What's the point of creating a hegemony nowadays?

[Commander Tobe]

With the new subjugation sytem I feel like building a hegemony and spending a lot of time (and envoys) to gain full control over it is obsolete. I find it much easier to just build a giant fleet and subjugate empires. Is there actually a viable reason to choose forming a hegemony instead of subjugating empires that I don't see?

 

[mial42]

Instead of? No. But you can do both - fed vassals are easier to keep loyal, since you can give them super-generous war terms (join all theirs, they join none of yours) since they're in a federation. Doesn't have to be a Hegemony though; I'd make a Trade League, Research Cooperative, or even Holy Alliance before a Hegemony.

 

[A2ch0n]

Doesn't have to be a Hegemony though;

For a vassals only fed i would always stay with a hegemony. Permanent leader + huge fed fleet (keeps loyalty too) and more control about the members. In addition the members get more resource production and at least i want healthy vassals (with fair contracts) to prevent uprisings and keep them loyal.

 

[HFY]

Yeah, agree with OP -- Hegemony seems a bit out-dated now that Overlords are a thing.

Doesn't have to be a Hegemony though; I'd make a Trade League, Research Cooperative, or even Holy Alliance before a Hegemony.

Yeah, exactly -- now that you can be a permanent Overlord and also get the benefits of the better Federation types, what's the point of Hegemony existing?

 

[A2ch0n]

what's the point of Hegemony existing

Have you ever used it this way and be it for test purpose? In my opinion there is no better federation type. I really like it. The other ones give better boni, granted, but the hegemony on it's own is the best in case of stability, control and power. The fleet contribution is at the lower end of cohesion and being the all time ruler is another benefit on it's own. Over all i like the effects and especially the over all impression.

So i would say it definitely has its purpose and didn't need to change.

 

[Less2]

There's not much reason if you are taking lots of vassals. They always vote for you, so you have no trouble controlling it. Cohesion is already high. You probably don't care about the fed fleet if you are abusing vassals since your own fleets are strong enough. Hegemony is good for fed fleet if you start with it as an origin but otherwise you're better off with Research Cooperative for the large research boost (massive during crisis), which also helps your vassals keep up with you in tech and avoid them becoming protectorate.

 

[A2ch0n]

don't care about the fed fleet if you are abusing vassals since your own fleets are strong enough

1) I don't see any abuse. I subjugate peaceful and make fair contracts (as a feudal society empire) where i try to give the same amount that i take, except diplomatic freedom. The last thing i want is constant war.
2) The federation fleet is essential in my opinion. But hey thats my kind of play and yes you can RP on GA difficulty without problems if you know the game. No need to min/max.

 

[Harry Angel]

With Hegomeny - Powerfull feed your fleet,
As leader you dont need deal too much with AI wierd decision behavior and -1000 points bcs they dont like you

 

[Rooker75]

If I have multiple vassals (which is rare) and I've gone down Diplomacy (which is also pretty rare) and I am Authoritarian (also rare), then chances are I'll create a Hegemony and stick all my vassals in it for the bonuses and fleet. I stay out of federations usually, so I don't see a downside to doing this if all the moons and planets line up right.

 

[amib]

With the new subjugation sytem I feel like building a hegemony and spending a lot of time (and envoys) to gain full control over it is obsolete. I find it much easier to just build a giant fleet and subjugate empires. Is there actually a viable reason to choose forming a hegemony instead of subjugating empires that I don't see?

hegemony is different from the other federations. you shouldn't bother adding empires to it diplomatically. you should form the hegemony, spin off a vassal with restricted voting so they vote the same as you every time. kick out the non-vassal empires, and then subjugate them as vassals with limited diplomacy so they vote your way.

if you give them generous terms and keep them happy as your vassals by specializing them according to their preferences, they are less likely to rebel and will happily continue to be productive client states within your hegemony. you don't lose your naval capacity by level 2 so you don't have to worry about that, you can keep your fleets stronger than all of theirs and once you pass the vote for war declarations and who joins and all that, you can then use the hegemony's fleets and power to subjugate more empires.

i don't think i've actually used the hegemony CB more than once or twice, it's easier to just subjugate them and that brings them into the hegemony anyway.

 

[Less2]

hegemony is different from the other federations. you shouldn't bother adding empires to it diplomatically. you should form the hegemony, spin off a vassal with restricted voting so they vote the same as you every time. kick out the non-vassal empires, and then subjugate them as vassals with limited diplomacy so they vote your way.

