broken vassel system ruins this game

[BLÀde]

when you build a city you should have control over it that's how it works in every other 4x game in history! not doing this and than having to spend points to control it and making it so eventually you don't have the points to take control of them blocking you from expanding or getting access to newer resources is the most stupidest system i have ever seen! ign is right to give it 5/10

[Feastmongrel]

You can actually raze (i.e destroy) neutral states rather than envoy them into vassalage, but unfortunately destroying pre-vassalised states isn't coming until a later patch.

That said, try playing around vassals by taking the right focuses and governments (Chivalry, Colonialism, Feudal Monarchy etc.), rather than integrating every vassal you come across. The XP, culture and research income is actually really high, with the added bonus that you don't have to micromanage the vassals.

[Azethoth]

I don't like your solution of adding boring micro across 50 vassals. It would be better to keep the focus of the current system. I like that a lot, even with the downside of no control.

Much better would be to be able to feed them improvement points from your pool. Then they can do their thing faster.

You can also build the militia they need for extra control that you are currently only building on your regions. During or after a crisis you can also just help clear their territory.

[chaney]

Hmm, it seems there is more misunderstanding of the game and the systems in it just as the IGN reviewer did.

The game gives you different ways to access resources and different costs apply to them.

If you just want access to resources on tiles, Outposts are pretty cheap to set up. Drop some Trading Posts or some other improvements to get the goodies without needing to expand a full city to the area. These can be more expensive in Improvement points but are not expensive in the other currencies.

For closer resources and juicy tiles without extra resources, the Towns are super. I like having a little control over where the Region grows and Towns grab a nice bunch of land rather than the systems that expand in all directions. (I do look forward to the passive expansion getting more player control.)

Setting up a new Vassal seems pretty inexpensive, and doesn't come with the kind of overall drag that full Regions do. If you want control, sure you pay more, but since it didn't cost so much to build the Vassal space, you are not getting "ripped off" it just offers more flexible choices and spreads the cost into more currencies over more time.

Furthermore if you find the penalty for having too many Regions is too high, you can turn one back into a Vassal after giving it what it needs.

The flexibility is something appealing to some of us. This isn't to say that everything is balanced, I'm sure it will get some changes, and once modding is opened up there will surely be ways to make expansion super cheap so you can spam cities everywhere.