Autonomous Vassals – Baron Mod

Absolute Crown Authority weighing you down? Manually garrisoning all those Motte & Baileys growing tedious? Your available peasants to tax just too sparse on certain map gens? Like the concept of Vassals but wish they were more useful?

Well look no further good Baron, now you too can delegate in style and leave all those pesky details up to your loyal underlings.

This mod heavily expands upon the Baron class’s Vassals, enabling them to upgrade their personal garrisons via retainers and improving the surrounding lands of their small fiefdoms. Particularly successful Vassals may even eventually upgrade their backwater Motte & Baileys into Castles, further expanding their ability to defend the lands you have entrusted to them.

Utilizing several features from my other Baron mod – Raise the Levies! – as well as incorporating more organic terrain terraforming, you’ll watch as your Vassals slowly grow the strength of their, and by extension your, domain year after year.

(NOTE: This mod is NOT compatible with Raise the Levies. If you want to use the two together please use this Autonomous Vassals + Raise the Levies Compatibility version instead.)

The mod has been extensively tested almost exclusively on the following settings and is intended to be played on them as a baseline:

Map Size: Enormous
Era: Any
# of AI: 8-16 (teams of 1-3)
AI Difficulty: Knight
Wilder: Enabled
Multiplayer: Co-op (optional) [Never Tested in Versus, YMMV]

I do plan to add more content to Autonomous Vassals in the future and further improve their personal impact upon Elysium.

Summary

45+ Units
– Noble retainers, each of which enhances the defenses of the fort as well as offering special bonuses
– Bailifs, who wander around the surrounding area, taxing the peasants and improving the local infrastructure
– Men-At-Arms & defensive siege equipment
– Local patrol forces
– Vassals can now be placed in Castles
– Several small features from Raise the Levies! such as buffed Unicorn Knights
– Numerous Easter Egg units

Vassal Retainers
Each retainer a Vassal hires will have an effect upon the fortress. Whether its the Master-At-Arms organizing new groups of defenders, Blacksmiths to improve the armaments of the Vassal’s army, personal Court Mages, Plague Doctors to heal diseases – and numerous other retainers are available to these fledgling lords. Via Retainers, with enough time Vassals will eventually generate well over 1500+ gold worth of defenders for their fort, given they don’t run off and suicide charge the local magic library of course.

Realm Management
Your Vassals will now send out Bailiffs, whose duties consist of shaking down the local peasantry for more taxes, stationing garrison forces in valuable locations, and converting underutilized land into productive farms, villages and mines.

Castellans
Vassals can now be given Castles to govern, and may even convert their Motte & Bailey into a Castle given sufficient time to improve their demesne. Vassals who are lords of their own Castle will send out patrols to defend the surrounding land and have access to a greater number of Retainers than their poorer backwater Bailey counterparts.

Unicorn Vassals
Unicorn Vassal Knights and normal Vassal Knights have access to a number of different Retainers and are prone to developing their surrounding areas differently from one another. Give both a try, different locations may benefit more from one or the other.

As stated above, this mod is NOT compatible with my other baron mod, Raise the Levies. Aside from that however it should be compatible with pretty much any other mod, as it alters very little of the base game.

If there is a compatibility issue it is probably related to conflicting numbers being used, if that is the case simply find the conflicting numbers and alter them in the c5m of this or the other mod. The following are the relevant numbers used in the mod:

Custom Terrains N/A
Terrain Groups -1055 & -1081
Variables N/A

Join My Discord[discord.gg] – I’ve set up a discord where you can get info & updates on my current & upcoming projects, this is also the easiest way to get in touch with me. I plan on expanding into modding Dominions & other games in the future, I hope you’ll look forward to playing those as I am.

If you like what I do and want to throw a few bucks my way I’ve opened a ko-fi account: https://ko-fi.com/hsmasher.

I take mod commissions – if you’ve got a mod you’d like me to make for you, or you’d like an extra pair of hands for your own, get in touch, if I like it and feel it’s something within my ability to make I’d be happy to do so.