Stellaris Overlord - Vassal Contracts

with the overlord expansion being announced last week it's time to delve into the nitty and gritty of this update and what you can expect from the subject mechanics that are coming into our general direction one thing that is important to know in this particular case is that tributes as well as standard vassals will change quite significantly in this expansion to give you a little bit of background on why this particular expansion is being made in general it is particularly difficult to unite the galaxy underneath one empire it can be incredibly stressful to claim every single empire you can go through a total war approach but it's not necessarily the most quote unquote nicest way of doing things therefore this expansion is looking to bring tributaries and vassals into a more interesting scenario with different vessels and different tributaries and different protectorates giving them more abilities and giving them more meat on their bones so to speak there's a lot of stuff to go through here today and let's take some time to do so i would like to say up front though that it looks like the stellaris team was like hey crusader kings can i copy your homework i'll try not to make it too obvious yeah that should probably already give you a good indication on what to expect so at the core of this expansion is the negotiations system essentially once you've claimed another species to be your vassal or tributary you go into the negotiation phase now in some cases you will probably be able to force your hand and basically tell them what you are now doing however generally let's say that you've vassalized a secondary species on the side and like you know what come and join us kind of like how feudal empires work so to speak and what you can then do is go into the aforementioned negotiation phase so what can you actually negotiate with on them outer empire well first of all can a subject be integrated integration as for those of you who don't use it very often i most definitely do not is essentially integrating another empire into yours completely which usually means that your empire will completely crash and burn due to the subsequent ai economy are completely going tits up which is not necessarily the best thing in the world but you can turn it on or turn it off based on the contract that you have with another empire also can a empire or a vassal have independent diplomacy how can they navigate can they vote on their own things in the galactic community can they have their own packs can they have their own trade deals etc etc it's really important to actually formulate these things and i cannot see a scenario where you would ever want to give a subject empire the ability to vote against you because that's kind of standing against everything that you're trying to do as a overlord empire whether or not you are authoritarian or quote-unquote benign to those of you who are below you can a subject expand freely now this is something that has actually come up quite a lot with the feudal empires as i mentioned earlier on feudal empires in the past were capable of expanding on their own relatively early on and could grow out of proportion relatively quickly the problem with them was is it was usually not a very good idea to let them do so because they would be starting relatively small and the ai would not necessarily be the smartest uh chip off the old block in that sense so yeah whether or not today can actually expand is something that you can set up and it's now been removed from the fuel society so having a vassal being able to expand on their own can be pretty powerful but the real problem here is from what i can see is if we do it too late in the game a vassal expanding will basically mean that they cannot really expand anywhere because all the holes in the galaxy are already filled up or you need to be in a situation where there's a very large galaxy with only a few client species that all over the place but the option is there which i think is interesting but yeah having a quote-unquote preset for one of your uh client species there's a variety of them like as i mentioned vasel subsidiary tributary protectorate there's a bulwark as well essentially some of these already have those options and i would recommend for you to probably enable that off the get-go because it does give other empires a little bit more power and in the end the ability to grow their economy which is very very valuable you can have subsidies so essentially what kind of subsidies from you the overlord will go to the subject are you going to be sending basic goods food energy minerals advanced goods things like consumer goods things like alloys that sort of thing or of course strategic goods like your gases your crystals your moats etc and apparently also research now some of the subject types are very very weak specifically protectorates and essentially they'll get a massive bonus in technology anyway that was something that was already in the game they get a default boost of 80 bonus to any science that the overlord has already scienced before but in general it's uh it seems to be relatively straightforward of trying to get your subjects up to speed now what i don't see here is the ability to say you are not allowed to research this technology like insert technology x just to make sure that you can keep them under control and stay in the scenario that they become a little bit um upheavally let's put it that way ironically this is happening with slider bars which i think is very exciting i don't think we've seen slider bars in stellars for quite some time unless it's on the start the galaxy menu which is rather