Tired of every game becoming a galaxy of 2-3 superoverlords with a dozen vassals each? So am I. So I fixed it. You're welcome.

From now on, when one empire demands another empire bend knee and become a vassal, it will be extremely difficult, but still vaguely possible, to get the other empire to agree. Pretty much the only way for one empire to become a subject of another, the would-be overlord will have to invade and conquer them with a vassalize war goal, which is the way it should work imo.

As for AI empires asking for another AI empire to subjugate them peacefully? No more of that. If they ask *you* or another human player, it should still work as normal, since diplomatic acceptance values are obviously meaningless for humans.

What I've found tends to happen now is that nobody gets to snowball early based on vassal taxes. There will still be a few overlords with multiple vassals, which they gained by invading their neighbors. But this only seems to happen near the end of the mid-game period, at which point it's too late to really snowball properly based on vassal resources.

This has been a massive quality of life improvement for my own games.

INSTALL:
Put this in your Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\mod folder and add it to your playset in the Paradox launcher