If you're doing that then Hegemony isn't really different from other federations. Most of the value of a Hegemony comes from the fact that you can always maintain control of it, but if all the AIs are your vassal that really isn't a problem. In my Common Ground game they in fact were willing to immediately become a subject diplomatically the day after I kicked them out.

 

[Cry_Havok]

Hegemony's killer app, as it were, is the fact that the leader doesn't have to pay fleet cap tax, and unlike Science Directorate and Holy Covenant gets a + damage to crisis buff. And at level 5 you actually get to steal your allies diplo power, meaning it's going to be almost impossible to lose control. (and even more dominant in the Galactic Senate) Trade League is still my favourite, and a case can be made for Generic Federation and Martial Alliance for the +50% damage to crisis, but I still like Hegemony

 

[blahmaster6k]

There's not much reason if you are taking lots of vassals. They always vote for you, so you have no trouble controlling it. Cohesion is already high. You probably don't care about the fed fleet if you are abusing vassals since your own fleets are strong enough. Hegemony is good for fed fleet if you start with it as an origin but otherwise you're better off with Research Cooperative for the large research boost (massive during crisis), which also helps your vassals keep up with you in tech and avoid them becoming protectorate.

Specialist vassals can't become protectorates, so if you just make everything a prospectorium or scholarium you won't run into the protectorate issue. The only disadvantage of specialist vassals is a little bit of subsidies, but the taxes coming in will more than offset any subsidies you're paying out.

 

[DeanTheDull]

With the new subjugation sytem I feel like building a hegemony and spending a lot of time (and envoys) to gain full control over it is obsolete. I find it much easier to just build a giant fleet and subjugate empires. Is there actually a viable reason to choose forming a hegemony instead of subjugating empires that I don't see?

What do you think the value of a Federation is?

Remember that before Overlord, a complaint was that Federations were the big 'everyone in the galaxy is part of this defensive block and the game gets too boring to conquer everyone' complaint to snowballing. This is because- unlike vassals- everyone in a Federation is included in the war, everyone contributes to the Federation fleet cap, and- unless you order pass a law otherwise- everyone pays into it's construction. (And why would you? Having other empires pay for your upkeep-free fleets is pure bonus alloys.)

Federations are currently powerful not as an alternative to vassals, but by doubling-down on the benefits of vassals. The diplomatic trust translates to loyalty, the auto-join wars means you can trade those terms in your contract negotiations, the free agreements or Federation member benefits help your vassals be better contributors to you. Hegemonies in particular are considered good for tributary relationships, because the worker bonuses that your federation members get go to the vassals who are paying you worker tribute. Since the goals of a tributary system are to get your own pops to be as close to a 100% specialist economy for maximum output and sprawl efficiency, this is good.

The crux is that hegemonies aren't actually the best at this. The most economically powerful federation is the Trade Federation, due to how the power of the free trade agreements scale with the number of members you have, which means vassal-spam is empowered massively. (11 member trade federations basically double their empire's TV production due to giving 10% of their TV to each other member.) Martial Federations are the biggest fleet beneficiaries and key to 0-influence claim builds. Science Federations... aren't that great, but are genuinely good for letting you bee-line key techs but then catch up on the power of the research agreements.

 

[Less2]

Specialist vassals can't become protectorates, so if you just make everything a prospectorium or scholarium you won't run into the protectorate issue. The only disadvantage of specialist vassals is a little bit of subsidies, but the taxes coming in will more than offset any subsidies you're paying out.

Costs a lot of influence to do that if you are going to take over the galaxy. And in any case, vassals getting research boosts helps you too. *stares at like 3M fleet power worth of vassals attached to me fighting the crisis*

Science Federations... aren't that great, but are genuinely good for letting you bee-line key techs but then catch up on the power of the research agreements.

+45% research rate as an empire-wide bonus (multiplicative with pop modifiers) during the mid to lategame is pretty busted. +90% if you hit level 5 and have a crisis active, which is absolutely broken. We're talking 2-3 month repeatables. I'm including the base impact of a research agreement, normally players wouldn't go back and forth testing which AIs have what they are researching for every tech, but with a large federation someone just naturally has researched everything before.

 

[DrTentacles]

Hegemonies are currently thematically redundant with Vassals, yeah.

Mechanically, they're the most tolerable Federation because you have to deal with the AI invite spam/war dec spam/fleet management the least.

