Becoming the pope as the blasphemous HRE

Playing as the HRE, I'm desperate to get into the pope's favor, in order to become one myself eventually. HRE starts in big disfavor, which becomes even worse if you don't do something about it. So built alot of churches and priests to convert my population away from heresy and stop does damned inquisitors from coming to my lands. Having so many priests I hope to dominate the college of cardinals at some point. But even though the priests start converting, and they don't get anymore pious, so I don;t even get the change to get into the CoC! I know letting your priests accompany crusades works, but crusades don't come around that often.
Adding to that, that all the Italian factions seem to hate me and tend to declare war on me at some point (they are tempted to attack my weakly defended frontier cities), after which the pope forces me to stop my counterattacks once I do something back, and I become even more unpopular. I'm think of giving up Bolonga altogether, although I'm afraid that will harm my trade.
Any suggestions/strategies?

bump?

Be aggressive in the beginning, none of this pope appeasement crap. March on the Italian States as soon as you can, and cripple France early on.

Erm. Well, try to garner support among the northern nations (Denmark, etc.) I more or less rigged an election by having perfect relations with almost every catholic nation so they followed where I went.

Preferati A - 1 vote
Preferati B - 1 vote
Preferati C - Guess how many votes :D?

Hope this helps

Stormbringer

Be friendly with France if possible or just keep them from doing any damage, build a massive force and go take Rome problem solved

Well, though i wasn't trying to become the pope i managed it early on. I pumped out some clerics and sent them into lands where the catholic % was very low. By doing that i had about 3 of my clerics become cardinals almost one after another. Shortly after that once the current pope died my guy was nominated. As it stands right now my guy is the pope and i have an additional 4 cardinals. Two of which are bishop preferati.

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Originally Posted by -Isapostolos-

Playing as the HRE, I'm desperate to get into the pope's favor, in order to become one myself eventually. HRE starts in big disfavor, which becomes even worse if you don't do something about it. So built alot of churches and priests to convert my population away from heresy and stop does damned inquisitors from coming to my lands. Having so many priests I hope to dominate the college of cardinals at some point. But even though the priests start converting, and they don't get anymore pious, so I don;t even get the change to get into the CoC! I know letting your priests accompany crusades works, but crusades don't come around that often.
Adding to that, that all the Italian factions seem to hate me and tend to declare war on me at some point (they are tempted to attack my weakly defended frontier cities), after which the pope forces me to stop my counterattacks once I do something back, and I become even more unpopular. I'm think of giving up Bolonga altogether, although I'm afraid that will harm my trade.
Any suggestions/strategies?

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Build churches on turn one. Priests on turn two. Conquer all rebel provinces accessible, some 7-8, send all your priest to Stettin which only have some 15% catholics to beef up piety in them then move them all into the Baltics and you´ll soon dominate the CoC.
I always leave Bologna vulnerable and set my southern border to Bern-Innsbruck and Vienna with a stack within striking distance to Bologna. Milan and Venice always falls for this and tries to take Bologna. I repel and they retry. Eventually they´ll get x-commed.

Take Florence and give it to the pope! (as a gift)
Offer tribute, 100 per 10 turns!
Build churches!

Ask for an crusade as soon as possible (lets say in the 3rd turn).
Gives you cheap troops, easy targets, Teutonic Knights, popes favor, piety etc.

After that you are pope's best friend.
Let enemies attack you, perhaps let them conquer a city of yours, soon they will be excommunicated an you can join an crushing crusade against them.

As HRE I was never excommunicated, though fighting against catholics almost exclusive. (Of course, until you battle against the pope himself ;) )

This applies to all factions, But especially HRE.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1.Build Churches. (To maximum level possible.)
2.Diplomat to Rome to pay da Pope money every other turn or so.
3.Train Priests. (As many as you can, always have max priests.)
4.Send Priests to Non Catholic lands.
5.Try heretics and witches.
6.Go on Crusades.
7.If you can pull it off, assassinate Cardinals higher than yours in the College of Cardinals.
8.Try to maintain initially good relations with a couple of othe Catholic factions to get their vote for Pope.

You do this, you can control who the pope is eventually.

As an aside, you may want to limit your church building antics to cathedrals (rather than grand cathedrals) to ensure that your priests get the Bishop (+1 piety) trait upon training, as it's currently bugged and doesn't appear in huge cathedrals.

Interesting you should ask right at this point in time. I normally don't reply to these things but I recently had this happened to me:

In my HRE game I decided to be aggressive and stop enemies before they have a chance to major damage. I took Venice and destroyed the Danes (they've only got one city) in the first couple turns. Then I waited and built while the Poles, the Milanese, the French, and more recently the Byzantines and the English attacked me.

