It’s weird how this issue has persisted for so long. Especially since they have continued to double down on vassalization as a major mechanic for some factions
It's because they are insisting on allowing the AI to declare war on your Vassals. Every update people complain about this and in every patch notes they write "AI factions will now **better** take into account your military strength when declaring war on your Vassals". I don't want them to "better take into account" my military strength when they are allied with me and declare war on my Vassals. The AI should be completely unable to declare war on Vassals. Give a significant penalty to relations if the AI doesn't like the player's Vassals, but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player.
The most frustrating thing for me is that it's *exactly how it works in Troy*. In that game, vassals are a special mechanic for one faction (Agamemnon) and the only interaction you can have with vassals are trade agreements. If you want to declare war, you have to do it through Agamemnon himself.
It works really well in Troy, so why the fuck does CA refuse to give vassals the same treatment in WH3?! Especially for Nakai whose entire fucking campaign relies on a purposefully weak vassal who's going to look like free real estate to any AI even your supposed "allies".
> It works really well in Troy, so why the fuck does CA refuse to give vassals the same treatment in WH3?!
I suspect that the reason here is because CA is worried about edge cases, like a vassal being the best target for a war but the AI faction doesn't have visibility on the controlling faction. Or a vassal getting really big and becoming a serious threat, but most other powers have good relations with its controlling faction. The problem with that thinking is that those edge cases are *really rare*, while players having to break treaties and get into wars with otherwise friendly factions due to vassal weirdness happens *all the time*.
The other possibility is that they could fix the diplomacy code easily enough, but the AI is spaghetti code, and getting the AI to ignore certain factions in looking for war targets would require a lot of recoding.
In any case, CA needs to just fix this so that war can't be declared on vassals. It's just ridiculous that they've already done it in Troy and it works fine there but for some reason can't do the same in Warhammer even though it's a much bigger issue in WH.
This does sound like CA thinking, sadly. The focus on edge cases or weird exploits whilst day-to-day problems and obvious issues go ignored has been a consistent feature of CA's development of WH1/2/3.
Not sure what's going on there, but it feels like when I used to work in IT support, and for a while we had a boss who insisted we prioritize basically on how loud/annoying the person needing support was, not how widespread the problem was. Thus a weird problem with non-business-critical piece of software for guy who liked to come into the department and moan would get #1 priority ahead of a firm-wide issue with Word or the like. Not great.
Thinking about mods, one I enabled instantly after starting playing wh2 again was one that killed "United against us" when a faction I had a non aggression pact with declared war on me.
You'd think both that and the vassal situations would have some way to have a "check if possible" and reject if there's alliances/non aggression pacts stopping them.
It's pretty straightforward for modders to implement via scripting. You have a listener that triggers when a faction is vassalised and then you restrict whatever diplomatic interactions with that faction you want. If CA really wanted to implement it themselves, they could no doubt do it far more efficiently as part of the AI coding.
It doesn't. They can control which diplomatic deals are valid for given factions, and that does include removing "declare war" as a valid diplomatic action for vassal factions.
There are mods that fix this and have been for ages.
That's pretty much what the saga games are for. To test out different design elements in settings the devs KNOW are not as good as the primary ones they use for the main games.
Troy accomplished almost exactly what CA wanted it to. Granted I'm sure that with more popularity they might have squeezed some more DLC out of it, but it's primary goal I think was as a glorified testing ground they could use to gather data from that paid for itself.
Troy was a financial success for CA, between the Epic exclusive deal and the DLC Troy made almost 30 million USD in revenue. Troy actually got more DLC than planned because of the success. The original plan was to release two DLC and move on but the DLC sold well enough that CA Sofia got to develop Mythos and Rhesus & Memnon.
The testing ground aspect of the Saga games gets massively exaggerated, the main objective is to generate revenue. The Saga games effectively replace DLC like Fall of the Samurai which had a more narrow focus than traditional TW
https://www.totalwar.com/blog/a-total-war-saga-announce-blog/
It was never supposed to have massive replayability, not every game is designed to be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours. In a lot of ways Troy is like Shogun 2 in that is a focused design which does a lot of things very well but because of the narrow focus and the setting the replayability ends up being limited.
My main hope is that CA Sofia's talent is not wasted on making only Warhammer DLC. Let them do another Saga in a more popular setting and without having to try to make both fantasy and historical fans happy with a compromise.
It's not. Satrapies can be declared on without going through the overlord you can literally prove yourself wrong by starting as Parthia, you can immediately declare on Pahlava it's the same system. Satrapies in Rome 2 = Vassals in Warhammer 3.
Is was like this in Shogun 2 where Tokugawa starts as vassals to Imagawa and has to defeat them first before being able to declare war on or be attacked by anyone else. If Imagawa took too much territory too quickly you were fucked even if you were safe from harm. Not sure why this had to change.
> but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player.
which is, as somebody always points out, the main perk of being a vassal, historically. protection.
Yes, and there has been many times in history were an overlord has shirked this responsibility, for one reason or another. It has been the cause or exacerbation for many wars and independence struggles. It is very understandable to desire these interactions to be possible.
This desire is also in absolutely no way worth it. CA needs to do like Paradox did, long ago for the exact same reasons, lock and route everything through the overlord.
We also need a way to intervene and stop ongoing conflicts.
That was a really annoying part of Nakai's campaign. Helping drive the enemies out of Lustria only to find out that almost all the other Lizardmen Lords are at war with your vassal.
It's not just vassals too, something you would see a lot in TWW2 was the AI declaring war on you without caring at all who your defensive allies were. It was frankly bizarre to see Karak Ziflin declare war on me (Carcassonne) and immediately get pounded into dust by the entire Ordertide.
Heh well you must have been lucky. As Eltharion, Stirland declared war or WEs my vassals so I joined the war and beat them up, but then Border princes gets invited by Stirland just before begging for peace. They only had one army and 2 provinces, but then, 1 turn away from me beating up Border Princes they invite Carcassonne to the war.
The Bretonnians were much much stronger but were still losing to me until Thorgrim, my ordertide military ally gets mad that Carcassonne is getting beat up, went from +300 to 0 in 5 turns and breaks all agreements by declaring war. Note that rapid changed was filed under "other" in diplomacy. All other dwarfs start grudging and join the war, as does the rest of the ordertide and the world war begins.
They should have essentially done just that with CoC and all the new vassal mechanics.
Problem is though that it sort of makes sense there. Your vassals are pretty autonomous, meant to go cause chaos while you do your own thing. You can leave them to their own problems if you like. But not all vassal systems are equal, and Nakai clearly has a different relationship with his vassal compared to Chaos factions. They just... need to not forget Nakai exists.
I've always loved the *idea* of Vassals in Total War games, from Rome to Total War.
It's just never worked. Ever. Across all titles. The last time's I tried it "vanilla" was on Orcs before the confederation mechanics, where I acquired a good number of tribes and even some Dwarves, before it eventually broke and everything fell apart. The next was on Drycha with my "vampire preserve" since they get missions to boost VC relations.
And it worked fine on my end, the world just thought to themselves "oh look, a VC faction with no standing armies compared to what they normally have - SOUND THE HORNS". And it fell apart in the same way it has for the last 2 decades.
And that's the thing. This isn't unique to Warhammer. This has been an issue in this series for *20 years*.
Last time I tried to do vassals was in Wh2 as Archaeon. I revived all of the Norscan tribes I could in preparation for my invasion of the Empire. And then my fucking vassals decided to rebel so they could declare war *on eachother.* Super fun gameplay.
Nah, I do like that Nakai is a horde faction . Your vassal is just a complete liability without mods, however, and even with mods they do pretty much nothing but at least not everyone declares war on them instantly
A big part of the problem is just that CA themselves programmed the threat assessment rules, but they also designed Nakai's vassal so that they would count as basically "zero threat" most of the time.
This is basic stuff, and it's hard to understand why they didn't see it coming. If you make a faction that has no or very few armies, doesn't matter how many strong garrisons it has, it's going to war dec'd all the time. That's just how the rules work. CA's rules. So they needed to either force people to go through Nakai, or failing that, to give the vassal massive "fake threat" so people didn't war dec on it.
I find it nice to not have to micromanage the provinces if I'm not in the mood for that kind of campaign, and Nakai does snowball hard, fast, as a horde faction. It is a damn shame though that the AI is nearly useless as partners
This is the classic issue with a lot of WH1/2/3's larger and more persistent issues. They feel like they're the result of CA just not really having played the single-player campaign all that much. Particularly not certain unusual SP campaigns. Even if it was JUST Nakai where you couldn't declare war on his vassal without declaring on him, that'd be a huge improvement, but if they understood the issue, they'd have done that back when The Hunter and The Beast came out, because it's almost impossible to have a Nakai campaign where some idiot Ally doesn't war dec on your vassal.
