Whats the point of attacking in this game????

[jonesinski]

Two quick newb questions after reading this thread:

1: How do you tell your vassals what to research? Do these have to be capitulated vassals?

2: How does one ever dump a vassal one no longer wants?

Thanks...

 

[thecaesar]

Get rid of vassal states? Heaven forbid!! For those of you who think vassal states mess up the game just because your enemies run in fear from you to hide behind someone stronger, you clearly don't like playing realistically. I actually don't see the AI's use this very much, and when they do the vassal usually only remains under another's protection for around 6 - 10 turns, for some reason. I agree that if it happened EVERY time you were winning against someone, it would get irritating, but that never happens to me - in fact, most times I destroy civs without so much as a plea for peace or capitulation. This is almost disappointing to me... but then again, usually the people I destroy are people who have a lone religion or something, so everyone wants them to die but no one wants to kill them... all the more for me!

 

[Ataxerxes]

Two quick newb questions after reading this thread:

1: How do you tell your vassals what to research? Do these have to be capitulated vassals?

2: How does one ever dump a vassal one no longer wants?

Thanks...

1. No, peace vassals are also under your direction. Start your dialogue, click "Let's Discuss Something Else" and the option "We would like you to Research" will come up. You then choose the tech. It has to be a tech the vassal CAN research (i.e. has all prerequisites). You might even give the vassal a couple of techs so he/she can research something you want. You also get the option "Why don't you attack" allowing you to direct what enemy city the vassal should concentrate on. However, often the vassal declares war because it has to and then engages in a phony war.

You often want to direct research, not only for trade. You might want to direct them away from culture techs. Some AI's like Mansa will vassal to a strong Civ (might be you) and then gun for culture. You can actually beat yourself this way if you're not careful.

2. You can't. You could try constant demands but even that's hit or miss. The more likely way is to declare war and let the vassal lose more than half it's cities.

It's true vassals foul up your diplo and don't do much for your power ranking. However, a vassal will trade it's last unit of a resource with it's master. So, if Mansa has only 1 Ivory, he won't trade it unless he has a master.

 

[jonesinski]

Hey, thanks for all the helpful advice, Atax. Looks like Freddy and Asoka have more specialized labor to do for me.

I thought someone mentioned in a post above that you can dump a vassal, but I guess not.

 

[ATC1983]

This is particularly monstrous on Earth18. I've played games where China gets maybe 6 peace vassals; it just gets so pointless, particularly if they've got a tech lead.

 

[duckstab]

I actually don't see the AI's use this very much, and when they do the vassal usually only remains under another's protection for around 6 - 10 turns, for some reason.

I think your experience is unusual. Certain AIs, particularly MM and Gandhi, will peacevassal themselves with annoying predictability. And for the entire game. Practically the only time they don't do it is when they roll a strong enough start to be military powerhouses themselves.

 

[Ataxerxes]

I think your experience is unusual. Certain AIs, particularly MM and Gandhi, will peacevassal themselves with annoying predictability. And for the entire game. Practically the only time they don't do it is when they roll a strong enough start to be military powerhouses themselves.

My experience is in the middle. I generally see AI-AI vassals that are stable for a while, then they declare independence and then they revassalize. I sometimes see it for the entire game but usually not. However, I don't see it every 10 turns either. My experience with MM and Gandhi is identical to yours - annoying predictability.

@ATC1983 - I think it is worst on Earth18. I often see a couple of blocs form and have never seen Mansa stay free.

 

[theskibum]

You also get the option "Why don't you attack" allowing you to direct what enemy city the vassal should concentrate on. However, often the vassal declares war because it has to and then engages in a phony war.

unless you vassalize Shaka and leave him with 4-5 decent cities, then he will conquer along side you. I did this once, and he took enough land compared to me, that he ended up breaking away from me and trounced me something good

 

[Archon_Wing]

My experience is in the middle. I generally see AI-AI vassals that are stable for a while, then they declare independence and then they revassalize. I sometimes see it for the entire game but usually not. However, I don't see it every 10 turns either. My experience with MM and Gandhi is identical to yours - annoying predictability.

@ATC1983 - I think it is worst on Earth18. I often see a couple of blocs form and have never seen Mansa stay free.

Sometimes I play with PA on, and then sometimes 2 civs will PA and THEN PEACEVASSAL to Qin. I usually lol when that happens.

Getting rid of vassals. If it's a cap vassal; if you are nearby them, you can sometimes expand your culture so much that they'll actually lose enough land or break away. Warring and not helping works well, sometimes they can die.

