Stellaris Vassal Contracts - How To Steal An Empire

contract negotiations are key to establishing a successful empire in stellaris overlord in this video i'm going to share my knowledge and provide to you a visual guide to the art of the deal we're going to go through a five-step plan for the ultimate payoff by the time you've finished watching this video you should be well equipped to conquer the entire galaxy without ever firing a single shot we're going to learn the ins and outs of the new vassal contract system in stellaris overlord we're going to learn how we can install ourselves as another empire's overlord we're going to learn some cheesy tactics for stealing all of their planets pops and starships and then finally we're also going to learn how we can get the most economically out of another empire by becoming their subject so without any further ado let's dive in to part one welcome to the human hegemony this is a feudal society which i'll be using to show off the new vassal mechanics we already have a number of neighboring empires which have been vassalized by us if i go to the union's map mode you can see that the colours of these empires do change to match our own and that's because they're vassals under the great might of the human hegemony once you have a vassal either through conquest or diplomacy and i'll get to how we can get one through diplomacy a little later once we open up the contacts menu and go to agreements we can see all the vassals we have and here we can either do a term negotiation or a trade negotiation a term negotiation will be the important thing here this will be changing all of the different terms of the vassal contract if you are an overlord or a vassal you can get to this screen in order to negotiate it here we have the main negotiation screen what we have here are a whole bunch of different legal options that will change our interaction with either our vessel or if we are a vassal with our overlord generally speaking the further to the right the term is the more that benefits the vessel and is positive for the vassal and the further to the left the terms are the more it benefits the overlord for this reason terms on the left tend to give you negative monthly loyalty whereas terms on the right do tend to give positive loyalty and loyalty is important loyalty decides the relationship between the two parties in the agreement between the overlord and the subject if loyalty is positive the subject is loyal and if it's negative they are disloyal and then it changes by some amount every month there are various ways of impacting the monthly loyalty change first off there are all of the agreements we'll have which will have an impact then there are the holdings like the overlord garrison that you can build on your vassals worlds in order to increase their loyalty and depending on the opinion your subject has of you if they have a good opinion their loyalty will go up and if they have a very bad opinion it will go down that means if you've conquered a vassal rather than getting them diplomatically they could start with quite a high negative loyalty the first term you have to choose between is subject integration if integration is permitted that means the overlord can integrate the subject into their empire pretty straightforward if you're the vassal you do not want this to ever be on integration permitted as it is a high risk for the vassal it also has a very hefty -4 monthly loyalty impact next we have the diplomatic freedom of the subject this can range from completely independent diplomacy which means the subject is free to engage in diplomacy with other empires and vote independently subjects really like this one to a mid-ground where their diplomacy is restricted the subject is free to engage in diplomacy but they must follow their overlords votes in federations and in the galactic community however that doesn't mean they will always support if you are supporting something for instance i want to support repeal regulated growth my subjects can either choose to come and support me or they can stay and continue to abstain what they won't be able to do is ever oppose something you put onto the senate it will also force the subject to agree to join any federation the overlord is already a member of and if the overlord is a member of the galactic community the subject will be forced to join as well the most distasteful version of this is very limited diplomacy the subject may not engage in diplomacy with other empires and cannot vote independently this means they have to follow the way you vote in everything basically their votes are your own and if you're enjoying this video please fulfill your contractual obligations to the like button next up we have the expansion terms this basically defines whether or not your subject will be able to build new star bases and thus expand their territory on the very free side of things we have expansion permitted there's no change whatsoever there and subjects do quite like that one expansion regulated this means subjects can expand but they must pay a 50 percent extra influence cost to the overlord if you're the overlord this is very nice whenever they build an outpost and finally if expansion is prohibited they cannot expand their empire at all this is very restrictive for your subjects restart contribution here we have the contribution tab now this basically defines the economic relationship between an overlord and their subjects unlike all of the rest of them this one is a little counterintuitive because instead of being arranged left to right where left is good for the overlord and right is good for the subject this has been inverted if you move the sliders to the left that represents the overlord paying a percentage of the subject's production to the subject as a subsidy and if you move them to the right and the figure goes positive that represents