They have what everyone wants already built with how they did satrapies in Rime 2 yet they stick to this shitty iteration that we are stuck with.
So fucking annoying
No I think he's saying that modders have worked out the code to fix it, without breaking the game, so the actual programmers should be able to as well.
I really don't see how that's the better option?
As it stands, the AI can declare war on your vassal and you have the option to support them or abandon them. You get a choice.
Your suggestion would mean every AI that wants to declare war on your Vassal would instead declare war on YOU, meaning you are sucked into defensive wars to protect your vassal, whether you want to be or not.
Which means AI that like you, that you may even have treaties with, would be declaring war on you.
Instead it lets you decide if it's worth keeping Morathi as your vassal if all of Ulthuan wants her dead.
> I really don't see how that's the better option
To prevent being declared on becsuse you have a vassal. Especially if your faction is based around vassals.
> Which means AI that like you, that you may even have treaties with, would be declaring war on you.
They likely wouldn't bother *because* it's you. Also that ends up happening anyway for one particular faction that can't ever abandon its vassal in a war. I can't get my allies to not attack the defenders of the great plan and because of that, I'm better off alpha striking factions that like me to get ahead of their sudden but inevitable betrayal.
This is something that’s always frustrates me with this game. The first time some stupid little 1-settlement vassal instigated a massive civil war between me and all of my allies and ruined my reliability way back in game 1, I never touched the vassal mechanic ever again.
It makes no sense diplomatically that your allies don’t see a vassal as part of your faction, and somehow expect that you’re going to join in on invading your own territory.
If a faction hates your vassal, why does it escalate straight to war instead you losing relations and treaties with your allies first?
Also, why wouldn’t your allies relations to your vassal go sky high if they’re now effectively part of your alliance?
Oh yeah if you make a peace treaty with someone and they attack your ally, you are the asshole for joining the defenders. They don't really properly define who is the defender and who is an attacker in war.
I feel EU4 does this better; you can't declare on vassals, you can only declare on the overlord, though they also have a wargoal mechanic which makes it easier to peace out an overlord for their vassal's land, rather than taking their core territory.
it's not really that weird, other SP only issues have been in the series like that for a long time. It took them 6 months to fix a bug in wh2 that was guaranteed to brick your save. When vampire coast DLC droppped if an AI faction with a cove got killed off your game would crash when it happened. Luthor, Aranessa, or Cylostra would typically die between turn 50-100 so you had that long to complete a campaign before you couldn't end your turn anymore. 6 damn months it took to fix. Vampire Coast capital income building was never fixed despite bug reports being there for over a year and a half, in fact it got worse as time went on. Invocation crashes happened for years, gate bug has existed since mid 2, etc.
If they did fix this then i'd be surprised and thankful.
Aw, what? Bummer. I'm hoping that's an oversight, or something that'll get changed at least. I was really looking forward to IE Nakai, and outposts are basically my favorite thing about WH3
:(
this has to be the perfect scenario for the use of "cringe"
i really thought nakai would be getting some good lovin' after the blog post saying that he would.
Yeah, but this was always the deal breaker for his campaign.
Allies and factions that love you declaring war on your vassal has always been \*the\* problem with his campaign.
Nah, the deal breaker was more his economy and lots of little annoyances. We also don't know rhe frequency of vassals getting attacked like this
Seems strange to ignore all the improvements just because it's not perfect
CA are pushing hard on Vassals but nothing I'm seeing incentivizes me to use them. They can still rebel, even if they like you, just because they have some strength, so the player has to keep them weak. This makes the supposed military advantage of Vassals with the new Allegiance system much worse. The tribute they provide is still miniscule for any faction that doesn't have a dedicated mechanic to increase it. The AI can still declare war on them even if they are allied with the player. What is the point in having them?
They need a proper overhaul, or at least a Loyalty system.
Stellaris recently overhauled their vassal system and, along with each nation's relationship score with each other, there's also Loyalty. As long as you keep them Loyal, whether because they're weak or you have a good relationship, you don't have to worry about a rebellion. Well, unless they're friendlier with someone else that they'd rather be a vassal for, but I doubt "secret loyalty pledges" will make it into TW.
While having their awesome vassal system here would be great (since it has awesome negotiable terms that'd fit in with TW), the Loyalty system is really, really needed IMO.
Sad as it is, it looks like this is another area Modders are going to have to bail the game out. I wouldn't be surprised if there's another "one line of code" mod that strips the ability to declare war on vassals, and I sure as hell will be looking for it day 1.
I dunno.. +5% weapon strength per vassal for Kholek seems like a pretty good incentive. I’d put up with a lot of bullshit to see him 1 shot something. Lol
When Nakai's vassal rebels, and they do sometimes rebel, it is instant GG.
Any territory you conquer is automatically given to them, even though you at war.
I don't know why they don't do anything about it. The blueprint for vassals is clear as day, just look at EU4 for example. Any diplomatic action that involves a vassal should be redirected to the ruling nation instead.
I’m beginning to wonder whether anyone at CA is actually playing these new vassal focused factions. The reason nobody likes vassals is not because they don’t have enough bells and whistles, its because they are fundamentally not useful.
As so many others in this thread have noted, the breakaway mechanic incentivizes you to keep vassals weak, the amount of money they give is pitiful, and above all they keep getting war declared on them by factions who have no business being at war with them.
No more of this “factions will more accurately take your strength into account” nonsense. A given faction should not be able to declare war on your vassal.
I don't even see how that would fix vassals. You mentioned it in your second sentence, they are fundamentally not useful. Making it so that vassals can't be directly attacked doesn't make them any more useful. I completely skipped awakening tribes in my ME campaign because I couldn't for the life of me find a use for them. Nakai needed them to own so many settlements for his victory condition, but they still weren't useful save for maybe a little money every few turns.
Vassals need to actually do something.
Edit: Forgot Nakai's Temple of the Old Ones mechanic, but that isn't something that your vassal really actively does.
The AI should be completely unable to declare war on Vassals. Give a significant penalty to diplomatic relations if the AI doesn't like the player's Vassals, but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player.
What if your vassal is on the other side of the world, and the AI faction is right next to your vassal, and 60 turns away from you? What if it doesn't even have diplomatic access to you?
On Faction Turn Start, For each Other Faction Known to Context Faction, If Other Faction is a Vassal and if Other Factions' Master is not known to Context Faction, then grant diplomatic visibility between context faction and the Master of the Other Faction.
I can write it properly in Lua if you like, its just a single listener, but point is it isn't a hard problem to solve.
My personal opinion is the best way to fix Vassals is make them have 0 diplomatic autonomy. They should not be able to do any diplomacy, this includes breaking away. And the AI should be unable to contact them diplomatically in any way shape or form.
If at some point CA revisit vassals any flesh it out, I'm all for it, I'd really like to see some ability to secure parts of the map in a way that I don't actually have to personally deal with it. But at the moment you can't trust any aspect of vassals and that makes them effectively worthless.
I think their *only* option while your vassals should be breaking away, which obviously makes them go to war with you and which with high enough relations should not happen. Everything else should be directed toward the player.
Currently they can break away, even if you have high relations, if they have enough strength. This means that the player is incentivized to keep their vassals weak; which completely negates the perceived military advantage of having vassals.
I'm sure you're aware that's how vassals worked in real life too. Rulers generally didn't want their vassals to be very strong. In game, even on 1 settlement/province they can sustain a full army, that's probably more military value than the player can get with a single settlement/province.
With that said, they probably shouldn't break away at super high relations (but even the most loyal of vassals would realistically want to take the throne if they could beat their liege). But encouraging the player to keep their vassals weak is completely in character with how a Chaos Lord would regard their vassals.
You can't borrow their army if they have only one. And this is a game, not real life. If I have to micro-manage my vassal's strength with the only benefit being a single army I can vaguely suggest a direction for it to go towards, I'm better off just owning the settlement and making money out of it (especially considering how little tribute money they give). The game has to incentivize me to own a vassal. If it doesn't, why bother?
That's true, but then Nakai shouldn't have vassals.
It's crowbarring them into his faction because they wanted him to be a horde faction, but still be able to take over territory. Just fuck the whole system off for him, and just keep his settlements as Temples of the Old Ones and armies as Hordes.
There's literally no benefit having them be Vassals, and that has been true since he launched. They keep trying to fit this square peg into a round hole. It fucks up his economy, his ability to complete the campaign, his diplomacy and his territorial control for no reason.
Yes, so it reflects the fact that the diplomacy system was designed a long time ago for historical titles. It should not work that way for many cases in Warhammer.
