Puppet or Annex Ethiopia as Italy?

[Darthclimo]

The question is in the subject line. What are the implications of puppeting versus annexing Ethiopia as Italy? Beyond maintaining an influence and another base of operations in Africa, is there any need to annex?

[Entstehung]

Puppeting is better because it can handle more on its own, such as suppressing Ethiopian resistance and building factories. However, the single biggest pro is that you can choose not to call it into war. The AI isn't very good about declaring war on puppets. So, if you don't invite them to join, Britain and France will stack troops on your puppet's borders yet never invade. It's kind of exploitative, but it works.

Why should you ever annex? To prevent border gore.

[CaptainSpacetime]

Annex if it makes your name bigger, otherwise puppet.

[Just4Fun]

There also used to be the tactic to puppet every possible state in Ethiopia separately, so you get more chances of them going for their unique "add factories" focus trees. Over time you can try to annex them and gain more factories this way.

[velvetcrabman]

Originally posted by Just4Fun:

There also used to be the tactic to puppet every possible state in Ethiopia separately, so you get more chances of them going for their unique "add factories" focus trees. Over time you can try to annex them and gain more factories this way.

No need to annex them individually really, you can still create Italian East Africa and create a unified puppet, it'll reset autonomy to a low level that's been increasing crazily, did that just the other day to see if it's work....it does.

[All talk and no fight]

Originally posted by Just4Fun:

There also used to be the tactic to puppet every possible state in Ethiopia separately, so you get more chances of them going for their unique "add factories" focus trees. Over time you can try to annex them and gain more factories this way.

Sorry to ressurect this thread but I was considering making a small guide on Balkanizing Ethiopia- why wouldn't you want to Balkanize and puppet Ethiopia into small groups? I don't really see the downsides- you can get way more free factories, and each puppet gets a chance to develop their own free 8 unit resource

[velvetcrabman]

The main reason is that all those little states start raising their autonomy at a crazy rate after a while and trying to reduce it enough to annex them is a slow and costly process that isn't successful in every game. Not sure why this happens tbh, perhaps they default to a branch of the main Ethiopia tree, then again, perhaps not. Be interested to know.

[All talk and no fight]

Originally posted by velvetcrabman:

The main reason is that all those little states start raising their autonomy at a crazy rate after a while and trying to reduce it enough to annex them is a slow and costly process that isn't successful in every game. Not sure why this happens tbh, perhaps they default to a branch of the main Ethiopia tree, then again, perhaps not. Be interested to know.

It's a part of the special Generic Horn of Africa nation focus' which every balkanized part of Ethiopia gets- except for normal Ethiopia which keeps its tree, and the Somali Sultante which gets regular generic focus tree.

Anyways yes they can get free autonomy points from their focus trees if they endeavor to go down it- but if you want to annex them, as you said months ago just create italian east africa, then you could annex them.

Either way the developed resources are still quite powerful, and the bonus mills and civs you get from them are great as well- ofc given enough time like say till 1942 every puppet will go down the focus' to increase their autonomy and become the 2nd tier of fascist puppet and only give 25% civs, but its still good to get free factories until then.

[velvetcrabman]

Cheers for answering that.

Would love to see that guide and some sort of comparisons between various routes and options, timescales, etc, always good to have other folks opinions on stuff like this.

[All talk and no fight]

Originally posted by velvetcrabman:

Cheers for answering that.

Would love to see that guide and some sort of comparisons between various routes and options, timescales, etc, always good to have other folks opinions on stuff like this.

I've just created it- it goes over most of what you should care about in regards to what you get over time- you can see in the final screenshots for example how many civs and mills im getting from subjects in sep 1939- although not pictured in the screenshot is the collab government of Croatia which did some military and civilian focus' as well

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3190691521