a subject paying taxes to the overlord there are four different categories for these economic relationships basic resources meaning that one party is paying energy credits minerals and food advanced resources meaning you're paying alloys and consumer goods research meaning you're paying some of your precious precious research points every month and strategic which is generally the easiest one to find the production for and you'll be paying volatile moats exotic gases and rare crystals it's important to know that whenever you're trying to negotiate for some tribute from your subjects for each of these categories you start to move up your subject will get a minus 500 penalty to the agreement it doesn't matter how far up you go in either of the categories they'll still get this base 500 agreement on top of the fact that they don't like the loyalty change this means it is much much more difficult to ask for 15 percent of two resources than it is to ask for 30 of just one resource category to highlight this point it's actually easier to get them to agree to a 75 tribute than it is to get the subject to agree to give you 15 of their basic resource and advanced resources at this point and due to that i'm pretty sure the way that we ask for resources in these vassal contracts is going to get rebalanced the overlord conflicts dictates what wars the subjects will get involved in on the overlord's behalf it can be set from none which is actually quite bad for the overlord meaning the subject will never join the overlords wars defensive the subject will only ever join the overlords defensive wars if they are ever declared war upon offensive the subject will only ever join the overlord if the overlord declares the war and all wars meaning the subject will join unsurprisingly every war the overlord is in the further to the right you get with this one the less the subject likes it subject conflicts is exactly the same as the overlord conflicts but defines the relationship between the subject and the overlord meaning if you set this to all the overlord will join all of the subject wars that means your subjects can declare offensive walls and then you'll be forced to join them which can be very very annoying next up we have the holding limit meaning how many holdings you can build in your subject's empire this can be set all the way from zero which will have no impact on loyalty up to four which has quite a high impact on monthly loyalty the final term to be agreed upon is the sensors this basically shows whether or not the overlord will share their sensor data with the subject a subject is required to share all sensor data with the overlord already but the overlord can force the subject to see none of their sensor data if you change to unified sensors which doesn't cost you anything as an overlord not really anyway you'll get a nice little buff to monthly loyalty without having to do anything else if you'd like to buy stellaris overlord and also support this channel you can do so by following the link down in the description and purchasing it on the humble bundle store and there's also a sale on most of the stellaris dlc until the 24th of may on the top right here we can also choose the type of subject we have the first type is vassal which has some preset defaults but generally this is the same as a vassal was before patch 3.4 then we have tributary these terms are again generally the same as what a tributary was before 3.4 you have a 30 tax from the subject to the overlord for your basic resources after that there are the three specialist subject types bulwark is the easiest to get your subject to agree to the reason for this is that a bulwark comes with a 30 tithe from the overlord to the subject meaning if you want to make a ball work look out you'll pay lots of resources through the nose for that privilege because you're giving subsidies to your vassal this usually means that vassals are very happy to become bulwarks gallarium is the next specialist type that you can get with the overlord dlc this one means that your the subject pays a 30 minimum tithe in research to the overlord it can be quite difficult to convince a subject to do this as getting a subject to pay any of their resources to the overlord gives a base -500 opinion modifier to agreeing to the deal and finally we have the prospectorium this gives thirty percent of the basic resources and thirty percent of the advanced resources to the overlord generally speaking because you're asking for two different types of resources it is basically impossible to actually pull this off i have not managed to get a single ai to agree to become a prospectorium when i played patch 3.4 so far because asking for these two gives a minus 1 000 penalty to the term negotiation whereas giving some subsidies doesn't give a plus 500 penalty to anything it's simply the loyalty change impact here and the term change which you're going to find different each of these unique subject types bulwark scolarium and prospectorium also comes with special bonuses that will level up depending on how loyal the subject is if your subject has positive loyalty they'll gain 10 of their total loyalty as experience every month tier 2 will unlock at 1200 experience and tier 3 will unlock it 3600 experience the final thing we have here is what will happen to the subject when you change some terms around at the moment i've not changed any of the terms in this negotiation yet let's say i wanted to make the subject join all of my conflicts both defensive and offensive so i'd move this over to all that will come with an immediate hit to the loyalty of the subject as well as an ongoing monthly loyalty impact this is reflected here it shows i'm going to go from 100 down to 80 and minus 0.7 monthly loyalty down to minus 2.7 a little bit lower down we can see both what the influence cost of these term changes will be