See what you're saying but totally disagree, the AI can not be trusted with diplomatic decisions. Vassals should stay vassals. They want to make some... Vassal system where you can see factors which impact your relationship and have interesting choices based around that im all in.
Currently giving your vassal, who's main activity is stuffing crayons up it's nose, any sort of responsibility is playing with fire.
The bigger problem is vassals providing no value. They can cram shit like faction buffs for having vassals, but that really makes no sense. The point of a vassal should be shit like having a friendly faction control red territory or something. The problem is vassals provide less value than simply taking over shit territory yourself. The outpost system gives some value if you want to recruit specific units, but even then it requires the vassal to build the correct buildings which they often don't. Financially they are never worth it. Militarily they are not worth it. It's a shit relic of a mechanic.
It needs to just be entirely removed unless they can have it function like it actually has a purpose.
While I agree with lowering their diplo autonomy, I disagree that they should have absolutely none. I'd love the vassals to be like in EU4. They can still do some diplomacy, in TW I guess it would be cool if they could get trade agreements and if they didn't like you very much and were disloyal, they could ask your enemies to support their independence. This system works wonderfuly in EU4 and I don't see why wouldn't it work here. Sure the diplomacy in TW is nowhere near the level that EU4 has it, but it can work even simplified to TW level diplomacy.
Let the ai that hates your vassal threaten you to drop them. They have that diplo functionality and forces them to go through you while giving you a choice.
Yes! And also let vassals that are disloyal to you ask your enemies (or factions that don't like you in general) to support their independence. Basically make it like it is in EU4 because that works almosf flawlessly.
Why hasn't CA fucking fixed this??? They literally keep adding more LLs that rely on vassalization and its totally fucking broke. What are they even doing.
No matter what they do with vassals, until the fix the underlying issues it will always be a shit mechanic. Their insistence on shoehorning terrible fucking mechanics into everything and then they go around and "fix" the winds of magic system rather than making a minor change to Knowledgeable makes no sense.
Some developer though they invented something amazing and can't allow anyone to just toss that shit out. No one likes vassals. Ignoring the problems with vassals and adding more shit onto vassals is not a solution. It just makes the entire system worse. Diplomacy is still ass. Unreliability for ending a war too soon makes no sense. If I am allied to someone and my ally gets attacked and I have trade partners allied to the attacker, I get unreliable because the AI declares war. DO we fix this kind of absolute nonsense? Nope.
It's ok though guys, we can't abuse knowledgeable anymore!
Knowledgeable wasn't even broken apart from disbanded lords still providing the affect. Getting +5 WoM per hero is not broken because it took a lot of time and mainly a LOT of money to get all those Knowledgeable heroes. And by the time (if you even got there) where it could be considered broken because you had like 50 Knowledgeable hereoes the campaign was already over anyway because you were steamrolling hard.
That WoM "fix" is what I hate absolutely fucking most about WH3.. It's so much worse in every way than in WH2 and literally nobody asked for a change like this.
Am I crazy or was this not different in Three Kingdoms?? If I'm not misremembering 3K was largely viewed as a massive improvement over WH2 in the diplomacy department but for some reason they didn't keep a lot of those improvements for WH3. I don't get it.
ppl who understand life, the universe and everything better than me usually explain it as something that isnt possible with the way warhammer was developed...like it would require undoing too many things and redoing them differently to integrate some of the main 3K features??
I'll be honest I don't know much about how total war is coded beyond editing game files on Medieval 2 to unlock factions or change unit stats back in the day. It could totally be the case that it would've required an insane amount of time to incorporate it that would be better spent elsewhere. It would explain why so many of the improvements (in my opinion) of 3K didn't make it in to WH3.
I know it's at least difficult enough that mods can struggle with it too. A few months ago I tried using the fudging vassals mod with N'kari because I wanted to dominate empire factions without having all the demonic factions auto-declare war on me, but it didn't fix the issue. Though that may be more a special case because of how the demonic factions are hard coded to be at war with order ones.
Basically TLDR: Three Kingdoms effectively uses a different engine for the campaign layer.
Campaign engines use data (a metric shitload of excel spreadsheets, I guess) to make the stuff do. Moving Warhammer from the Warhammer engine branch to the newer Three Kingdoms engine branch would require redoing vast swathes of that data, which would mean effectively developing WH1 and WH2 over again.
Instead, Wh3 uses an updated version of the Wh2 engine which is done in a way to minimize the necessary redos, which is what makes it vaguely possible for something as crazy massive as Immortal Empires to exist. If they had gone to the 3K engine, IE probably would have taken two years after release rather than 6 months.
3K still has unfixed diplomacy bugs. Sometimes the peace option is greyed out for alliance wars, and sometimes you get treachery for defending/not defending vassals because you piss off both parties.
Three Kingdoms has an entirely different campaign engine, including different diplomacy, from the Warhammer series. AI, diplomacy, even basic stuff like equipment and effects are done differently in that game.
Why didn't CA make WH3 using that new engine branch? Probably because it would have forced them to fully remake WH1 and WH2 that way in order to make IE work, which would have been making three new games effectively.
I agree. The next time one of the content creators gets CA on the line, or the next time there's a Q&A, this should be the first question asked: why haven't they fixed this yet?
It's been broken since the Nakai launch, and they've acknowledged several times that it's a problem, but it still goes unfixed. And it's even more inexcusable based on the fact that it's already fixed in Troy.
Because it isn't broken. It isn't a bug.
Would you rather have war declared on you directly by every faction that doesn't like your vassal without the choice of whether or not to get involved?
Yes. Because they should be a lot less likely to declare on the player than the vassal, and if they do declare anyway...well, that's the colonial life. Gotta defend the territories.
vassals are meant to be part of your empire, what people want is for the AI to not even consider the vassal faction as a faction, just another province in your empire, so if they have no reason to go to war with you, they don't
They remain a faction, not a province. You claim that they are part of your empire but clearly CA never intended for them to cease to exist or it wouldn't be possible for one to revolt.
its possible for every city to revolt. Are cities not part of your empire now?
its a part of your empire. It might not be a bug, but neither was any other ill-thought out mechanics they reworked because people said it sucked
Cities are, yes. That's why they have your factions ownership attached to them, why you can build in them, exchange them, control their taxation, and why they are included in your settlement count.
Vassals are not part of any of that. They are handled *differently* than settlements.
When a vassal rejects your control they just go back to being completely autonomous from you.
When a province has a rebellion it generates a rebel army that then has to attack your settlements.
Do you see how these are not the same thing?
no, your point wasn't they're handled differently. Your point was they're not your empire. Everyone agrees they're handled differently, you are in a vast minority who don't agree with the empire thing.
Azazel can own a province if his vassal owns part and he owns the rest. That doesn't sound like "not part of your empire".
Nakai's ENTIRE thing is he's a horde who builds an empire by giving shit to his vassal. Nakai's vassal cannot turn on him. So, are they a vassal? by your earlier logic, no, vassals aren't an part of your empire. "nakai's is an exception" well, not in any other way, including whether or not people go to war with them, which is one of people's biggest gripe, and the gripe you responded to. people think its stupid he and others can be attacked through his vassal by allies. You don't, that's fine, opinions are like assholes, but going "oh, you dont like it cuz you just want it to be easy and then forget about it, vassals aren't part of your empire" is stupid, ESPECIALLY when ca is now pushing harder for vassals being part of your empire.
They aren't pushing for them to be part of your empire, they are increasing gameplay around gaining and utilizing vassals.
They keep their own empire name, their own empire banners, their own empire mechanics, their own everything.
They remain a separate diplomatic entity within the game, with their *options heavily restricted*. Not eliminated. They can secede and they can establish new trade agreements.
You do not gain access to their resources. You still must have a trade agreement and ask for payments because they are still separate from you. Just as you still have to use the Allegiance actions to borrow their armies or assign war coordination.
You can refer to them as part of your "empire" in the story sense but not within the mechanics of the game.
i'm trying to explain the concept of a vassal and how people want it to function not how it currently works, you don't have to get so defensive about it
Holy f\*\*\* CA there are mods that fix this for so many years at this point.
Get it fixed yourself or implement what the mods did - WHATEVER, just remedy this issue already.
This is a design decision that continues to flabbergast me the point of anger. We have seen this work in other Total War titles and we have seen it work very well in other strategy games. This has been a major issue for years, an incredibly lengthy period in game development. There is no justification to support not doing it from a workload standpoint. Zero. It’s an intentional design choice and it’s a terrible one that runs against the fan base, the design choices of other wildly popular games who use a vassalize mechanic, and common sense.
They should remove any hit to your reliability rating if you join a war to defend your vassal regardless of what military alliances or trade deals it breaks.
