I think this is a rather unpopular opinion but I like the way Amplitude has decided to approach vassalage. First, for any who don't know or don't have open dev access, it is impossible until around about the industrial era to actually eradicate a player from the game. Before this, If, when forcing surrender, taking a city would result in a player being eliminated you can't do it and so vassalizing them becomes the best option.

Obviously, this rings some alarms at first as in most strategy games vassalage just leads to one or two things: either you are so handicapped that you might not even be playing and are really just hanging out with your friends and not leaving the session, or you sit there the entire time plotting your revenge (Look at Total War for how vassals will always bite you in the ass). However, because vassalage is somewhat of an inevitability when it comes to early wars Amplitude has taken an interesting approach to keep it engaging and because of the win condition (fame), it is possible albeit difficult for a vassal to actually have a better score than their liege.

First, let's talk about the limitations:

  • No diplomatic autononmy

    • Essentially your liege acts as your mouthpiece. You can't control trade routes (which we will get to later) open borders, map sharing. Anything really. I am not sure how this works if you want to go to war with someone that isn't your liege but I am interested to find out and am working on becoming a vassal in my current playthrough to test it. I Will update when I find out.

  • Tribute

    • You're a tributary so you are going to be paying your liege a percentage of your income each turn. Pain

  • Influence and Religion

    • Your gods are dead, you now worship your lieges religion. Additionally, your influence goes to extending their sphere of influence not your own. This second bit is the most advantageous for the Liege imo but it is also mechanically sensible for one reason: rebellion. When you take into account the pros (which are coming next) if you still decide to rebel, because the Liege has an overwhelming influence over your territories you are going to take a penalty to your war score each turn. This imo is brilliant. It makes the vassal an underdog fighting not only armies but the will of their "oppressed" people and puts the Liege in a true position of power that isn't easily ripped away by a mere surprise war or dog pile when the liege enters another war.

Now the bonuses:

  • Let's start with the big one. You and your Liege share ALL RESOURCES. Yes, your luxuries and strategic resources are theirs now....But theirs are also yours! Did they have an edge on you because they had access to iron? Now you have iron to build up your own armies. Have you been having problems with stability and as such haven't been able to build as many quarters as you'd like? Boom you now have all of the pearls, porcelain, and ebony your lord has so long as you kiss their ring during meetings. Remember how you can't make your own trade routes? From an economic perspective, it's unfortunate but whenever your liege buys a resource you now also benefit from that resource. This was the mechanic that showed me that Amplitude is trying to make this system more interesting than other strategy games typically do. If my lord has enough resources...I may just be better off under them than going it on my own!

  • Shared vision

    • You share vision... enough said.

There may be more to vassalage than I currently know, war interactions, future plans, potential interactions after certain techs are civics are discovered. But so far, I find the approach that has been taken, in addition to the slower pace of conquering territory, has thanks to the way war scores and forced surrender work, is a great way to make sure losing one war isn't the end of your game or multiplayer session. I have friends who love going to war in Civ but never feel good doing it in multiplayer, especially early. Humankind seems to have offered a solution to this issue and the dreaded one war to win them all.

I think, all in all, the main issues people have with this system are one of two things:

  • Tribute amount is too high and gives a considerable advantage to liege compared to other empires

  • The way enemy AI acts during a war is often inefficient in terms of war score and therefore the amount of times you can vassalize someone is too high at the moment. For those that don't understand how the final warscore is calculated, it is calculated based on your remaining war support and theirs at the end of the war. This puts your score somewhere between 100 and 200 and vassalization cost is 150. This means that so long as you maintain about 50 war support by the time you force the surrender you can vassalize.

Discuss!