Are march vassals worth it?

[Trondheim]

Hi. i am currently playing as Hungary and have managed to win a war against kebab ottomen! Yay!! But i was wondering if i should wallachia, my vassal, a march, or if i should core the areas i took from ottoman myself.

Are marches usless or actually good? I have influence ideas btw, which makes vassals better.

[Dux]

Yeah, I find them pretty useful to be honest. Could be just my play style I don't know, but as Prussia for example I prefer to grab bits of Poland for myself but rather than expand to Livland/Estonia I always vassalize the Livonian Order and sometimes make them release Estonia (whom I end up vassalizing too, or annexing and then giving back to LO once they're my vassal). From there I feed a couple Lithuanian provinces to LO in order to improve their effectiviness and I gain a pretty useful ally. In my current game I gave LO about 4 provinces and made them lose 3 (Estonia, my other march) and they always field a 20-23K army to help me in my wars, and not only they have decent combat bonuses but I get an extra 23K men I don't pay for from provinces that otherwise would only allow me to field about 8K men if that much.

[Exarch_Alpha]

Marches are multiplayer feature. In single player the best path is always controlling land directly, and having to take Stab hit to finally annex march is not nice.

So vassals still totally worth it, marches are a roleplay asset in SP. If they didn´t cost diplo to mantain, ok, but they do. And using Diplo for development is very good.

Ultimatedly the bottom line is making the most of monarch points. Marches aren´t cost efficient exactly because of that (sum of losing stability + not viable to have several marches at the same time due to diplo cost).

[Kelldath]

Originally posted by Exarch_Alpha:

If they didn´t cost diplo to mantain, ok, but they do. And using Diplo for development is very good.

I don't understand, they only use 1 diplo slot like any other vassal.
As exarch mentionned, the downside is that you get a -1 stability and -200 relations for revoking the march, so they're practically impossible to annex. The -1 stab will disapear if you have diplomatic ideas.

However, as of 1.12, they keep their military bonuses no matter what their size (25% max manpower, 20% manpower recovery speed and 30% force limit), and with the -15% liberty desire, you're pretty much assured they'll never rebel, even above 300 development.
Since you're not supposed to annex them, they don't get the -30 relation malus when you annex another vassal.

If you have an area you're not interested in owning directly (because it borders an ennemy for exemple, which historically is the whole reason of marches), it can be a good tool. Keep 1 march the entire game, while vassals come and are annexed.
If you own Common Sense, the interactions with marches make them even more interesting, as you can feed them manpower and build forts in their territory, making them very nice buffers.

In a game as Poland, I shared Greece and Anatolia with Moldavia (their starting march next to Wallachia). The point is to give them regions you want to fortify, you'll pay the fort once, but they'll pay the maintenance.

[FluffyShrimp]

I mainly base my Marches on two things, their military ideas and if I want to annex them. 95% of the time I vassalise someone to diplo annex them later, but if you have no intention of doing that, such as if the vassal is far away or in a crowded area (outside Europe or in the HRE as respective examples) marching is a very viable option. But not all countries are created equal, as some make much better marches than others. Good military ideas, plenty of room to expand, small initial size and somewhat far off location is ideal, so countries like Brandenburg, Scotland, Sweden and The Hordes would be the best to march (althought some might have to be weakned to be vassalised). That's my five cents on Marches.