Suggestions: Punishing disloyal vassals

[Cabezaestufa]

Something that annoyed me in my Sengoku games so far is how relatively powerless you are against treacherous vassals despite being the clan leader. If a powerful vassal is really commited to ruining your day, there's not much you can do about it. You can try to lower his honor using ninjas, but most of the time you do it once (which is usually never enough to get him to commit seppukku) and by the time you can get a second ninja he already has more honor than he had at the beginning. You could try to kill him, but chances are his successor will hate you even more. And reducing his power by taking back his titles is horrendously expensive in honor (I know, I know, honor is plentiful at this point, but the nice fellas from Paradox are supposed to be working on fixing that for the next patch). So I have a couple suggestions to give you more options in dealing with these damn traitors.

First of all, how come they can plot against you, send ninjas against you, and do all kinds of mischief and then come out unscathed even if they get caught? Why would it even cost me any honor to take titles away from some jerk who just allied with my worst enemy to betray the whole clan? So I propose to bring back the concept of "casus belli", just not against other clans (opinion works well in that case), but against your vassals. If a vassal just tried to kill you, you should most certainly be more than justified in taking all his titles and making him split his belly, so the honor cost in taking these actions should be reduced. Discovered plots, ninja attacks and things like that should give you a "justified cause" to take actions against your vassal. And the concept could be expanded even further: Imagine a new ninja action, let's call it "Framed!", that on success would give a clan leader a "justified cause" against a certain vassal of your choice...

Other things that you could do: trying to remove the vassal by force in case of extreme disobedience or rebellious behaviour. Why is it that only a vassal can trigger a civil war? The clan leader could also spark one by sending his army to remove a vassal forcefully. This would immediately give the rest of your vassals a relations penalty against you (if you don't have the aforementioned "justified cause") and then create a civil war where you get the vassals that support your heir on your side, and the vassals which support the victim if he is a pretender or would have supported him if he was (after taking into account the relations hit) on his side. This way, if you saw a rebellion coming, you could spark it on your terms (instead of resigning yourself to get backstabbed the moment your powerful neighbour finally decides to gobble all your lands).

Finally, how about plotting against one of your vassals? Not sure how this could go, but maybe if you can get most of the clan against him he could be forced to renounce to his claims to clan leadership and/or retire to a monastery. I just think plotting is a great mechanic, but a bit underused at the moment, and it would be great if a clan leader could find more uses for it than finding allies for attacking a bigger clan.

 

[Wilsonrtf]

Other things that you could do: trying to remove the vassal by force in case of extreme disobedience or rebellious behaviour. Why is it that only a vassal can trigger a civil war? The clan leader could also spark one by sending his army to remove a vassal forcefully. This would immediately give the rest of your vassals a relations penalty against you (if you don't have the aforementioned "justified cause") and then create a civil war where you get the vassals that support your heir on your side, and the vassals which support the victim if he is a pretender or would have supported him if he was (after taking into account the relations hit) on his side. This way, if you saw a rebellion coming, you could spark it on your terms (instead of resigning yourself to get backstabbed the moment your powerful neighbour finally decides to gobble all your lands).

I like this idea best. If a vassal refuses his liege order, there could be a decision to start a civil war against him. Your vassals would not like it, though, mostly if the guy has high honor. Maybe some of them would even join his side.

The plot idea is also interesting, but would require some good thinking to prevent gamey tatics.

 

[Nefaro]

There should be a special Plot created to attempt replacing an unloyal vassal. The plot system is pretty cool, and I think it deserves some additional options all around.

Suggestions on details?

 

[Finnish Dragon]

There should be a special Plot created to attempt replacing an unloyal vassal. The plot system is pretty cool, and I think it deserves some additional options all around.

Suggestions on details?

I think plotting to remove a disloyal vassal is a better idea than trying to remove him by using force. Using force against a member of the own clan would upset other members of the clan triggering a possibility that they would join they vassal if they feel that the attack on a vassal is unjustified.

A plot should be something like trying to frame him conspiring against the clan leader. That should make other vassals angry on him and it should force him to commit seppuku or go to a monastery. There is always a possibility that he is able to find out about that plot and then is exposes it causing the clan leader to lose honor.

 

[Wilsonrtf]

I think plotting to remove a disloyal vassal is a better idea than trying to remove him by using force. Using force against a member of the own clan would upset other members of the clan triggering a possibility that they would join they vassal if they feel that the attack on a vassal is unjustified.

But that´s exactly what´s nice about it! :laugh:

I would vote for both options.

 

[Cabezaestufa]

I think plotting to remove a disloyal vassal is a better idea than trying to remove him by using force. Using force against a member of the own clan would upset other members of the clan triggering a possibility that they would join they vassal if they feel that the attack on a vassal is unjustified.

Not if you had an actual reason for it, hence all my talk about these internal casus belli. If the guy just conspired to make another clan declare war on me just to break free (for instance) and was discovered, the rest of my vassals should be urging me to go beat his ass. After all, they would have been dragged into war if he had succeeded too. On the other hand it should be possible to do it without good reason too, after all if I want to antagonize my whole clan, why would the game want to stop me?

Just use an algorithm to see who supports who (in fact, it's already been implemented: they use it to calculate which pretender is supported by which vassal) and it's all set. Even some vassals might choose to remain neutral (and possibly backstab you when all your troops are commited against the other faction!).