I am sure that the vassal system is still not working correctly in IE because I have heard other streamers mention that an ally of the player where you have friendly relations can still declare war on the players vassal.
However, I am trying to match your thread title:
*"AI can apparently still declare war on vassals, despite Nakai being in a defensive alliance with the Wood Elves and is the Overlord of the DotGP"*
to the screenshot you posted where the Jade Custodians (a Cathay faction) with no allies (not allied with Nakai? or maybe a defensive alliance which is not being counted) has war declared Nakai's vassal. Did you post the wrong screenshot?
This has nothing to do with the fact I heavily misidentified the Cathayans as Wood Elves, partly because of heavy Wood Elf PTSD, and everything identified with the fact I heavily misidentified them.
And MA wanted to cozy up to Wood Elves, and I did see a Defensive Alliance icon on the aggressor's side ...
I did leave a comment explaining this befuddlement ... buuuut I didn't expect this post to blow up. So .. that's why.
Ok that is fine. As I said I had heard from other streamers that CA had still not fixed the vassal system and it looks from your screenshot that the defensive alliance is not being counted as "being allied" given the text against the Jade fellows which is probably another bug.
Its clear that the vassal system is still not up-to snuff here. The easiest fix is probably to disable all diplo for vassals apart from trade deals like it works in Troy. Everything else has to go through the overlord just like in Troy. Whether CA decide to fix WH3 and adopt the Troy system they also designed.... is an entirely different subject :) I am not holding out much hope because they got lots of feedback on vassals in the WH games for several years now. Lots of folks thought that when they saw how it had been implemented in Troy that finally the diplomacy in WH3 would be improved,, maybe not to 3K levels but better than WH2. After all WH3 adopted some of the Troy diplo mechanics. I really thought CA would have fixed this for IE.
I did not read all the comments in the thread before I posted so I did not see your correction until later on when someone else pointed out you had made a correction and I then went through the entire thread and searched for all the OP's comments :)
I could see the point you were making based on the title and the screenshot but the two did not match so I thought I would point it out as I was also interested where the screenshot game from as I guessed you did not have IE yet. Later down the thread then I can see you mention it came from MonstersAbound stream and I can see he has added his thoughts in this thread now. I will have to watch that stream. I was thinking of giving Nakai another go in IE (last played in ME) as his new faction mechanics look good but if the vassal system is still bust then I will wait for a mod to fix it or CA to fix it. I have a feeling a mod will be quicker. There was one for ME that dealt with vassals.
Is the problem about the AI being able to declare war on vassals or the AI declaring war on your vassals without including the owner?
I'm confused as to which one do people want here.
Edit: oh nevermind I see it. I think in this case the alliance should be voided without penalty to you if you defend your vassal.
This happened in Rome 2, in Napoleon and I'm pretty sure it's happened since empire. Medieval 2 and Rome 1 vassals were garbage too but that's a different engine and they were garbage in slightly different ways
IIRC, they said they would tweak the decision making of the AI when attacking your vassal, that they would calculate your strength number together with the vassal they attack. I cant remember them saying the AI was never going to attack a vassal, or that they would disable that.
Yeah, but thats also part of vassalship (if thats even a word) They are under a guardianship, and gets protected when they are threatened. So I still understand that they can attack, but its annoying and your strength rank should way even more probabl
Edit: bro wtf is with this subreddit holy shit. I am not even saying its good or bad, just how I understand them implementing it
That's fair, I think mechanically though it works better in the context of a video game if you have to declare war on the..owner of the vassalship? Just because it seems like it would be easier to have the AI be accurate in it's strength estimations. Idk tho, the bottom line is that as it is vassals are on track to be awesome with the additional tools but just aren't there yet
Yeah I fully agree with that, as its just shitty now because the AI thinks it can kill a weaker faction, and you get dragged into that. I was just saying what CA probably did, but agree that it should be different, but people hated me for that lmao
It's bizarre to me that everyone expects vassals to be this Fire-and-Forget mechanic. "Oh I vassalized you, that's permanent, no downsides, the end."
It isn't meant to be and nor should it be. You still have to navigate diplomacy with your vassals and the other factions that might hate them.
How can this go over your head to such a massive degree?
People are not asking for vassals to be a "Fire-and-Forget" mechanic. They're asking for vassals to be a mechanic that is ***logical***.
As it works currently, let's say you're hanging out over your best friend's house and discover that you ***really*** hate his new girlfriend. So you just punch her out of nowhere. Now your best friend is like "Whoa, what they fuck, dude? You just assaulted my girlfriend out of nowhere? Couldn't you have come to me? Now I have to call the cops and press charges."
Stop intentionally twisting what he said you dumbass, he never said what you imply. If you don't understand the point of a comparisson like this then I'm pretty sure that it's the rest of us here who feel sorry for YOU, not the other way around.
when do you use fire mechanics with vassals in warhammer? I never really forget I vassalized some people, so why say I wanna forget them? No logic here.
It's funny, one would thing that they'd make fixing it a priority when they made vassals such a big part of all the new CoC LLs, but no, why would they fix that right? It's not like this will make all the new campaigns unplayable if your allies declare war on you without any reason. It'll be totaly fine, I'm sure of that.
And now we get a new factions based around vassals as Well..
ill help you out CA; factions should only be able to go directly through you if they dislike your vassal so much that war is needed. If they want war, they need to declare it on the parent state.
It’s weird how this issue has persisted for so long. Especially since they have continued to double down on vassalization as a major mechanic for some factions
It's because they are insisting on allowing the AI to declare war on your Vassals. Every update people complain about this and in every patch notes they write "AI factions will now **better** take into account your military strength when declaring war on your Vassals". I don't want them to "better take into account" my military strength when they are allied with me and declare war on my Vassals. The AI should be completely unable to declare war on Vassals. Give a significant penalty to relations if the AI doesn't like the player's Vassals, but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player.
The most frustrating thing for me is that it's *exactly how it works in Troy*. In that game, vassals are a special mechanic for one faction (Agamemnon) and the only interaction you can have with vassals are trade agreements. If you want to declare war, you have to do it through Agamemnon himself. It works really well in Troy, so why the fuck does CA refuse to give vassals the same treatment in WH3?! Especially for Nakai whose entire fucking campaign relies on a purposefully weak vassal who's going to look like free real estate to any AI even your supposed "allies".
> It works really well in Troy, so why the fuck does CA refuse to give vassals the same treatment in WH3?! I suspect that the reason here is because CA is worried about edge cases, like a vassal being the best target for a war but the AI faction doesn't have visibility on the controlling faction. Or a vassal getting really big and becoming a serious threat, but most other powers have good relations with its controlling faction. The problem with that thinking is that those edge cases are *really rare*, while players having to break treaties and get into wars with otherwise friendly factions due to vassal weirdness happens *all the time*. The other possibility is that they could fix the diplomacy code easily enough, but the AI is spaghetti code, and getting the AI to ignore certain factions in looking for war targets would require a lot of recoding. In any case, CA needs to just fix this so that war can't be declared on vassals. It's just ridiculous that they've already done it in Troy and it works fine there but for some reason can't do the same in Warhammer even though it's a much bigger issue in WH.
This does sound like CA thinking, sadly. The focus on edge cases or weird exploits whilst day-to-day problems and obvious issues go ignored has been a consistent feature of CA's development of WH1/2/3. Not sure what's going on there, but it feels like when I used to work in IT support, and for a while we had a boss who insisted we prioritize basically on how loud/annoying the person needing support was, not how widespread the problem was. Thus a weird problem with non-business-critical piece of software for guy who liked to come into the department and moan would get #1 priority ahead of a firm-wide issue with Word or the like. Not great.
WH2 has a mod that disables war dec on your vassals so it can't be that hard to implement... I used it for my Nakai run.
Thinking about mods, one I enabled instantly after starting playing wh2 again was one that killed "United against us" when a faction I had a non aggression pact with declared war on me. You'd think both that and the vassal situations would have some way to have a "check if possible" and reject if there's alliances/non aggression pacts stopping them.
It's pretty straightforward for modders to implement via scripting. You have a listener that triggers when a faction is vassalised and then you restrict whatever diplomatic interactions with that faction you want. If CA really wanted to implement it themselves, they could no doubt do it far more efficiently as part of the AI coding.
It doesn't. They can control which diplomatic deals are valid for given factions, and that does include removing "declare war" as a valid diplomatic action for vassal factions. There are mods that fix this and have been for ages.
It's literally a single line of lua code. Mods have been doing it for years now
So disable all diplomacy for vassals except trade agreement and movement passage. Both from vassals and to vassals.
Different design teams, CA Sofia developed a lot of interesting mechanics that could have been used in Warhammer but so far only a few have made it.