For peacevassals, it's very haphazard, but if you keep trading with their worse enemies and refuse to help them, sometimes they won't like you anymore and leave. I find it happening when I cap a few people they hate.

Get rid of vassal states? Heaven forbid!! For those of you who think vassal states mess up the game just because your enemies run in fear from you to hide behind someone stronger, you clearly don't like playing realistically.

Considering a lot of new masters commit suicide by accepting the new vassal, sometimes declaring war on multiple civs (Mind you, the AI usually will never war with more than one at a time, unless the AP is involved, then they have no choice), I don't find the realism argument holding much water. Well, I suppose many leaders were idiotic and suicidal, but hey....

Frequently, they receive NO benefit from accepting the vassal and often get vassalized themselves. They also constantly gift the new vassal techs with no return; their vassals are often more advanced than the masters because of this! Oh, and they sometimes jump to another master and rinse and repeat.

So how does that usually make sense; I thought a master usually exploits its vassal, not throw away its chance to win the game just because it needs to protect some other civ it doesn't even care that much about. Some civs offer themselves at cautious or even annoyed, so it's not like their doing suicide missions for their friends.

It is a good concept, but in game can lead to such annoyances.

Personally I still leave it on because the game is extremely tedious without it, but you can't blame people for having gripes with it.

 

[MCan]

This happens sometimes to me. But what goes around comes around. If its a AI leader steam rolling (Alex), you can bribe them into peace, and get their victim to capitulate to you. If you dont like having vassals it doesnt help, but sometimes you have to block the AI from getting them. Or else you end up with half the world as one civ...

 

[Bei1052]

Get rid of vassal states? Heaven forbid!! For those of you who think vassal states mess up the game just because your enemies run in fear from you to hide behind someone stronger, you clearly don't like playing realistically. I actually don't see the AI's use this very much, and when they do the vassal usually only remains under another's protection for around 6 - 10 turns, for some reason. I agree that if it happened EVERY time you were winning against someone, it would get irritating, but that never happens to me - in fact, most times I destroy civs without so much as a plea for peace or capitulation. This is almost disappointing to me... but then again, usually the people I destroy are people who have a lone religion or something, so everyone wants them to die but no one wants to kill them... all the more for me!

You're getting lucky. Anyway, vassalage as a whole doesn't annoy me so much-- even when I get pulled into a war with a stronger civ because the civ I was pounding into dust voluntarily vassalized to them. What really annoys me is how the AI abuses the voluntary vassalage mechanic. I wish I could voluntarily vassalize to an AI who is the tech leader and have them gift me all of their techs over a ten turn period. Or better yet, I'd love to vassalize to a particularly aggressive civ, then turtle up and go for a culture/space race victory without worrying about another civ declaring on me or without worrying too much about research (because my master will give me whatever tech he researches the turn after he researches it).

 

[thecaesar]

I think your experience is unusual. Certain AIs, particularly MM and Gandhi, will peacevassal themselves with annoying predictability. And for the entire game. Practically the only time they don't do it is when they roll a strong enough start to be military powerhouses themselves.

Yeah, I usually see this with MM too, and also Huayana Capac sometimes if he's having a bad game. But basically how it goes is:

Huayana Capac has agreed to become a vassal state of Wang Kon!
(8 turns pass)
Huayana Capac has declared independence from Wang Kon!
(1 turn passes)
Huayana Capac has agreed to become a vassal state of Bismarck!
And then it happens pretty much every 10 turns or so, sometimes it lasts up to 25 turns without declaring independence...

It's weird, but it doesn't affect me much... I just thought they were being wishy-washy.

 

[Ataxerxes]

unless you vassalize Shaka and leave him with 4-5 decent cities, then he will conquer along side you. I did this once, and he took enough land compared to me, that he ended up breaking away from me and trounced me something good

Love that story. That's our Shaka! Some of the AI's (and certainly Shaka) make very good attack dogs. Any of the serious warmongers or others with high UnitProb are good at this. Oddly enough, Cathy seems to make a good attack dog for me for some reason.

Problem with vassalizing the psychos is that they are harder to bring under heel and are nearly dead by the time they accept your beneficial rule. Although sometimes you can give them back cities that won't do you much good due to maintenance.

Thecaesar described my experience with AI-AI vassals a lot of the time. My vassals seldom leave - I do try to cultivate good relations with my pets.

 

[plasmacannon]

On Marathon game speed, choose an empire more capable of an early rush (Persia or Egypt) and attack before that option becomes available.
On these slower game speeds, you can spend more time using the early units to a greater effect.

 

[Pumabear]

A lot of people suggested to vassalize myself before the computer does but I don't want to do that because I have never understood the point of vassalizing. For example I only get half of its population if I go for domination victory. Furthermore I don't get anything from the cities, no production and no research, but I still have to pay maintenance cost for them!!!!!!


