How do you vassalize someone?

[Kulumatic]

How do you vassalize some1? The warscore it too high if you choose it... if you fight the war for other wargoals you have to wait 10 years?

[phantommail]

Score to high cuz enemy is to big for U. So yea , take some planets and w8 10 years

[Kulumatic]

Ah ok well that changed in the patch?

So if i can invade an enemy nation, kill all their fleets, space ports, mining and research stations and bombard every planet, i still can only take like 2 or 3 planets each "war"?

How do you play a militaristic nation then?

[coolman20012]

i actually take 1 planet at a time cos the war score system is really stupid. why don't they give up when no fleet is left? sometimes it takes 10 years to get a high warscore cos the enemy is so weak there are no means to get a higher score. so i basically demand 1 system, destroy their fleet, wait 10 years, next war. and as i have 3 neighbours that works out quite ok'ish.

[Leeira]

Make sure to blockade their planets with your fleets, it gives far more warscore than one or two fleet victories.

[SBGaming]

Depending on your Government Ethos, particularly if you have a Pacifist Ethos. it might be a good idea to Liberate some of the planets from a larger planet, and then follow up by Demanding Vassalization. Won't quite work well if you're Xenophobic, or if the new Liberated planet is too far away.

Liberating a Planet will form a new government/Empire with the same Ethics as your own. Because I'm a Fanatic-Materialist-Pacifist, every Planet I Liberate becomes Fanatic-Materialist-Pacifist, and because I liberate one planet at a time they are often too small or weak to survive on their own so they willingly accept and are really happy having me as an Overlord.

The best part is that they will develop themselves and their ships (feeding them minerals as well as Research Agreements help), and over time they will build a fleet which will assist you in battle. It's quite nice seeing that 9K fleet from vassal I Liberated/Vassalized early on joining me when going to war, although with that said I'm up to 4-16K fleets, but they only have the one planet.

Usually they follow my fleets around like lost puppies, but I've had vassals attack and occupy enemy planets without myself having to do anything.

Before you try to Vassalize a larger Empire which may have a set of differing Ethics, try breaking bits and pieces off it first, and Vassalize those instead.

More importantly, if you are really Militarily minded you should always have 3 or 4 targets you want to attack. Attack Empire A, take some territory. While waiting for 10-year truce to expire, Attack Empire B, take some more territory. Attack Empire C, and repeat. Once the 10-year truce ends with Empire A, repeat from the beginning.

Even better is to attack someone who has allies. Although I could be wrong, the truce from what I understand only applies to the Empire you specifically declared war on, even if you intend to take their allies territory. If this is as I remember it, just declare war on one of their allies, and take some of the territory of those you have a truce with. That's one of the disadvantages of being someone's ally, since if they get attacked, you have the potential to lose territory.

[Placebo ★]

Originally posted by SBGaming:

Even better is to attack someone who has allies.

I would dissagree here. I haven't been playing for very long, so i might be wrong but... Whenever I try to attack an alliance (mostly because they are all weak compared to me) after winning the war my threat level instantly goes insanely high to all of the other empires and within a few years they all form one big alliance and completely obliterate my empire. Sure its easy enough to take on 2 or 3 weak little empires, but being attacked by 4 + 1 strong empire isnt a fun experience.

I've found that simply waiting out the 10 years is enough to rebuild and make sure that my neighbors don't decide that I'm a big enough threat to form an alliance and destroy me.

[Sohei]

There are four ways.

1. They like you adn feel weak and threatened by others and ask to be your vassal out of the blue. Very rarely happens.

2. You suck up them and are much more powerful than them and then just ask them to become a vassal. Rarely they be willing to agree to this.

3. You declare war on them with the war goal of vassalizing them. They can't be too big but otherwise you can do this just about any time you want.

If they have an incompatible ethos or you made them mad somehow then they may be disloyal to begin with. It might be possible to rpeair relations but starting out with high relations other than the war related penalties would make things much easier.

4. You release some territory you conquered as a vassal.

[Mistfox]

In a way, I'm glad you can't grab too many planets. I made the mistake of demanding 6 planets from a rival once. And won the war. After that my energy income was -174, my core planets were 12/7 and monkeys were swinging from the celing fans.

Lesson learned. Slow and steady digestion avoids indigestion.

[SBGaming]

Originally posted by Placebo ★:

Originally posted by SBGaming:

Even better is to attack someone who has allies.

I would dissagree here. I haven't been playing for very long, so i might be wrong but... Whenever I try to attack an alliance (mostly because they are all weak compared to me) after winning the war my threat level instantly goes insanely high to all of the other empires and within a few years they all form one big alliance and completely obliterate my empire. Sure its easy enough to take on 2 or 3 weak little empires, but being attacked by 4 + 1 strong empire isnt a fun experience.

I've found that simply waiting out the 10 years is enough to rebuild and make sure that my neighbors don't decide that I'm a big enough threat to form an alliance and destroy me.

Always compare the relative strength of the allies to decide whether it's worth it. The important thing is that you can keep the war going after the previous one ends. More importantly though have some allies of your own.

In my current game there's basically become three big factions. Ours, the Stellar Pact which includes myself and my 10 Vassals, and one Protectorate, plus two other decently sized Empires, and two much smaller Empires. The second one, the Beneficial Compact (a Federation) includes 2 decently large Empires and one single planet empire. The third is a second Federation, the Propitous Axis, which has one large Empire, a couple multi-planet Empires, and a couple single-planet Empires.

The complicated part is that the Tendra-Zuhn League (Propitous Axis) and the United Hantak Administration (Beneficial Compact) have signed treaties that guarantee each other's Independence, so yeah, going against any of them, brings them all into an all out Galactic-wide brawl, so my focus has been targetting the smaller Empires and Alliances, of which there are far fewer around. I was part of the Beneficial Compact but possibly by accident I Voted Yes to form a Federation, and got out of it immediately, joining the one I'm with now.

I suspect a lot of the Empires rushed to jump into Alliances and Federations because of the threat of the Unbidden which took a chunk of territory from my ex-alliance members, and although I wanted to stop the unbidden threat, I should have waited for them to eat up more territory, so they would be weaker. I have since colonized much of that area, and left some unbidden territory around that the AI doesn't seem to care about doing anything about as a bit of a Neutral Zone, while I establish myself there.

[SBGaming]

Originally posted by Mistfox:

In a way, I'm glad you can't grab too many planets. I made the mistake of demanding 6 planets from a rival once. And won the war. After that my energy income was -174, my core planets were 12/7 and monkeys were swinging from the celing fans.

Lesson learned. Slow and steady digestion avoids indigestion.

You can always create vassals out of some of that territory. They might not like you very well, but atleast you don't have to deal with the economic impact.

Alternatively create a sector from the newly conquered territory, which is the way you deal with large chunks of newly acquired territory that you don't plan to manage.