cool also can overlords and subjects be drawn in each other's wars i would hope so in some scenarios but sometimes some you know some vassals you don't want them having in your wars because they're weak and if they die then you know you'll lose some of your income this is something that you probably want to avoid this is a very interesting one overlord building holdings and how many you can place them now building building overlord buildings inside of a vassal works very similarly to how mega corporations function whether on the subject tab or at least on the planetary tab you have the ability to build a building this can be very specific with megacorps you have all these special structures that you can do but apparently overlords can do the same thing but they can define ahead of schedule how many of these buildings are actually going to be buildable which i think is rather fascinating you know if you have a certain limits then you know you may it may not cost as much so yeah it's a it's a empire wide limit as well so if you have a holding limit of three you can only build uh three different buildings across the entire empire not on each separate planet so that's something normally keep in mind and finally does the overlord share sensor information with that subject overall it really feels like the proposal on the subjugation really means that hey we want to bring you under our wing this is our terms this is what we propose you won't be dragged into our wars for example we will give you this much resources and in return you will do this you can become a vassal a tributary a bulwark a scolarium or a protectorate and essentially you can go out to other empires and say i would like to do this and then potentially later down the line renegotiate these sort of terms which i think is rather fascinating but yeah um apparently there are certain types of empires that have defaults set up for instance uh tributaries and subsidiaries uh they open they have to contribute a certain amount of resources by default and it cannot be lowered and similar to say research or advanced strategic goods etc so that error is pretty interesting but then there is the change to feudal society because it has been overhauled quite significantly so the new system really works with something called loyalty the more loyalty you have the better the performance will be within that other empire and that can go up and down depending on what sort of terms you have if they are independent they will have the they will be allowed to expand a lot more or do their own thing if they are no longer if they're not going to be integrated which is something you probably wouldn't want anyway they will be more loyal in general which i think is rather interesting but still fuel society which is something that was already changed in the libra update where leaders do not cost unity upkeep now also generates additional monthly loyalty and do not suffer penalties from having multiple subjects the more subjects you have apparently from what i can read here is that you cause some problems here so what does this currency called loyalty actually do well essentially what happens is you will have a loyalty change and it can go into the plus and it can go into the minus and it works very similar to say your loyalty system in crusader kings 2 where the higher the loyalty is the more a subject will support you and if you go into the negative they are more likely to rebel i kind of like the sort of plus minus system where you really need to keep an eye on your loyal subjects in order to keep things interesting but unlike crusader kings you don't necessarily have that need to micro individual characters it's more of a macro empire loyalty system i do like that and maybe in the future maybe maybe for like maybe stellars2 who knows if the scope doesn't change we could see more stuff with characters and i think the feudal system by itself works really well with that too where you could potentially have a slew of small empires that you have to groom into loyalty so to speak so you can have your options to say okay i spend i tell you to do this this is going to reduce loyalty but i'll let you do something else in return which is going to increase loyalty so you need to strike that balance and at the same time also need to make sure that uh yeah you don't have any problems there but apparently disloyal vassals can also swear secret fealty to one of your rivals and then they'll be able to follow them in an alliance war so essentially you can have secret fealty i hope that the the intelligence systems actually tie into that what you can have there is is that if a empire has done a secret pledge of fealty you can essentially say hey if you go to war we will join you in this particular attack and then we'll join you later on so you have this balance between these large empires these large domains with smaller sub-empires and i kind of wish that sectors worked in this way as well it does make a lot of sense that sectors would work in this sort of functionality which is a bit of a shame that is not the case right now which is unfortunate but yeah uh subjugating other empires is definitely something you need to be careful about apparently you don't want to have too many because some of them can become jealous of other subjects and yeah that one is rather interesting apparently there's a modifier called divided patronage where essentially all the loyalty in your empire will be reduced because of the amount of uh vassals you have if you're familiar with crusader kings it's called a domain limit over there so it's it's rather cool that they're trying to uh do this sort of thing and apparently if