Federations are something I'd love to see a Custodian/QoL pass on. I'm willing to accept any "break from reality/agency" thing to stop the constant alert spam.

I'd suggest that Federations should have an "agenda" like the galactic community, where they focus choose to on either strengthening communal bonds, expansion (peaceful), or war, and offer bonuses based on a vote/summit at set intervals. What federation members want to do should align with a visible empire agenda/stance.

I'd prefer to see Hegemonies and vassals merged, where a hegemony serves are a "meta-bloc" that dictates your internal policy toward your vassals, and what sort of actions vassals are allowed to take toward each other. For example, vassals shouldn't be locked out of declaring war with each other, and diplomatic options for vassals should probably have more to do with the hegemony, while resource tariffs can stay under the current vassal UI.

It's a problem with the current DLC system that AI politics have ended up incredibly compartmentalized, and they could absolutely use a general pass to give greater clarity, less modularity, and avoid giant diplomacy boni that override AI "personality" and ethics and create unbreakable uber-federations.

 

[Millbot]

Hegemony is hurt the most by the current imbalances with the vassal system because the vassal system does almost everything that a hegemony does, only much better.

If I were spit balling ideas.

-Vassals should eat a diplomatic weight malus, since everyone in a federation, the GALCOM and the Galactic Empire would be aware that they aren't independent. This would be a nerf to vassal spam, but would also help hegemons because that means independent empires in their federation would be more useful to getting resolutions passed than having vassals. I want to say, there is a federation law where you can force your fellow members to vote with you or maybe it was that you got a chunk of their diplomatic weight.

-They need to introduce federation holdings. If I were doing it, The bonuses for holding would scale with federation level. not sure if all four slots would be available out of the gate or locked behind the federation levels. For each vassal you have, you'd eat a malus that lowers the benefit you get from federation holdings., You're Hegemons and Galactic Unions would have access to all the federation holdings as a thing that sets them apart from other federation types. Then an area where those two would differ, is that a hegemon leader could determine what holding buildings are available or that other members have to build. So if there is a holding that boosts food production and you think it's a huge waste of resources, you as the hegemon leader could forbid members of your federation from building it, while mandating that at least one of their holding slots has to be filled with the joint federation research building.

-Even if they rework the cohesion mechanic to be less brutal, if it still remains, maybe vassals have a modifier that increases the cohesion they cause or have it so they are less able to mitigate cohesion issues within the federation. This would be more about making it less appealing to create a federation that is is almost nothing but vassals. I want to say, they did make it so that you can't create a federation with a vassal, not sure if they also made it so that your federation goes poof if all the other members are your vassals. Regardless, if it's the later, it really doesn't stop a player from creating a one system empire to be the sole independent AI empire in a player's federation, while all the other empires are vassals of the player.

-They probably do need to accept some immersion loss and give players more control over federation they are in, while the AI has less control because god is it dumb at times. I admit that would weaken the point of Hegemons, but making the AI less obnoxious to deal with, isn't a strong selling point and is kind of damn in it's own right. "Hey, your choices are have some really nice bonuses, that the idiot AI ruins or have okay bonuses, but the AI can't ruin those."

 

[Kharrus]

With the new subjugation sytem I feel like building a hegemony and spending a lot of time (and envoys) to gain full control over it is obsolete. I find it much easier to just build a giant fleet and subjugate empires. Is there actually a viable reason to choose forming a hegemony instead of subjugating empires that I don't see?

It's the best way to fast-track becoming the Galactic Imperium, especially after the nerfs to multi-vassal empires. The fact that members can't willingly leave, as well as the Join or Die casus belli and other federation perks, make it the easiest fed type to just roll over everyone and scoop up other empires into your federation regardless of type or diplomatic relation.

 

[Thiend]

It's the best way to fast-track becoming the Galactic Imperium, especially after the nerfs to multi-vassal empires. The fact that members can't willingly leave, as well as the Join or Die casus belli and other federation perks, make it the easiest fed type to just roll over everyone and scoop up other empires into your federation regardless of type or diplomatic relation.

The post to which you are replying, and indeed the entire thread, is two years old.

The nerfs to multi-vassal gameplay, toothless as they are, also didn't exist for over a year after the last post in this thread.

 

[Ikael]

I really do hope that feds and vassals get a balance pass at some point. And most importantly; to the relationship between those two systems.

Ps: Yeah hegemonies became kinda redundant once specialized vassal swarms arrived.