Also the cities I have already captured from him have a lot of unhappiness because they "long to their homeland" and this unhappiness doesn't disappear until I have destroyed him completely. If I let him be my vassal all these cities will be very unhappy forever according to my experience.

 

[obsolete]

Well, Firaxis need SOME kind of gimmick to trick people into buying the same game all over again.

 

[s.bernbaum]

A lot of people suggested to vassalize myself before the computer does but I don't want to do that because I have never understood the point of vassalizing. For example I only get half of its population if I go for domination victory. Furthermore I don't get anything from the cities, no production and no research, but I still have to pay maintenance cost for them!!!!!!


Also the cities I have already captured from him have a lot of unhappiness because they "long to their homeland" and this unhappiness doesn't disappear until I have destroyed him completely. If I let him be my vassal all these cities will be very unhappy forever according to my experience.

In that case, the solution is the one that I and others use. Always start your games through the Custom Game screen and turn off vassals.

 

[God-Emperor]

A lot of people suggested to vassalize myself before the computer does but I don't want to do that because I have never understood the point of vassalizing. For example I only get half of its population if I go for domination victory. Furthermore I don't get anything from the cities, no production and no research, but I still have to pay maintenance cost for them!!!!!!

You seem to have missed a bunch of the points of what people have been saying.
Half the population and land area counting towards the domination requirement is better than the none that you get if they become someone else's vassals.
As your vassals, everything they build belongs, in some sense, to you so you do more-or-less get all their hammers. You can also tell them what to research, therefore you get all their research points even if they are not directly cumulative to speed your own research (you can have them research some lower priority tech while you research some other series of techs - they probably have 1/3 or less your research output given the conditions that would lead them to capitulate, although that may increase a lot as most of them tend to let their military languish and develop their economy, and culture, once they are vassals)(BTW: on high difficulties this is even more beneficial since they keep getting the AI research rate, which is increasingly better than the player's as the difficulty level goes up: on Emperor the human has to spend 20% more research points to get a tech than the AI does, and at Immortal it is 25% more). I think they always trade techs with you as if they are friendly, even if they are not.
Additionally, each vassal you have gives you +1 happy in every one of your cities. That alone can be worth more then the maintenance cost if you are running into the happiness related population limit in some of your cities.

And, of course, a significant reason to make them your vassals is simply to prevent them from becoming someone else's vassal. Especially someone else who you are not prepared to go to war with. This can be the only choice you have: do they become your vassal or someone else's vassal?

Also the cities I have already captured from him have a lot of unhappiness because they "long to their homeland" and this unhappiness doesn't disappear until I have destroyed him completely. If I let him be my vassal all these cities will be very unhappy forever according to my experience.

That homeland unhappiness does fade as your culture percentage increases. I don't remember when it is gone completely - I think it is something around when the culture in the city is 3/4 yours (it may be proportional to the size of the penalty, which depends on the size of the city; for example of the city would have 4 unhappy from this if you have minimal culture in the city it might have 1 fewer per 1/5 that it is culturally yours and so get no such unhappiness if it is 4/5 or more culturally yours, or something like that). Any of the captured cities that still has one of their cities nearby may never get to that point, but it should be possible to reduce the amount of unhappiness some, and any that are outside the cultural range of their remaining cities might get there as long as you build some culture producing buildings in the city. The earlier you capture the cities the more likely it is since the potential culture output grows from later buildings (and a civic), for example a city captured before they could build a theater in it (especially if done before they have the tech to do it) is likely to start shifting towards your culture pretty quickly once you build one there. This culture shift is easier to do if you have the Creative trait and harder to do if they have it.

 

[thecaesar]

Someone mentioned something about hating colonies? IDK, I kinda like it... and they also said that they hate how colonies can trade out your techs? Well, if they trade out your techs for other techs, then you can trade them for the techs, right?

I think colonies are probably less useful on certain maps, especially because of the rule that you may only make one per continent (I hate that rule because you have to make one enourmous colony, not a bunch of smaller ones that won't organize against you as quickly) But on archepaligo maps, I make TONS of colonies and it's so fun to just -DoW on toku- and watch all my colonies organize themselves and kill him IDK, maybe I'm just weird...

 

[backthief]

I usually play with No Vassals and No Barbarians.

After Emperor, i believe those 2 options are overly explored by the game. I would even call it cheating, since you get way more barbs than the AIs.

I like to keep the Tech Broker since its pretty fun that not all AIs trade with each other and you end up having to choose between one group of AI or another.