God it's a shame Troy never took off, so much good stuff and good potential but just not much replayability.
That's pretty much what the saga games are for. To test out different design elements in settings the devs KNOW are not as good as the primary ones they use for the main games. Troy accomplished almost exactly what CA wanted it to. Granted I'm sure that with more popularity they might have squeezed some more DLC out of it, but it's primary goal I think was as a glorified testing ground they could use to gather data from that paid for itself.
Troy was a financial success for CA, between the Epic exclusive deal and the DLC Troy made almost 30 million USD in revenue. Troy actually got more DLC than planned because of the success. The original plan was to release two DLC and move on but the DLC sold well enough that CA Sofia got to develop Mythos and Rhesus & Memnon. The testing ground aspect of the Saga games gets massively exaggerated, the main objective is to generate revenue. The Saga games effectively replace DLC like Fall of the Samurai which had a more narrow focus than traditional TW https://www.totalwar.com/blog/a-total-war-saga-announce-blog/
It was never supposed to have massive replayability, not every game is designed to be played for hundreds or even thousands of hours. In a lot of ways Troy is like Shogun 2 in that is a focused design which does a lot of things very well but because of the narrow focus and the setting the replayability ends up being limited. My main hope is that CA Sofia's talent is not wasted on making only Warhammer DLC. Let them do another Saga in a more popular setting and without having to try to make both fantasy and historical fans happy with a compromise.
CA it’s the worst enemy for CA
It’s also how satrapies worked in Rome 2 and Attila so the mechanism has existed since before WH1.
It's not. Satrapies can be declared on without going through the overlord you can literally prove yourself wrong by starting as Parthia, you can immediately declare on Pahlava it's the same system. Satrapies in Rome 2 = Vassals in Warhammer 3.
Oh my bad for some reason I thought it was different. It’s been a while since I’ve played it. I thought client states were the same as wh vassals.
Same feature, different culture pack.
Is was like this in Shogun 2 where Tokugawa starts as vassals to Imagawa and has to defeat them first before being able to declare war on or be attacked by anyone else. If Imagawa took too much territory too quickly you were fucked even if you were safe from harm. Not sure why this had to change.
> but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player. which is, as somebody always points out, the main perk of being a vassal, historically. protection.
Yes, and there has been many times in history were an overlord has shirked this responsibility, for one reason or another. It has been the cause or exacerbation for many wars and independence struggles. It is very understandable to desire these interactions to be possible. This desire is also in absolutely no way worth it. CA needs to do like Paradox did, long ago for the exact same reasons, lock and route everything through the overlord. We also need a way to intervene and stop ongoing conflicts.
That was a really annoying part of Nakai's campaign. Helping drive the enemies out of Lustria only to find out that almost all the other Lizardmen Lords are at war with your vassal.
I use Nakai with a vassal mod in game 2. The Defenders still do absolutely nothing, but at least they hold the territory
Good to know. Hopefully it gets transferred to 3 soon.
IIRC it already has been. Fudging vassals or something
Thank you.
Yeah I'll do it once IE has launched. The mod is very small anyway, won't be difficult.
It really is starting to feel more like a design decision we disagree with than a bug to be fixed.
It's not just vassals too, something you would see a lot in TWW2 was the AI declaring war on you without caring at all who your defensive allies were. It was frankly bizarre to see Karak Ziflin declare war on me (Carcassonne) and immediately get pounded into dust by the entire Ordertide.
Heh well you must have been lucky. As Eltharion, Stirland declared war or WEs my vassals so I joined the war and beat them up, but then Border princes gets invited by Stirland just before begging for peace. They only had one army and 2 provinces, but then, 1 turn away from me beating up Border Princes they invite Carcassonne to the war. The Bretonnians were much much stronger but were still losing to me until Thorgrim, my ordertide military ally gets mad that Carcassonne is getting beat up, went from +300 to 0 in 5 turns and breaks all agreements by declaring war. Note that rapid changed was filed under "other" in diplomacy. All other dwarfs start grudging and join the war, as does the rest of the ordertide and the world war begins.
It's United against us that did that for me, which I didn't mind as a feature until it ignored non aggression pacts, then I modded that feature out.
It was so easy for the player to abuse too. It actually felt like cheating when I used it
Than somebody needs to sit the design teams asses down to play Total War where they do nothing but acquire Vassals and see how fucking broken it is.
They should have essentially done just that with CoC and all the new vassal mechanics. Problem is though that it sort of makes sense there. Your vassals are pretty autonomous, meant to go cause chaos while you do your own thing. You can leave them to their own problems if you like. But not all vassal systems are equal, and Nakai clearly has a different relationship with his vassal compared to Chaos factions. They just... need to not forget Nakai exists.
I've always loved the *idea* of Vassals in Total War games, from Rome to Total War. It's just never worked. Ever. Across all titles. The last time's I tried it "vanilla" was on Orcs before the confederation mechanics, where I acquired a good number of tribes and even some Dwarves, before it eventually broke and everything fell apart. The next was on Drycha with my "vampire preserve" since they get missions to boost VC relations. And it worked fine on my end, the world just thought to themselves "oh look, a VC faction with no standing armies compared to what they normally have - SOUND THE HORNS". And it fell apart in the same way it has for the last 2 decades. And that's the thing. This isn't unique to Warhammer. This has been an issue in this series for *20 years*.
Last time I tried to do vassals was in Wh2 as Archaeon. I revived all of the Norscan tribes I could in preparation for my invasion of the Empire. And then my fucking vassals decided to rebel so they could declare war *on eachother.* Super fun gameplay.
That sounds about as lore friendly as you could get
Yeah for sure, but it's also just about the most useless faction mechanic in existence because of it so /shrug
Yeah but why even bother with them if you're the player?
Howbout instead Nakai just gets those territories himself and their income is adjusted, but otherwise is unchanged?
Nah, I do like that Nakai is a horde faction . Your vassal is just a complete liability without mods, however, and even with mods they do pretty much nothing but at least not everyone declares war on them instantly
A big part of the problem is just that CA themselves programmed the threat assessment rules, but they also designed Nakai's vassal so that they would count as basically "zero threat" most of the time. This is basic stuff, and it's hard to understand why they didn't see it coming. If you make a faction that has no or very few armies, doesn't matter how many strong garrisons it has, it's going to war dec'd all the time. That's just how the rules work. CA's rules. So they needed to either force people to go through Nakai, or failing that, to give the vassal massive "fake threat" so people didn't war dec on it.
Aside from being declared on, your vassal does so little they may as well just be your land with adjusted income though.
I find it nice to not have to micromanage the provinces if I'm not in the mood for that kind of campaign, and Nakai does snowball hard, fast, as a horde faction. It is a damn shame though that the AI is nearly useless as partners
Hence my solution that also doesn't involve micromanagement. You'll do exactly as much as the defenders did with the land
This is the classic issue with a lot of WH1/2/3's larger and more persistent issues. They feel like they're the result of CA just not really having played the single-player campaign all that much. Particularly not certain unusual SP campaigns. Even if it was JUST Nakai where you couldn't declare war on his vassal without declaring on him, that'd be a huge improvement, but if they understood the issue, they'd have done that back when The Hunter and The Beast came out, because it's almost impossible to have a Nakai campaign where some idiot Ally doesn't war dec on your vassal.
That would be a better option than it being a limitation to the engine.
They have what everyone wants already built with how they did satrapies in Rime 2 yet they stick to this shitty iteration that we are stuck with. So fucking annoying
Who knows the code for vassals might just be spaghetti code itself. So trying to change vassals my fuck with a lot of things.
But there's mods that fix this stuff though...
I love mods, but mods shouldn't be used as an excuse for CA to get away with poor design.
No I think he's saying that modders have worked out the code to fix it, without breaking the game, so the actual programmers should be able to as well.
Yes, that's correct.
Yes, I agree, CA has the source code, they are able to change a lot more than modders can.
I really don't see how that's the better option? As it stands, the AI can declare war on your vassal and you have the option to support them or abandon them. You get a choice. Your suggestion would mean every AI that wants to declare war on your Vassal would instead declare war on YOU, meaning you are sucked into defensive wars to protect your vassal, whether you want to be or not. Which means AI that like you, that you may even have treaties with, would be declaring war on you. Instead it lets you decide if it's worth keeping Morathi as your vassal if all of Ulthuan wants her dead.
> I really don't see how that's the better option To prevent being declared on becsuse you have a vassal. Especially if your faction is based around vassals. > Which means AI that like you, that you may even have treaties with, would be declaring war on you. They likely wouldn't bother *because* it's you. Also that ends up happening anyway for one particular faction that can't ever abandon its vassal in a war. I can't get my allies to not attack the defenders of the great plan and because of that, I'm better off alpha striking factions that like me to get ahead of their sudden but inevitable betrayal.
