Consequences of Noncompliance

[Prussian1]

What are the consequences (besides losing the money) of not completing any of the missions?

The missions do not seem to align with my strategic goals and I find myself burning resources on wild goose chases that detract from the rest of the game.

[PBI]

Missions from the Council of Elders can be safely ignored and allowed to expire with no consequence whatsoever as far as I am aware.

Missions from the Pope are more serious since they directly affect your Papal favour, but fortunately they are generally limited to "Go on Crusade" (which is a good idea anyway, and only requires you to make a token effort to join to satisfy the Pope, not to actually take the target), "Train a priest" (which is very easy to achieve) and "Stop attacking such and such". The last sort are more serious, but half the point of playing as a Catholic faction is figuring out how to expand at the expense of the other Catholics without being Excommunicated.

The various other missions, from guilds or from rival faction heirs, have little or no consequence for ignoring.

[TevashSzat]

Regarding the Papal missions: You can usually avoid the more troublesome ones by keeping a good relationship with the papal faction. The easiest way to do so is just park a diplomat next to Rome and then just bribe the pope as much as needed to maintain good relations.

Thus, you can attack and obliterate Catholic factions with the pope most often looking the other way

[Galain_Ironhide]

Before the pope even has a chance to say - "stop attacking faction X for 7 turns" you can always just set your self up for a blitz style tactic and take each christian factions pronvices (the ones you want that is) out with the use of catapaults and trebuchets on one turn because you can attack immediatley.

Other wise you can just ignore those requests because, as it stands, the penalties are worthless. Aside from being excommed if that bugs you, like it does me because I like being the friendley devout christian and all :tongue2:.

[Yoyoma1910]

Before the pope even has a chance to say - "stop attacking faction X for 7 turns" you can always just set your self up for a blitz style tactic and take each christian factions pronvices (the ones you want that is) out with the use of catapaults and trebuchets on one turn because you can attack immediatley.

Other wise you can just ignore those requests because, as it stands, the penalties are worthless. Aside from being excommed if that bugs you, like it does me because I like being the friendley devout christian and all :tongue2:.

Being friendly with the pope also helps to insure that you get tons of Cardinals, and that one of your Cardinals is the next pope.