time is a factor: if you are at war over decades, then this is a negative factor for me.

- more in general: I still havent really understood the Vasall thing completely. How does that really work?
Deliberate vasalldom only was offered to me twice: once, it was a terrible week alexander, who came to me out of the blue. The other one was actually a trap: mansa was eaten alive by Ragnar, and litterally before his last unit was killed in his last city, mansa asked me to become is master XD and foolish me said yes. Immediately I was at war with ragner, and you know what that means...

 

[antimony]

As is pointed out earlier in the thread, capitulation is based on net war success (their losses - your losses) and their size / power vs. yours, but also relative to the rest of the field. If you are not already one of the major powers (and usually you are not in your first breakout war on high difficulty), then even if you are successful the AI will probably vassal to someone else. From what I read elsewhere there is not too much to do about it, except go to war really early before AIs get feudalism, or maybe attack someone who likes nobody (though not sure that prevents peace vassaling).