Protectorates

[Cheexsta]

From my experience:

NEVER TRY AND GET PROTECTORATES.

You will always gain a protectorate if you offer them a million mnai in return, but they are so bugged it is not funny. It screws with your income reports at the beginning of each turn, even when the alliance is broken.

So my advice would be to avoid getting them altogether.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Wise answers from Ludens and Cheexsta. No surprise of course that though!

[Dumbass]

From my experience:

NEVER TRY AND GET PROTECTORATES.

You will always gain a protectorate if you offer them a million mnai in return, but they are so bugged it is not funny. It screws with your income reports at the beginning of each turn, even when the alliance is broken.

So my advice would be to avoid getting them altogether.

I could do the wise thing and listen to your advice. But no I must keep trying to get proctectorates even if they are buggy. Why you say? Cos they're soo damn irresistable!

[skuzzy]

Protectorates are nice for empires far from your capital. You get cash incentive and do not have to deal with enormous building project and army costs to maintain the cities. So the idea is cash incentive instead of draining your pocket. Unfortunately the AI has some sort of Japanese WW2 complex and enjoys watching themselves crumble. I really wish that Sega would realize they have a specialized niche of players and stop trying to glamorize the game and work on AI. But this argument is old, yet the thread sadly reminds me of it. God bless the EB team.

[Tiberius Nero]

In my experience you can't get protectorates in anything that plays with the RTW 1.5 .exe period. Come to think of it, you can't even get a ceasefire (except in the early, early years of the campaign), let alone protectorates. Even if you have reduced the enemy to a small town in the middle of the desert and you offer them 30 regions and 100000 cash back, they will still laugh at any sort of offer that terminates hostilities. It is pathetic.

[Cheexsta]

I could do the wise thing and listen to your advice. But no I must keep trying to get proctectorates even if they are buggy. Why you say? Cos they're soo damn irresistable!

In my Roman campaign I got sick of the Carthaginians constantly attacking my lands in Africa, so I gathered up a million mnai (not that hard when you own enough gold mines) and paid them to become my protectorates.

The first few turns were fine, they paid the money back (since protectorates give you a certain amount of money depending on what they don't spend - and since they won't spend a million mnai in a turn, you get it all back anyway) and everything was fine and dandy.

But then after a while the income reports got all messed up. According to the report I was earning 30k each turn from diplomacy, but it didn't add into my treasury. It got so frustrating that I ended up rolling back to an earlier savegame from several years before, and just crushed the Carthaginians completely.

This used to happen in 1.2 as well, but not as much (it only happened when I tried any of the "diplomacy exploits" of 1.2).

So my suggestion would be to avoid the headaches that accompany protectorates completely.