Manual Inadequacy: Need Explanations of...

[sunsmountain]

A Protectorate is an agreement between your faction and the other faction who can chose to fall under and become part of your Protectorate: An area of the known world which falls under your (Roman) protection.

At the time of their acceptance, all of their faction's lands count as regions conquered towards your goal (50) after which you must take Rome. The best thing is that you dont actually have to conquer them, they count towards your goal, but they do not yield you any resources. In fact, rumour has it they cost you about 50000 a turn, but let's hope that is a bug... although i've had my treasuries depleted in these deals, ive never seen a monthly cost.

Note that giving a faction under your Protectorate another region (because it has a distance to capital of 80% and you dont feel like keeping an army there) does NOT count toward you goal of 50 regions.

As for getting a Protectorate, a number of things have to be in place, when asking:
- NO Spies/Assassins in their territory (creates distrust during negotiations, and they always know)
- You killed off most of their armies (recently), use the historical graphs to check this, you may have missed that army of skirmishers in the corner (notably when asking the Numidians).
- Your armies are bordering, but NOT inside their regions (creates distrust during negotiations)
- Any trade rights or alliances you may have had with them in the past work against you now, since you obviously broke those agreements. Time will heal these 'wounds' though, so try again later.
- When offering money, trade rights or map information to make up for any negative attitude they have, in addition to asking for them to Become a Protectorate, the AI won't counter offer. It will simpy reject or accept, based on the height of the amount offered (where trade rights and map information simply count as money: trade rights ~500, map information ~3000).
However, if you add (poor) regions in the deal, they will counter offer, and ask for good regions. At that point you can buy them out (replace regions by large amounts of money, in the order of 5000 each, at least, depending on difficulty and diplomat skill).

This is how i get my Protectorates, which i may add is quite difficult (and the manual says fuck all about it). Of course due to AI re-assessment on every re-load, you can also ignore their attitude towards you, offer the protectorate, re-load, and offer it again (without extras, both cases). They will always accept. This way you can 'win' the game in 267 BC...