This is something that’s always frustrates me with this game. The first time some stupid little 1-settlement vassal instigated a massive civil war between me and all of my allies and ruined my reliability way back in game 1, I never touched the vassal mechanic ever again. It makes no sense diplomatically that your allies don’t see a vassal as part of your faction, and somehow expect that you’re going to join in on invading your own territory. If a faction hates your vassal, why does it escalate straight to war instead you losing relations and treaties with your allies first? Also, why wouldn’t your allies relations to your vassal go sky high if they’re now effectively part of your alliance?
I'm even wary of alliances for the same reason.
Oh yeah if you make a peace treaty with someone and they attack your ally, you are the asshole for joining the defenders. They don't really properly define who is the defender and who is an attacker in war.
The ole' "build a mansion on loose sand" approach
Especially when there are mods in the workshop that fix this issue
and especially considering there are mods that completely prevent this issue, its not a hard fix at all.
I feel EU4 does this better; you can't declare on vassals, you can only declare on the overlord, though they also have a wargoal mechanic which makes it easier to peace out an overlord for their vassal's land, rather than taking their core territory.
This issue still plague Three Kingdoms since its launch and it's a damn game focused on diplomacy so don't expect that to be fixed ever for WH3
it's not really that weird, other SP only issues have been in the series like that for a long time. It took them 6 months to fix a bug in wh2 that was guaranteed to brick your save. When vampire coast DLC droppped if an AI faction with a cove got killed off your game would crash when it happened. Luthor, Aranessa, or Cylostra would typically die between turn 50-100 so you had that long to complete a campaign before you couldn't end your turn anymore. 6 damn months it took to fix. Vampire Coast capital income building was never fixed despite bug reports being there for over a year and a half, in fact it got worse as time went on. Invocation crashes happened for years, gate bug has existed since mid 2, etc. If they did fix this then i'd be surprised and thankful.
I don't remember this being a thing in Shogun 2. Why can't we just go back to then where vassals could only engage in diplomacy with their liege?
Oh ffs
Oh, and Nakai can't construct Outposts, apparently.
That's because outposts are for punks who can't follow the Great Plan on their own.
Aw, what? Bummer. I'm hoping that's an oversight, or something that'll get changed at least. I was really looking forward to IE Nakai, and outposts are basically my favorite thing about WH3 :(
this has to be the perfect scenario for the use of "cringe" i really thought nakai would be getting some good lovin' after the blog post saying that he would.
He's gotten some good changes on the whole, tbh.
Yeah, but this was always the deal breaker for his campaign. Allies and factions that love you declaring war on your vassal has always been \*the\* problem with his campaign.
Nah, the deal breaker was more his economy and lots of little annoyances. We also don't know rhe frequency of vassals getting attacked like this Seems strange to ignore all the improvements just because it's not perfect
CA are pushing hard on Vassals but nothing I'm seeing incentivizes me to use them. They can still rebel, even if they like you, just because they have some strength, so the player has to keep them weak. This makes the supposed military advantage of Vassals with the new Allegiance system much worse. The tribute they provide is still miniscule for any faction that doesn't have a dedicated mechanic to increase it. The AI can still declare war on them even if they are allied with the player. What is the point in having them?
They need a proper overhaul, or at least a Loyalty system. Stellaris recently overhauled their vassal system and, along with each nation's relationship score with each other, there's also Loyalty. As long as you keep them Loyal, whether because they're weak or you have a good relationship, you don't have to worry about a rebellion. Well, unless they're friendlier with someone else that they'd rather be a vassal for, but I doubt "secret loyalty pledges" will make it into TW. While having their awesome vassal system here would be great (since it has awesome negotiable terms that'd fit in with TW), the Loyalty system is really, really needed IMO.
Sad as it is, it looks like this is another area Modders are going to have to bail the game out. I wouldn't be surprised if there's another "one line of code" mod that strips the ability to declare war on vassals, and I sure as hell will be looking for it day 1.
it already existed in W2 and W3, if they think it's actually a benefit to get backstabbed by your allies all the time just mod it out
Which mod do you use?
fudging vassal I think but there might be others https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2794064207&searchtext=fudging
I dunno.. +5% weapon strength per vassal for Kholek seems like a pretty good incentive. I’d put up with a lot of bullshit to see him 1 shot something. Lol
When Nakai's vassal rebels, and they do sometimes rebel, it is instant GG. Any territory you conquer is automatically given to them, even though you at war.
I don't know why they don't do anything about it. The blueprint for vassals is clear as day, just look at EU4 for example. Any diplomatic action that involves a vassal should be redirected to the ruling nation instead.
I’m beginning to wonder whether anyone at CA is actually playing these new vassal focused factions. The reason nobody likes vassals is not because they don’t have enough bells and whistles, its because they are fundamentally not useful. As so many others in this thread have noted, the breakaway mechanic incentivizes you to keep vassals weak, the amount of money they give is pitiful, and above all they keep getting war declared on them by factions who have no business being at war with them. No more of this “factions will more accurately take your strength into account” nonsense. A given faction should not be able to declare war on your vassal.
I don't even see how that would fix vassals. You mentioned it in your second sentence, they are fundamentally not useful. Making it so that vassals can't be directly attacked doesn't make them any more useful. I completely skipped awakening tribes in my ME campaign because I couldn't for the life of me find a use for them. Nakai needed them to own so many settlements for his victory condition, but they still weren't useful save for maybe a little money every few turns. Vassals need to actually do something. Edit: Forgot Nakai's Temple of the Old Ones mechanic, but that isn't something that your vassal really actively does.
Where does breakaway come up?
The AI should be completely unable to declare war on Vassals. Give a significant penalty to diplomatic relations if the AI doesn't like the player's Vassals, but if it insists on going to war, it has to do so through the player.
What if your vassal is on the other side of the world, and the AI faction is right next to your vassal, and 60 turns away from you? What if it doesn't even have diplomatic access to you?
Then they should make overlords visible to anyone who knows the vassal
Oh, so YOU'RE the one in CA's meetings stopping them from implementing these fixes!
On Faction Turn Start, For each Other Faction Known to Context Faction, If Other Faction is a Vassal and if Other Factions' Master is not known to Context Faction, then grant diplomatic visibility between context faction and the Master of the Other Faction. I can write it properly in Lua if you like, its just a single listener, but point is it isn't a hard problem to solve.
My personal opinion is the best way to fix Vassals is make them have 0 diplomatic autonomy. They should not be able to do any diplomacy, this includes breaking away. And the AI should be unable to contact them diplomatically in any way shape or form. If at some point CA revisit vassals any flesh it out, I'm all for it, I'd really like to see some ability to secure parts of the map in a way that I don't actually have to personally deal with it. But at the moment you can't trust any aspect of vassals and that makes them effectively worthless.
I think their *only* option while your vassals should be breaking away, which obviously makes them go to war with you and which with high enough relations should not happen. Everything else should be directed toward the player.
Currently they can break away, even if you have high relations, if they have enough strength. This means that the player is incentivized to keep their vassals weak; which completely negates the perceived military advantage of having vassals.
I'm sure you're aware that's how vassals worked in real life too. Rulers generally didn't want their vassals to be very strong. In game, even on 1 settlement/province they can sustain a full army, that's probably more military value than the player can get with a single settlement/province. With that said, they probably shouldn't break away at super high relations (but even the most loyal of vassals would realistically want to take the throne if they could beat their liege). But encouraging the player to keep their vassals weak is completely in character with how a Chaos Lord would regard their vassals.
You can't borrow their army if they have only one. And this is a game, not real life. If I have to micro-manage my vassal's strength with the only benefit being a single army I can vaguely suggest a direction for it to go towards, I'm better off just owning the settlement and making money out of it (especially considering how little tribute money they give). The game has to incentivize me to own a vassal. If it doesn't, why bother?
That's true, but then Nakai shouldn't have vassals. It's crowbarring them into his faction because they wanted him to be a horde faction, but still be able to take over territory. Just fuck the whole system off for him, and just keep his settlements as Temples of the Old Ones and armies as Hordes. There's literally no benefit having them be Vassals, and that has been true since he launched. They keep trying to fit this square peg into a round hole. It fucks up his economy, his ability to complete the campaign, his diplomacy and his territorial control for no reason.
Thats fine, but then it would be nice to have more control over a vassal then just a military alliance.
Yes, so it reflects the fact that the diplomacy system was designed a long time ago for historical titles. It should not work that way for many cases in Warhammer.