because in order to change any of these terms you have to spend precious precious influence which i've tended to find now in patch 3.4 we're spending a whole lot of generally speaking it costs more influence to move the terms towards something which is better for the overlord than the subject for example if i move to integration permitted and i also move to overlord conflict all that's going to cost me a whopping 425 influence now i can offset this influence cost by moving other terms in favor of the subject for instance if i move from subject conflict defensive to all that will reduce the total influence cost by 50 as moving from defensive to all cost me 50 less however it can be a bit confusing if i only move the terms in a direction which is better for the subject that still costs me more influence instead of receiving 50 influence for making the terms better for my subject i now have to pay but if i then move some other terms to make them for instance worse for my subject i'm going to go from defensive to offensive here now i've gone from having to pay an extra 50 for moving to all subject conflicts down to paying the base cost of fifth as you can see if i were to just do something better for the subject here it would cost me 100 but if i ask for a little bit extra that only costs 50. and then if you hover over the tick mark or cross at the bottom right of the screen you get to see what the acceptance is there are different things that change this acceptance the relative power of your empire compared to their empire i believe this is only military power that can scale all the way up to plus 250 the monthly loyalty of the subject that also has an impact on the agreement to the acceptance terms the monthly loyalty of the new agreement also has an impact on the acceptance the higher the monthly loyalty the new agreement will provide the more likely the vassal is to accept also the changes in the terms impacts the agreement of the vassal as well if you're moving from terms which are better for the vassal than the overlord this change in terms can even end up being negative i'm now asking for integration to be permitted and that's giving me a minus 156 change in terms the final modifier down there at the bottom is the from agreement terms this is impacted by the contribution terms for each of the contributions you set where one party is paying another the ai will get a minus 500 to their from agreement terms this means if you try to get tributes as i've mentioned before in two of them it will cost you minus a thousand which from my experience is pretty insurmountable you also generally speaking don't want to click the reset button here because that actually changes the weight of the agreement acceptance if i click the reset button and i start at the beginning and i want to go to integration prohibited independent diplomacy expansion permitted 30 percent no overlord conflict all two holdings and unified sensors my vassal is currently telling me no they are saying no with a minus 34 agreement acceptance and a monthly loyalty apparently a plus one if i go all the way back to my agreement screen and then oh reopen the term negotiation and i go through and add all of the same things i had before suddenly they will happily agree so it can be quite useful to use the reset button in certain circumstances because that will reset everything with the weightings back to some base modifiers but otherwise if you are the overlord generally you just want to fiddle with a contract ever so slightly before sending it on to them to be agreed now we're going to look at how we can get our subjects to come on board diplomatically in order to do this you must simply be superior to the subject with your military power if you are superior to the subject militarily not economically or technologically you can propose subjugation it's also very important that they have a positive relationship with you that means they have to be friendly cordial any of those type of things it doesn't necessarily mean they have to have a relationship above zero but their attitude must be a good one then we can go to propose subjugation and now we can look at what the acceptance terms are here there is a base of -50 there is something based on loyalty now that is their opinion of you the higher the opinion they have of you the higher this loyalty is and the lower the opinion they have of you the lower this loyalty is and you will need to overcome it finally the agreement acceptance is also based on empire population so earlier on in the game it can be much much easier to form vassals what you're going to want to do here almost certainly is agree to give them pretty much anything they'd want if we agree to let these neighbors of ours do everything they want and we had agreed to join them in all of their walls they will be very very happy to take us on board now overall this would seem like a bad deal for us but that's forgetting the fact that we can then renegotiate in five years i am altering the deal pray i don't offer it any further and there we go they've now agreed to become our vassal with some very very comfortable terms except for the fact they won't be able to just leave us but we can actually do much much better than that if you want to expand very rapidly without having any military progress you do need to build a military fleet for this in order to be superior to your neighbors but you don't have to be better than them in any way here we have a neighbor who is equivalent to us technologically and vastly superior to us economically they have seven planets which is quite a few more than us we've only got habitats at the moment but because we're superior to them we can propose a subjugation agreement now the important thing you're going to want to do here is set integration to be permitted after that set everything to be very much in favor of the subject we