Quote:
Originally Posted by LifeRebooted
OK so I gobbled up Candar, Byzantium (vassalizing Athens in the process), Albania, the Trebizond capital, Karaman, and Serbia (in that order). My hope was that by ping-ponging back and forth between east and west I would limit my aggressive overexpansion.
It seems that now, however, I am starting to upset the Mamaluks and Wallachia in particular. I am not too concerned about either of them, but I am beginning to wonder whether I am not doing enough to contain my AE.
It seems like vassalizing nations creates nearly as much AE, so I am also not so sure when I should do that rather than just taking them. Just when I am short on admin points and diplo-annexing is more viable?
If a country lost a ton of land and gets reduced to 1/a few provinces, and has a ton of cores on its lost land, if you force-vassalize them you can then retake those cores for very low AE. They can also be useful if there are a lot of wrong-religion and wrong-culture provinces that can be fed to your vassal where they would be same-culture and same-religion. For example, you could force vassalize Serbia and feed them all the Serbian and Orthodox provinces in Hungary, Bosnia, Ragusa, Albania, etc.
As ottos it doesn't matter as much because you can just steamroll over everything and get bonuses to core cost reduction and tolerance of heathens, but feeding your vassal its cores is extremely useful as smaller countries and when in high-AE areas like the HRE.