Vanilla Factions Expanded – Empire review

The problem it solves

Royalty gives you a fascinating refugee theocracy and then asks you to interact with it by grinding honor and building a nice chair. Here is the entire vanilla loop:

Potocki’s own words, from the mod’s Steam page: “For such a mysterious, powerful entity in the political sphere of RimWorld, there is surprisingly little content around them. When I wanted to make a Royalty focused playthrough, I quickly realized it’s just a ‘normal playthrough’ with ‘royalty sprinkles’.”

That’s the gap. The Empire is the only faction on the rim with functioning institutions, and vanilla gives you no way to be inside one.

What VFE – Empire changes

Five new titles get slotted into the middle of the ladder — archcount, marquess, archduke, magister, despot. That’s the headline, and it’s the least interesting part.

The change that actually reshapes a colony is the Royal Court:

An archduke needs subordinates who hold their own titles. A high stellarch needs four archcounts, or two marquesses. You cannot climb alone any more.

In practice that means throne rooms plural, bestowing ceremonies plural, and a colony full of conceited pawns who won’t eat plain meals — a whole aristocracy’s worth of overhead, so that one of them can go higher. That’s the moment “I have a psycaster” turns into “I have a court,” and it’s the single best thing in the mod.

Two more rooms arrive in the same spirit, both required from archcount up: a gallery for art exhibitions, and a ballroom for grand balls — a room with instruments in it and, in the mod’s own words, “nothing more — it’s supposed to be a big, empty space.”

The two settings that matter

The mod ships a settings page — Options · Mod settings · VFEE — with exactly two sliders. Both are worth knowing about before you start, because one of them cannot be fixed later.

• Terrorism Chance Multiplier — 0.01× to 5×, default 1×. Turn it down if silent bombs in neutral caravans sound exhausting; turn it up if that is the reason you installed this.
• Nobles per title — how densely the Great Hierarchy is populated. Default is one noble per title, sixteen in total. The mod is refreshingly blunt about the trade: “The fewer nobles, the higher the performance, but the more boring the empire.”

Set the nobles slider before you start. The mod says so itself: “Does not affect the already generated hierarchy.” Once the Great Hierarchy exists in your save, that number is baked in — and it is the number every vassalage and court decision downstream depends on.

Vassalage: you inherit an empire, you don’t build one

The signature system, and the one the lore earns. From marquess up, your nobles can “claim ownership of existing imperial bases and receive regular tithe.”

Read that carefully. You don’t found colonies. You take over towns that are already on your world map — and they become yours personally, not the Empire’s. Tithes arrive by drop pod on a schedule you set: steel, wood, gold, silver, meals, honor. With Ideology, slaves — one every ten days, captured for you by a town you own.

And it spreads geographically: you can only vassalise bases within 100 tiles of you or your existing vassals, so the map fills outward from wherever you started. The mod’s word for you throughout is overlord.

This is the piece Royalty never had. Vanilla makes you a favoured guest of a foreign power. VFE makes you a landholder inside it, with tribute that arrives whether you asked or not.

The deserters, and the best idea in the mod

Vanilla has one deserter and a loyalty squad that’s usually a single trooper. VFE has a hidden faction — ultratech, Sophian, first raids from day 45:

“Deserters are a group of ex-imperial soldiers and nobility who have decided to split away from the Great Hierarchy and adapt to the new, post-shattering life. They are considered public enemy number one.”

Sit with that. These aren’t bandits. They’re nobles — people who had titles, psylinks and a place on the ladder, and walked away. The Empire’s whole project is restoration: keep the hierarchy, keep the stasis, wait out the calamity. The deserters looked at a shattered empire clinging to the etiquette of a dead world and concluded the world was dead. The mod never makes their case, but it’s legible in one phrase: adapt to the new, post-shattering life.

Then there’s terrorism, which only switches on once a colonist holds a title. Deserters start appearing in the peaceful caravans of other factions. And:

“You cannot shoot deserters on sight, unless they have already began the act of terrorism. Shooting them beforehand may anger the caravan owners!”

All three attacks are silent — no letter, no alert. A bomb that beeps and flashes red until it goes off like an antigrain warhead. Poison injected into a meal stack. Or an assassin who peels off from the caravan and walks toward your highest-ranking noble, turning hostile only on arrival.

The mechanic is the theme. The moment you accept a title, ordinary traffic becomes threat surface. You can’t pre-emptively shoot the man walking at your baron, because you can’t prove anything and the caravan is neutral. The price of nobility is that you can never again assume the visitor is just a visitor.

The catch

The ladder hasn’t matched vanilla since 1.5. RimWorld 1.5 renamed three rungs — count became archon, duke became dominus, yeoman became novice. VFE never patched its side. Its only royal-title patch file contains icon assignments, three attribute changes and two room requirements, and not a single label operation. So this is the ladder you actually get:

baron → archon → archcount → marquess → dominus → archduke → consul → magister → despot → stellarch

“Archon” sits directly beside “archcount.” “Dominus” beside “archduke.” And the mod’s own descriptions explain the new ranks using names the game no longer displays: archcount is “bestowed upon those counts who have established impressive holdings” — there are no counts. Nothing breaks; seniority is correct. It’s a fiction seam, sitting in a mod with roughly 393,000 subscribers for two years, because the thing it broke was flavour text and nobody re-reads flavour text.

You do not take the throne. The Steam page says you can “make a play for the Imperial throne.” You can’t. The endgame quest has your stellarch throw an ascension parade and depart “to become the right hand of Emperor [name]” — you leave to serve him. It’s a ladder-climb ending, not a coup.

The intrigues aren’t a system. The blurb promises “intrigues and art exhibitions.” The exhibitions are real. The intrigues are marketing: there is no def, no UI, no mechanic by that name anywhere in the mod. What it points at is Royal Gossip — a social interaction that swings honor by ±1 depending on whether two nobles like each other — plus the terrorism above.

And it’s a leash, not a sandbox. Straight from the mod’s FAQ: “No, this is VFE-Empire, not VFE-Deserters. Being hostile to the Empire makes 95% of the content in this mod disabled.” Every system here assumes you said yes. Rebellion is a different mod.

120 hours in

The overhead is the point, and it’s also the thing that will decide whether you keep it. Running a court means every noble needs a room to spec, and the mod cheerfully lets a high stellarch demand four archcounts before he’ll consider you. That’s four more throne rooms, four more bestowing ceremonies, four more pawns who won’t eat plain food.

Vassalage carries it. Once tithes start landing by drop pod on their own schedule, the colony stops feeling like a farm with a chair in it and starts feeling like the seat of something. That’s the hook, and it lands.

The terrorism is the part I’d keep if I could keep only one thing. It costs nothing when it isn’t happening and changes how you read every caravan when it might be.

What wears thin is the ladder. Once you’ve noticed that archon and archcount are neighbours and that the descriptions refer to ranks that no longer exist, you can’t un-notice it — and this is a mod whose entire pitch is that the fiction deserved better.

Who it’s for

FAQ