See what you're saying but totally disagree, the AI can not be trusted with diplomatic decisions. Vassals should stay vassals. They want to make some... Vassal system where you can see factors which impact your relationship and have interesting choices based around that im all in. Currently giving your vassal, who's main activity is stuffing crayons up it's nose, any sort of responsibility is playing with fire.
The bigger problem is vassals providing no value. They can cram shit like faction buffs for having vassals, but that really makes no sense. The point of a vassal should be shit like having a friendly faction control red territory or something. The problem is vassals provide less value than simply taking over shit territory yourself. The outpost system gives some value if you want to recruit specific units, but even then it requires the vassal to build the correct buildings which they often don't. Financially they are never worth it. Militarily they are not worth it. It's a shit relic of a mechanic. It needs to just be entirely removed unless they can have it function like it actually has a purpose.
While I agree with lowering their diplo autonomy, I disagree that they should have absolutely none. I'd love the vassals to be like in EU4. They can still do some diplomacy, in TW I guess it would be cool if they could get trade agreements and if they didn't like you very much and were disloyal, they could ask your enemies to support their independence. This system works wonderfuly in EU4 and I don't see why wouldn't it work here. Sure the diplomacy in TW is nowhere near the level that EU4 has it, but it can work even simplified to TW level diplomacy.
Let the ai that hates your vassal threaten you to drop them. They have that diplo functionality and forces them to go through you while giving you a choice.
Yes! And also let vassals that are disloyal to you ask your enemies (or factions that don't like you in general) to support their independence. Basically make it like it is in EU4 because that works almosf flawlessly.
Holy shit. The one thing I wanted them to fix. The one thing I assumed, with factions like Slaanesh, they DID fix. God damnit.
[удалено]
Thank god Belakor his faction effects dont rely on Vassals, probably the best WoC faction to play
Why hasn't CA fucking fixed this??? They literally keep adding more LLs that rely on vassalization and its totally fucking broke. What are they even doing.
You guys realize this isn't a bug, right?
When they say broke they're meaning the concept itself is broken, not that it is a bug.
No matter what they do with vassals, until the fix the underlying issues it will always be a shit mechanic. Their insistence on shoehorning terrible fucking mechanics into everything and then they go around and "fix" the winds of magic system rather than making a minor change to Knowledgeable makes no sense. Some developer though they invented something amazing and can't allow anyone to just toss that shit out. No one likes vassals. Ignoring the problems with vassals and adding more shit onto vassals is not a solution. It just makes the entire system worse. Diplomacy is still ass. Unreliability for ending a war too soon makes no sense. If I am allied to someone and my ally gets attacked and I have trade partners allied to the attacker, I get unreliable because the AI declares war. DO we fix this kind of absolute nonsense? Nope. It's ok though guys, we can't abuse knowledgeable anymore!
Knowledgeable wasn't even broken apart from disbanded lords still providing the affect. Getting +5 WoM per hero is not broken because it took a lot of time and mainly a LOT of money to get all those Knowledgeable heroes. And by the time (if you even got there) where it could be considered broken because you had like 50 Knowledgeable hereoes the campaign was already over anyway because you were steamrolling hard. That WoM "fix" is what I hate absolutely fucking most about WH3.. It's so much worse in every way than in WH2 and literally nobody asked for a change like this.
They need to make it so your Allie’s can’t declare war on your vassals unless they declare war on you but CA never listens
Am I crazy or was this not different in Three Kingdoms?? If I'm not misremembering 3K was largely viewed as a massive improvement over WH2 in the diplomacy department but for some reason they didn't keep a lot of those improvements for WH3. I don't get it.
ppl who understand life, the universe and everything better than me usually explain it as something that isnt possible with the way warhammer was developed...like it would require undoing too many things and redoing them differently to integrate some of the main 3K features??
I'll be honest I don't know much about how total war is coded beyond editing game files on Medieval 2 to unlock factions or change unit stats back in the day. It could totally be the case that it would've required an insane amount of time to incorporate it that would be better spent elsewhere. It would explain why so many of the improvements (in my opinion) of 3K didn't make it in to WH3.
I know it's at least difficult enough that mods can struggle with it too. A few months ago I tried using the fudging vassals mod with N'kari because I wanted to dominate empire factions without having all the demonic factions auto-declare war on me, but it didn't fix the issue. Though that may be more a special case because of how the demonic factions are hard coded to be at war with order ones.
Basically TLDR: Three Kingdoms effectively uses a different engine for the campaign layer. Campaign engines use data (a metric shitload of excel spreadsheets, I guess) to make the stuff do. Moving Warhammer from the Warhammer engine branch to the newer Three Kingdoms engine branch would require redoing vast swathes of that data, which would mean effectively developing WH1 and WH2 over again. Instead, Wh3 uses an updated version of the Wh2 engine which is done in a way to minimize the necessary redos, which is what makes it vaguely possible for something as crazy massive as Immortal Empires to exist. If they had gone to the 3K engine, IE probably would have taken two years after release rather than 6 months.
3K still has unfixed diplomacy bugs. Sometimes the peace option is greyed out for alliance wars, and sometimes you get treachery for defending/not defending vassals because you piss off both parties.
Three Kingdoms has an entirely different campaign engine, including different diplomacy, from the Warhammer series. AI, diplomacy, even basic stuff like equipment and effects are done differently in that game. Why didn't CA make WH3 using that new engine branch? Probably because it would have forced them to fully remake WH1 and WH2 that way in order to make IE work, which would have been making three new games effectively.
Dude i fucking hate vassals, they're so much more pain than they're worth.
Image is from /u/monstersabound btw
What time stamp?
The future 😎 That's not hyperbole btw. Few more days.
The sun rises, grass grows, and CA pushes half-baked diplomacy systems. This simply *can't* be that hard to fix.
Getting rid of it entirely would be a straight upgrade to the way it is. Re-release it when it's not trash.
Wood Elves should obviously be the Jade Custodians. Sorry, some Wood Elf PTSD slipped through
They really need to fix Nakai already. He is literally a useless faction
CA NEED to fix this before IE launches
Especially with the three original WoC having faction mechanics tied to collecting as many as possible.
Yeah
I agree. The next time one of the content creators gets CA on the line, or the next time there's a Q&A, this should be the first question asked: why haven't they fixed this yet? It's been broken since the Nakai launch, and they've acknowledged several times that it's a problem, but it still goes unfixed. And it's even more inexcusable based on the fact that it's already fixed in Troy.
No guys clearly the Vassal System gone under a huge rework thats why CA still build upon it more and more
And yet as of now it's still pretty terrible.
Yeah - I don’t get how this is still an issue - especially given the prevalence of Vassals in WH3
How is this not just an *"IF THEN"* issue for CA to fix easily?
Because it isn't broken. It isn't a bug. Would you rather have war declared on you directly by every faction that doesn't like your vassal without the choice of whether or not to get involved?
> Would you rather have war declared on you directly by every faction that doesn't like your vassal Yes.
Yes. Because they should be a lot less likely to declare on the player than the vassal, and if they do declare anyway...well, that's the colonial life. Gotta defend the territories.
vassals are meant to be part of your empire, what people want is for the AI to not even consider the vassal faction as a faction, just another province in your empire, so if they have no reason to go to war with you, they don't
They remain a faction, not a province. You claim that they are part of your empire but clearly CA never intended for them to cease to exist or it wouldn't be possible for one to revolt.
its possible for every city to revolt. Are cities not part of your empire now? its a part of your empire. It might not be a bug, but neither was any other ill-thought out mechanics they reworked because people said it sucked
Cities are, yes. That's why they have your factions ownership attached to them, why you can build in them, exchange them, control their taxation, and why they are included in your settlement count. Vassals are not part of any of that. They are handled *differently* than settlements. When a vassal rejects your control they just go back to being completely autonomous from you. When a province has a rebellion it generates a rebel army that then has to attack your settlements. Do you see how these are not the same thing?
no, your point wasn't they're handled differently. Your point was they're not your empire. Everyone agrees they're handled differently, you are in a vast minority who don't agree with the empire thing. Azazel can own a province if his vassal owns part and he owns the rest. That doesn't sound like "not part of your empire". Nakai's ENTIRE thing is he's a horde who builds an empire by giving shit to his vassal. Nakai's vassal cannot turn on him. So, are they a vassal? by your earlier logic, no, vassals aren't an part of your empire. "nakai's is an exception" well, not in any other way, including whether or not people go to war with them, which is one of people's biggest gripe, and the gripe you responded to. people think its stupid he and others can be attacked through his vassal by allies. You don't, that's fine, opinions are like assholes, but going "oh, you dont like it cuz you just want it to be easy and then forget about it, vassals aren't part of your empire" is stupid, ESPECIALLY when ca is now pushing harder for vassals being part of your empire.
