vassal system is poorly implemented and is more of a headache. i've decided to play most of my games with it off from now on.
for example, a civ that i am clobbering to the brink of elimination runs off and becomes a vassal to a civ that i am friendly with for thousands of years. a stupid and pointless war ensues and causes a chain reaction (multiple wars because of multiple vassals all over the world) resulting in a global conflict all because a stupid 3-city beat-up civ tries finds a master. how does that make sense?
human players accepting to be a master is often pointless i realized. usually that vassal will have just a couple measly cities that are more of an annoyance by culture flipping your tiles and causing unhappiness in the cities that i originally took from him. the worst part is that after thousands of years, you decide to change your mind and don't want him as a vassal anymore and wanna get rid of him, you can't do anything about it. you can't cancel the vassalage and declare war on him to capture his 1 or 2 city to wipe him from the game. that's rather stupid. vassal once, vassal for life? i never accept capitulation or vassal state offer now. never.
there are a lot of problems with the AI judging and taking in vassal stats properly before declaring wars. often times, i've seen the AI attack a weak vassal triggering a war with a really powerful master that it has no chance of handling.
there are a lot of little details that programmers failed to address regarding vassals creating possible exploits.
example: when trying to get the AI to declare war on another AI, you can ask them to attack his vassal instead which usually costs less. i've used this loophole to easily get AIs get caught up in wars without spending much.
vassal system was a great idea in concept, but it was executed and implemented very poorly despite firaxis having played around with it in a previous expansion. yea, there are improvements over original warlords vassal states (which was really awful), but it is far from polished and in playable state by my standards.