you have the shared destiny perk this uh will actually um be reduced as well so if you're very heavy on the subject side of things share destiny now actually may make may uh may make a lot of sense then there's overlord holdings we already talked about that there is a ton of overlord buildings they work in the same way as franchise buildings do they are on the same screen as the franchise buildings as well but that uh the tab has now been changed to holdings instead i'll give you a couple of walkthroughs we've got the um ministry of truth yeah it gives you additional jobs on the planet it's an overlord propagandist and essentially it increases the influence of the overlord on that planet but also of course has a upkeep cost the material ministry which um apparently reduces the income of minerals to the subject but it will give three additional minerals for the overlord and same thing goes for metallurgists uh material ministry it looks like the ministry of something else scholarship it looks like there's a whole slew of things related to science giving you more resources but of course apparently these buildings all give you cost loyalty and stuff like that which is rather interesting uh eight agency which increases aid workers and increases loyalty on that planet which is really nice the ministry of energy which probably works in the same way uh the splinter hive which it looks like it's a hive mind sort of approach which spawns something called an overlord breeder which turns subject food into two pop assembly for the overlord's capital yeah get ready to generate a lot of pops this way that is a fascinating little approach uh apparently there's also a bunch of uh holdings that are being added to civics and origins like the noble chateau um it doesn't say if it's locked to anything it's actually one of the aristocracy elite civics that allows you to do that and apparently it reduces the loyalty change by minus one and it increases stability but also decreases amenities whether or not you want to build them is a whole different care question but yeah the communal housing outreach which is from shared burdens which improves housing amenities and egalitarian ethics attraction also it doesn't have any impact on loyalty which for some reason having a um socialist slash communist uh overlord in a sort of warsaw pact style approach does seem rather interesting and then finally gaia seeders are being changed as well because we have more uh terraforming flexibility uh which will be coming also in this new update essentially allow you to improve habitability on worlds quite significantly uh and also increase loyalty on those worlds too and this is a building you can then build on uh on a vassal's world which i think is really cool like you know spreading the ability of your civics as well as origins and place them on other worlds i think that's very very interesting apparently there's over 20 different holdings and i'm looking forward to go through all of them and there's quite a lot of stuff to go through once that expansion drops for overlord in general though how do i feel about this i think overall the system seems very powerful uh generally i play with quite a lot of tributaries as well as vassals because i do not integrate other empires because it's way too macroy and having the power to change what those vassals actually do is really interesting to me and i do think it's going to be a very interesting update however i do feel for players that do not necessarily play like this this is not going to be interesting at all and they'll probably be more focused on more of the ancillary things that come with the updates such as the megastructures as well as the the the jump gate that comes with things so whether or not things is uh is is going to be interesting to you is a whole different question and of course the orbital uh the orbital arcology or whatever it's called the big ring thing that goes around the planet but yeah a lot of really cool things to look forward here and it's it's pretty much up my alley and my play style i'm looking forward to see how this is all going to pan out but yeah maybe this is something for you maybe it is not it really depends on your play style but yeah what do you think what do you think is this is this something you're interested in would you like to have more power on other empires and being able to min max to see what they can do or control them more proactively make them super loyal or play them against each other in the way that crusader kings works maybe it could be a very interesting mechanic also this uh secret fealty thing i hope that you can find out what's going on there with your spies because um yeah you need to knit that stuff into the butt quite early on also apparently there's a new ascension perk so that's something we want to keep an eye on as well i want to thank you all for watching today's video once again if you have any questions put them down below we'll be looking forward to see those thank you so much for my patrons for making this video possible we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here until next time take good care of yourselves and as always each other

Channel: ASpec

Views: 54,640

Keywords: ASpec, A_Spec, Stellaris, stellaris overlord, Stellaris Overview, Stellaris Gameplay, Gameplay, Overview, Dev Diary, Overlord, Subjects, Subject, Vassal, Tributary, Protectorate, Vassal Contract, New Vassal Mechanics, Vassal Mechanics, Crusader Kings, Update, DLC, Expansion, Large update, Feudal Empire, Overlord Holdings, Holdings, Paradox Interactive, Paradox Development Studio

Id: yzzcpg5fssI

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022