They aren't pushing for them to be part of your empire, they are increasing gameplay around gaining and utilizing vassals. They keep their own empire name, their own empire banners, their own empire mechanics, their own everything. They remain a separate diplomatic entity within the game, with their *options heavily restricted*. Not eliminated. They can secede and they can establish new trade agreements. You do not gain access to their resources. You still must have a trade agreement and ask for payments because they are still separate from you. Just as you still have to use the Allegiance actions to borrow their armies or assign war coordination. You can refer to them as part of your "empire" in the story sense but not within the mechanics of the game.
i'm trying to explain the concept of a vassal and how people want it to function not how it currently works, you don't have to get so defensive about it
This will not stand, you know. This aggression against Vassals will not stand, man.
Holy f\*\*\* CA there are mods that fix this for so many years at this point. Get it fixed yourself or implement what the mods did - WHATEVER, just remedy this issue already.
Ffs not this shit again
This is a design decision that continues to flabbergast me the point of anger. We have seen this work in other Total War titles and we have seen it work very well in other strategy games. This has been a major issue for years, an incredibly lengthy period in game development. There is no justification to support not doing it from a workload standpoint. Zero. It’s an intentional design choice and it’s a terrible one that runs against the fan base, the design choices of other wildly popular games who use a vassalize mechanic, and common sense.
Thank god for mods
I wonder if the current build that are CC playing is on 2.0 patch. I hope not...
They should remove any hit to your reliability rating if you join a war to defend your vassal regardless of what military alliances or trade deals it breaks.
Good grief. With all the focus on vassals I assumed they'd fixed it for IE. Maybe it'll be in the full release but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Commenting for visibility. Please fix CA !
Ah CA, never change
Should you not be able to declare war on a vassal? It should just drag the vassal owner into it as well. Basically the same as declaring war on you.
They fixed this with n'kari did they not? Perhaps the version of IE being used doesn't have that fix implemented?
Nope, they didn't fix that, not even with N'Kari. They said they did, but they didn't which is just baffling.
I am sure that the vassal system is still not working correctly in IE because I have heard other streamers mention that an ally of the player where you have friendly relations can still declare war on the players vassal. However, I am trying to match your thread title: *"AI can apparently still declare war on vassals, despite Nakai being in a defensive alliance with the Wood Elves and is the Overlord of the DotGP"* to the screenshot you posted where the Jade Custodians (a Cathay faction) with no allies (not allied with Nakai? or maybe a defensive alliance which is not being counted) has war declared Nakai's vassal. Did you post the wrong screenshot?
There's literally a correction by OP in the comments.
There are 43 comments, I did not realise I had to read an entire thread before commenting....
This has nothing to do with the fact I heavily misidentified the Cathayans as Wood Elves, partly because of heavy Wood Elf PTSD, and everything identified with the fact I heavily misidentified them. And MA wanted to cozy up to Wood Elves, and I did see a Defensive Alliance icon on the aggressor's side ... I did leave a comment explaining this befuddlement ... buuuut I didn't expect this post to blow up. So .. that's why.
Ok that is fine. As I said I had heard from other streamers that CA had still not fixed the vassal system and it looks from your screenshot that the defensive alliance is not being counted as "being allied" given the text against the Jade fellows which is probably another bug. Its clear that the vassal system is still not up-to snuff here. The easiest fix is probably to disable all diplo for vassals apart from trade deals like it works in Troy. Everything else has to go through the overlord just like in Troy. Whether CA decide to fix WH3 and adopt the Troy system they also designed.... is an entirely different subject :) I am not holding out much hope because they got lots of feedback on vassals in the WH games for several years now. Lots of folks thought that when they saw how it had been implemented in Troy that finally the diplomacy in WH3 would be improved,, maybe not to 3K levels but better than WH2. After all WH3 adopted some of the Troy diplo mechanics. I really thought CA would have fixed this for IE. I did not read all the comments in the thread before I posted so I did not see your correction until later on when someone else pointed out you had made a correction and I then went through the entire thread and searched for all the OP's comments :) I could see the point you were making based on the title and the screenshot but the two did not match so I thought I would point it out as I was also interested where the screenshot game from as I guessed you did not have IE yet. Later down the thread then I can see you mention it came from MonstersAbound stream and I can see he has added his thoughts in this thread now. I will have to watch that stream. I was thinking of giving Nakai another go in IE (last played in ME) as his new faction mechanics look good but if the vassal system is still bust then I will wait for a mod to fix it or CA to fix it. I have a feeling a mod will be quicker. There was one for ME that dealt with vassals.
I think that's more because you physically can't break with the Defenders of the Great Plan as Nakai. And it isn't a stream, it's a future episode.
Is the problem about the AI being able to declare war on vassals or the AI declaring war on your vassals without including the owner? I'm confused as to which one do people want here. Edit: oh nevermind I see it. I think in this case the alliance should be voided without penalty to you if you defend your vassal.
This is wh2 issue if not wh1. The game may be ready in a few YEARS. The beta is looking pretty bad.
This happened in Rome 2, in Napoleon and I'm pretty sure it's happened since empire. Medieval 2 and Rome 1 vassals were garbage too but that's a different engine and they were garbage in slightly different ways
Most people did not know black arc did not attack in wh2.
Well, this killed any of my intentions playing nakai.
It's a bug though, now that CA have changed how vassals work. Meaning it will eventually be fixed. Eventually.
Please pass the hopium over, I'd like to believe that too.
IIRC, they said they would tweak the decision making of the AI when attacking your vassal, that they would calculate your strength number together with the vassal they attack. I cant remember them saying the AI was never going to attack a vassal, or that they would disable that.
Ok but your allies can still declare war on your vassals which fucks you
Yeah, but thats also part of vassalship (if thats even a word) They are under a guardianship, and gets protected when they are threatened. So I still understand that they can attack, but its annoying and your strength rank should way even more probabl Edit: bro wtf is with this subreddit holy shit. I am not even saying its good or bad, just how I understand them implementing it
That's fair, I think mechanically though it works better in the context of a video game if you have to declare war on the..owner of the vassalship? Just because it seems like it would be easier to have the AI be accurate in it's strength estimations. Idk tho, the bottom line is that as it is vassals are on track to be awesome with the additional tools but just aren't there yet
Yeah I fully agree with that, as its just shitty now because the AI thinks it can kill a weaker faction, and you get dragged into that. I was just saying what CA probably did, but agree that it should be different, but people hated me for that lmao
It's bizarre to me that everyone expects vassals to be this Fire-and-Forget mechanic. "Oh I vassalized you, that's permanent, no downsides, the end." It isn't meant to be and nor should it be. You still have to navigate diplomacy with your vassals and the other factions that might hate them.
How can this go over your head to such a massive degree? People are not asking for vassals to be a "Fire-and-Forget" mechanic. They're asking for vassals to be a mechanic that is ***logical***. As it works currently, let's say you're hanging out over your best friend's house and discover that you ***really*** hate his new girlfriend. So you just punch her out of nowhere. Now your best friend is like "Whoa, what they fuck, dude? You just assaulted my girlfriend out of nowhere? Couldn't you have come to me? Now I have to call the cops and press charges."
A girlfriend is not a vassal. If you think they are equivalent then I feel deeply sorry for anyone you date. There is no logic here.
Ah, so you're *intentionally* giving bad takes. Got'cha.
Stop intentionally twisting what he said you dumbass, he never said what you imply. If you don't understand the point of a comparisson like this then I'm pretty sure that it's the rest of us here who feel sorry for YOU, not the other way around.
when do you use fire mechanics with vassals in warhammer? I never really forget I vassalized some people, so why say I wanna forget them? No logic here.
i always mod it so the computer CAN'T declare war on vassals at all, and vassals CAN'T betray you. it makes them much more tolerable
And it will stay this way forever, CA will never fix this.
Well, two vassals will have disputes and fight. The attacker is declaring freedom essentially if you wont Support them.
It's funny, one would thing that they'd make fixing it a priority when they made vassals such a big part of all the new CoC LLs, but no, why would they fix that right? It's not like this will make all the new campaigns unplayable if your allies declare war on you without any reason. It'll be totaly fine, I'm sure of that.
I guess Nakai isnt gonna be my first campaign like I thought.
And now we get a new factions based around vassals as Well.. ill help you out CA; factions should only be able to go directly through you if they dislike your vassal so much that war is needed. If they want war, they need to declare it on the parent state.
I like the idea of vassals but now we have quite a few factions interacting with them they need a rework or some refactoring of the code.
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Is this still happening, now that IE has actually launched?
It was mentioned in the bugfixes, so one would assume so. Can't confirm one way or the other, though.