excommunication is retarded...in this game

[PittBull260]

you know what it is, you hate it. The pope warns you, if u attack a faction you'll be excommunicated...but that faction can attack you all they want! yea you can defend against it with no consequences but for example, if you see that factions boats coming to get you, you can't attack it you just gotta wait till they get on your land and invade you! I think it's ridiculous....makes me want to disable excommunication in the game (if i knew how)

[Monsieur Alphonse]

Simply become the popes favorite. He won't excom you if you have 8+ crosses. The other guy is also warned. If he is less favored then you, he will be excommed when he attacks you and then you can attack without pissing his Holiness of.

[Seabourch]

Yes it is annoying and retarded. But you can always can play a non-Catholic, they don't suffer from Popes.

[G. Septimus]

but, the funnest factions in the game are the Catholic & Muslim Factions. So You don't have to be Catholic like the modern ERE/ Byzantium Empire and Russia.

[Khorak]

The problem is often from ignoring how the Pope interacts with the factions and how important his good favour can sometimes be. He's linked to the Papal States faction afterall, so mashing up his allies or making an enormous charitable donation for a new giant hat will work just the same as they do with any other faction. I make it a priority to get up a Theologians Guild and produce pious priests to replace the cardinals I'll have stabbed to death in their sleep. As a Catholic faction you have to accept excommunication or get stuck well into the battle for Papal favour.

When your reputation with the Pope totally sucks you can almost guarantee that any act of aggression against another Catholic faction will result in him demanding you stop the bloodshed against them....problem is that they might have good relations and have a varying but much larger number of turns to attack you before he finally gives them the same mission to cease hostility; and even worse, if they have good relations with the big hatted sod, they can just ignore that mission, and only lose some good favour instead of being excommunicated! On the other side of that equation though, the suicidally aggressive AI will cheerfully hurl itself into excommunication, allowing you to cheerfully walk into their lands to rape houses and burn women (am I getting that correct?).

Failing that, your only recourse is to use the superiority of your soft, squishy brain to prepare for an offensive more effectively, so multiple enemy cities can be taken in a single turn with the help of delicious siege engines. The Pope will then effectively be asking you to consolidate on your conquests and really make sure you've got a firm grip on all you've taken before moving on. Thanks Mister Big Hat, I'll be sure to do that.

[Sevis]

Personally, I love the concept of excommunication. It restricts how much I, playing a Catholic nation, can do, but I know the exact same rules go for everyone else, and with a little planning, a few small favours from the pope can give you just the edge you need. Play on the defensive for a few turns, get your enemy excommunicated, and then call a crusade to their capital. Even if you're not the one to get it, it will generally cripple them - without diplomatic retribution. In my game, for instance, after the Holy Roman Empire (which was just a little better than me, England) got excommunicated I called a crusade to their capital - which the French got. Result - HRE is down from their high seat, they absolutely hate the French, and have given me Hamburg (for a ceasefire) and then Frankfurt (for an alliance). Oh, and I had time to take Metz and Dijon, too. In general, I'd say I'm more on the winning side :)

[Zild]

Keeping the Pope on-side is not exactly a challenge - what better thing to do with all those Muslim-infested cities conquered during your early crusades than gift them to his Big-Hattedness?

[Aemilius Paulus]

Meh, I counted 38 assassins in my one and only MiNO/M2TW game with England. I had them assassinate every mid-to-high ranking priest of any Catholic nation. And then each Pope until my priest's turn came, and now my kingdom enjoyed the benefit of one of its subjects on the throne of Papacy.

I never had any problems with the Papacy :shrug::devilish:

[Sevis]

Keeping the Pope on-side is not exactly a challenge

Oh? In my game, the Papacy is one of the top-five powers. More specifically, it happens to be third in the military standing. None the less, just outside my borders are three very tasty-looking Papal cities (Florence, Venice, and the one between the two). How in the world am I supposed to resist attacking that?!

[Zild]

Okay, I could see him being a little miffed at that!:laugh4:

[Seabourch]

I wouldn't attack the Pope if I were you unless he is down to Rome and there is no one to give him a province to call home.

[Sevis]

Drogba - in my game, the Papacy is a major power, the fourth (or even third, now that I've smashed Spain up a little) in power. Fortunately, I have dominated the college of cardinals and have several assassins parked outside Rome. Thus, soon enough, their cities will burn, and Italy will be mine...

First, though, I must take care of all those others. Poland should not last much longer, and Spain will be the next focus of my expansion.

[Rahwana]

In my game, the Papacy got all Italy as his subjects, as he excommunicate Milan, Venice, and Sicily.... and now they have grow really powerful and lay siege after siege against Napoli, which has the last Sicilian resistance....

Luckily, after taking Edinburgh, I only got mere warning and his "saddned heart" for an insta death of Scots (I'm english)... and now I've got a naval invsion to reduce Denmark to rubble...

[IncubusDragon]

I'm currently doing a Hungarian campaign, so I've built up armies with a heavy emphasis on Hungarian Nobles (a type of horse archer that can also do a fair bit of damage in melee combat), and launched my own little invasion of Europe. Obviously the Pope doesn't like that much, so it is a case of juggling between threats of excommunication and assassinating the enemy's cardinals, coz they got no influence if they're dead. Milan was my first victim to be destroyed, but I'm taking sadistic pleasure out of keeping other factions alive but weak. :laugh4:

So after a while, I now got a Hungarian Pope and 75% of the College of Cardinals are Hungarian too... I'm allied to the Papal States whilst simultaneously waging war on HRE, France, Spain, Portugal and Russia (Russia attacked me, but the more the merrier)... obviously it'll be Mongol time at some point - I haven't had Mongols to face in MIITW yet, but unless the Mongol battle AI is modelled on the best of multiplayer strategies, I reckon my Hungarian Nobles will see them off nicely.

If you're on your warning to cease hostilities against a specified faction or be excommunicated, you can either let yourself get excommunicated, or simply lift any sieges against the faction in question and don't click "attack" over any of that faction's units. That said, you're in the clear if they attack you and you simply defend yourself... so if you lift a siege, don't withdraw your army, just lift the siege... if they then attack your army, you can annihilate them on the field and still be in the clear, because you are defending yourself... if you did a good job (so few of enemy army left that they abandon their loyalties and take chances in the hills etc), then the settlement will either now be yours automatically, or it may show as a rebel settlement - which of course you can then assault/lay siege to with impunity from the Pope because rebels are friends of no-one.