do want them to be happy after all and if they still won't agree to become your subject we then get to stage two now here what we're going to do is we're going to give up some of our research and i'm going to recommend strategic resources over your basic economy the economic impact of giving up basic and advanced resources can be quite bad depending on the size of the economy you're trying to take over in this case their economy is quite a bit bigger than ours so we we probably don't want to give away lots of basic and advanced resources by giving away 15 percent of their strategic production and 15 of their research production they will now happily accept the agreement to become our subject [Laughter] if you do end up getting more than one subject make sure you've got something like the shared destiny ascension perk that's going to mean you don't suffer any monthly loyalty penalties from having multiple subjects for every subject you have passed the first every other subject will suffer a minus one loyalty so if you have three subjects each subject will get minus two loyalty per month now that 10 years have passed with the mandate of prak they've actually ended up becoming equivalent to us they are now equivalent in their military power superior technologically and equivalent economically but that won't help them because we're now going to integrate this subject for the low low cost of 296 influence and it's only going to take us 59 months so this is costing us a subsidy of around 50 research from each category so 150 research over a period of around 16 years and for that we're going to get seven planets a navy and an entire empire the mandate of prak and there we go everything has just triggered we're now going to get to fully integrate all of prak into our empire when i click this button we get it all our tech weight has exploded the navy size has gone up dramatically because we've managed to get all of the ships of the neighboring empire that were once our rivals simply because we managed to sneak ahead of them in military power and offer them such fantastic terms when they were becoming our vassal but what about becoming a vassal are there any ways of cheesing that well you'd be surprised to know there are quite a few ways that we can cheese the ai when we want to become a vassal first thing you want to do is you'll want to make sure you've got a reasonable stockpile of all resources so that one month will not bankrupt your economy and in order to become a vassal you don't actually have to disband any fleets we're back here to the mandated prac back in the similar situation but we can still ask to become their subject now let's say we wanted our overlord to give us lots and lots of nice subsidies well they would say absolutely not get out of town that is insane but what if it wasn't insane what you're going to need to do is go through every one of your planets and unemploy every single pop this will have some minor stability and production issues but don't worry we're going to fix it after just one month because generally speaking a single month of massive negative stability and negative amenities will not destroy your economy and it will also not make all of these planets revolt this has now caused us to appear economically very weak if we look at the economic power of our neighbor they are now overwhelming towards us we have just gone past that one month mark and there as you can see we're now producing basically no resources because we are apparently so weak and inferior now because we've given up all of our production and unemployed all of our pops for just one month the overlord is now more than happy to give us 45 of our base research production every month as a subsidy as well as 15 of our advanced alloys and other income we don't have to join their conflicts we don't have to they don't have to join ours we will give them some holdings we'll also restrict our voting sure but we won't give them integration rights this apparently sounds like an absolutely fantastic deal to them so we're going to say yes and proceed and there we are they have agreed the mandator prak will step in and help us out now we're going to go and restore all of our jobs [Music] and we'll get to the end of the month and bam all of our production has now changed it's now back where it used to be but not only that we are now getting significant subsidies from our overlord they're paying around 70 to 80 research of every category per month as well as a whole bunch of alloys if we were to try to come back to renegotiate this agreement they would say no with an acceptance of minus 1 750. so yes you've got it here folks this is how you can cheese the overlords due to the way they've actually set up the acceptance ratings it means you can get more resources more stuff out of the ai empires if you are their vassal rather than if you are the overlord when you're the overlord it is impossible to get an ai empire to agree to give you tribute in more than two categories but as a subject it is very very simple to get an ai overlord to hand you enormous subsidies in multiple resource categories this is the ultimate in negotiation the ultimate art of the deal if you've enjoyed this video and you've enjoyed how to steal everything from your ai neighbors why not go one step further and learn how to steal their genetic heritage as well if you'd like to know how to steal the genetic heritage of an entire species click the video on screen now

Channel: Montu Plays

Views: 79,872

Keywords: Stellaris, stellaris gameplay, montu plays, montu plays stellaris, stellaris overlord, stellaris overlord vassals, stellaris overlord vassal contracts, stellaris vassal contract, stellaris exploit, stellaris overlord guide, stellaris overlord gameplay, stellaris 3.4, stellaris 3.4 cepheus update

Id: I3LEtOPv3K0

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022