Feudalism and Vassalizations are both meant to be very decentralized empire organizations.Oberlus wrote: ↑Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:44 amFeudalism and Vassalization require Confederation (and so are impossible to adopt with Centralization), and I think it should be the opposite, since Confederation implies freedom to stay in the empire and the others imply domination from a central government.
Feudalism causes an empire-owned planet to collect industry from same-species populated but unowned planets in the same system. The imperial government has no direct control of those planets, so can't put buildings on them or change their focus or directly affect them with (most?) techs or policies. As a result, the empire doesn't pay any additional influence upkeep for them, but can still extract useful work from them.
Vassalization is similar, but for collecting influence from different-species planets from the capital or local empire-controlled planet. This is envisioned as slightly more decentralized since it's for other-species planets and collects a less tangible resource (influence vs. industry).
There is also Colonialism, which also extracts industry, but from any unowned planet with any species on it that is in the supply network and within a 3 starlane jumps of an owned planet (not just in the same system). Whether this is more or less centralized is debatable.
All these are supposed to make the unowned planets be sort-of part of the empire, while giving the empire no direct control of the planets and requiring a local empire presence (another owned planet) to collect the resources. This way one can grow an empire larger without having to go through the process of invading and depopulating and recolonizing or maintaining direct control over every planet that can be reached. Arguably they might not help much with the micromanagement as things are now, as one can colonize a bunch of planets and then decree them to be independent in order to benefit from them with these policies. Might have to think about how to make that not worth doing...
Doing this decently for tech->policy unlocks will probably require some reorganization of the tech tree. I found that there weren't a lot of good places to put many policies with the existing techs. This probably isn't surprising, since the tech categories weren't planned around having lots of econ/social policies to unlock and haven't been groomed since then with that goal.Reallocate the unlocking of some policies... there are techs that unlock too many policies