About Secret Fealties (2024)

1. Why is this a thing?

It's called secret fealty, not "everyone, but my overlord knows" fealty. What's the point of making it exclusive anyway, if you want to get rid of your current overlord, do you really care which of the potential candidates replaces them, does it has to be whoever asked first?

2. Why do I need a special CB for my soon to be subjects to actually support me?
Using the allegiance war CB? Fine we support you.
Want to subjugate our current overlord or impose your ideology on them? We'll rather fight with them.
And it's even worse when two overlords have a defensive pact. You can only ever get the subjects of one of them, the subjects of the other will fight you even if they have sworn secret fealty.

3. Why do empires sometimes randomly cancel secret fealties?
Sometimes you have an empire swear secret fealty, cancel it after a while and when you look they would accept it again right away even though they just cancelled it.
I even had a situation where I had three empires swear secret fealty to me just before I declared war on their overlord and one cancelled during the vote for war, but still voted for the war. I tried to get them to swear again, but the war started with them on their overlords side and after the war was over they still became my vassal.

fusei said:

1. Why is this a thing?
It's called secret fealty, not "everyone, but my overlord knows" fealty. What's the point of making it exclusive anyway, if you want to get rid of your current overlord, do you really care which of the potential candidates replaces them, does it has to be whoever asked first?

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I mean, kinda? If I were a vassal I'd hate to be taken over by some blundering idiot empire that keeps going into fruitless wars or someone with a proven record of absorbing vassals.

2. Why do I need a special CB for my soon to be subjects to actually support me?
Using the allegiance war CB? Fine we support you.
Want to subjugate our current overlord or impose your ideology on them? We'll rather fight with them.
And it's even worse when two overlords have a defensive pact. You can only ever get the subjects of one of them, the subjects of the other will fight you even if they have sworn secret fealty.

Click to expand...

This is just yet another manifestation of Stellaris' rigid, half-finished war negotiations. It's been a problem for a long time, but it's only getting worse as new mechanics are being square-peg-round-hole'd to fit the limited war mechanics.

3. Why do empires sometimes randomly cancel secret fealties?
Sometimes you have an empire swear secret fealty, cancel it after a while and when you look they would accept it again right away even though they just cancelled it.
I even had a situation where I had three empires swear secret fealty to me just before I declared war on their overlord and one cancelled during the vote for war, but still voted for the war. I tried to get them to swear again, but the war started with them on their overlords side and after the war was over they still became my vassal.

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Welcome to Stellaris AI. If you still have the save file you might want to file a bug report because I'm pretty sure that's not intended behaviour although sincere well done to the game for being able to keep up with that silliness and even managing to transfer the vassal without collapsing in on itself.

Zoomy said:

I mean, kinda? If I were a vassal I'd hate to be taken over by some blundering idiot empire that keeps going into fruitless wars or someone with a proven record of absorbing vassals.

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But the problem is they would be perfectly happy to swear secret fealty to me, if they hadn't already sworn it to someone else.
And considering who was left at this stage of the game they probably swore fealty to the defensive pact buddy of their own overlord.

fusei said:

But the problem is they would be perfectly happy to swear secret fealty to me, if they hadn't already sworn it to someone else.
And considering who was left at this stage of the game they probably swore fealty to the defensive pact buddy of their own overlord.

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Oh, Secret Fealty being exclusive is kinda silly, agreed. You should be able to propose it to multiple empires and the first to declare and win the war gets to keep you, and then all your other SFs get annulled and you'd have to redo them if you wanted to bail a second time.

I agree that secret fealties should work more like claims.

They should be part of any war declared by the pledged empire on the overlord. And perhaps even defensive wars declared by the overlord on the pledging empire, once the latter selects a war goal.

Zoomy said:

Oh, Secret Fealty being exclusive is kinda silly, agreed. You should be able to propose it to multiple empires and the first to declare and win the war gets to keep you,

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I'd still cap it at 3; pledging to more empires than that feels excessive.