I tried to keep up papal favor so I wouldn't have to face the pain of excommunication by giving occasional gifts of cash and map info with my permanent diplomat stationed at Rome. This did the job, but my favor wasn't outstanding and I got warning to stop retaliating against my enemies constantly. Some time before I had sent my Crown Prince on a crusade to Jerusalem (it was demanded by the Pope!) and I took the opportunity to train a bunch of priests and have then convert the region. Slowly and surely the rose in piety and in time they were all promoted to Cardinals giving my majority control in deciding the new Pope.

At this point the Papacy was being really nasty towards me. While I didn't have much territory outside of Germany proper and my acquisitions from northern Italy, Denmark, and bits of what I took from Poland, I was being assailed on all fronts. When I'd muster up an army to retaliate after defending wave after brutal wave of attacks on my cities the Pope, a nasty old Hungarian priest, would immediately tell me to knock it off or face excommunication. I had enough of it! I diverted an army in Italy and I marched it squarely into Rome, took the city after a turn of siege, and killed the Pope. When it came time to elect a new Pontiff, my Sicilian allies and I had no problem electing an Imperial priest to the throne. As soon as that happened my papal standing went to 'perfect,' I recommunicated, and got a ceasefire just like that. Now the Papacy loves me and hates my enemies. At least for now...

I find the best strategy as the HRE is to strike quickly and completely disregard the papacy.

I've actually given up my HRE campaign because it's seemed too easy - i'm excommunicated but the effects of that are far less than the effects of turtling would have been.

I won't clutter up the thread with a picture (even at half size it's too big :embarassed: ) but look here for a picture of my empire....at turn 15 :laugh4:

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Originally Posted by sapi

I find the best strategy as the HRE is to strike quickly and completely disregard the papacy.

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But, where is the fun in that. ;)

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Originally Posted by SirRethcir

But, where is the fun in that. ;)

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Burning venice to the ground after being backstabbed without having to worry about papal disapproval of executing christians? :P

A lot of you keep saying that you have to bribe the pope and such forth to eventually become the pope yourself. I didn't have to do that as the HRE. All i did was to build a bunch of churches, send out my priests, and some turns later i had them as cardinals. Then as the pope later on. Maybe i just got lucky. :juggle2:

Bribing is only useful if you want to not get excommed/want to launch a crusade. The 20% unrest from excomm can hurt. Then again, if you can handle it, it ain't so bad.

@sapi, nice empire. Surprised you didn't kill the Milanese yet. Genoa and Milan sure looks juicy/ill-defended.

When creating a Papal Hit Squad (what I like to call the mass conversion priest groups), I recommend putting 4-5 bishops together. You get the Bishop trait when training a priest in a settlement with a Cathedral - as Sapi said the huge cathedral doesn't give you that bonus because the trigger has an omission in it. If you have a Theologians guild in that city it's even better because they'll all get another +1 for Orthodox Training. Take those 4-5 priests and move them together into a territory that's mostly Orthodox or Muslim.

There are two traits you'll generally see with priests that increase their piety after the start, aside from the "Servant of God" line that you get from burning heretics and witches. The first one is the "Enemy of Heresy" line of traits, which comes from reducing the level of heresy in a given province. The second is the "Growing Faith" line of traits, which comes from causing a massive increase in the level of your own religion in a given province in a short period of time. You'd have to look at the file to make certain, but I think level 1 pops up if you make an 8% or greater difference in 3 turns or less. So the idea is to move the entire hit squad into the province on the same turn, and let them convert the population en mass. I get the most piety increases from going from province to province doing this. Make a squad, head them towards Constantinople, and stop in the Sofia region at the end of a turn. Move them all into Constantinople the next turn, and head towards the Hellespont (the southern land bridge to Nicaea). Again, cluster up there, and once all the priests gets the Growing Faith trait, move them all in a single turn over to Nicaea. Go from there to Iconium (it's Muslim) and repeat across the middle east going from Muslim province to Muslim province. They'll pick up Shining Faith and eventually Beacon of Faith for +3 piety from this.

For the "Enemy of Heresy" traits, just park them in a province with a high level of heresy for a while and let them reduce it. They'll pick up the trait that way.

Greetings All.

Excellent advice in this thread. Thanks.

I just reinstalled M2:TW yesterday, the only modifications I made was: unlock every faction, speed = 0.5, turns as years.

That's a big difference from my last install where virtually everything weas modded, triggers, stats, etc you name it. All was modded in line with the stuff I read on this forum but mainly I did'nt use anyone else's mod package.

All in all, I''ve come to the conclusion that for my taste M2:TW needs a good few hours of fixes before it becomes the truly great game it is. That, and all the GFX hardware you can acquire.

So I booted up and launched an HRE game. Everything went great and by 1100 I had 41 provinces. Now this is a LOT more micromanagement than I like, but the only other faction I ever played in SP campaign was the Turks and I wanted to do something different.

HRE is a fun faction to play as it's brutally simple. Peasant archers with peasants (LOL) made up most of my early armies.

Few questions on the Pope (with some background):

1. Why does the Pope tell ME to back off when the OTHER faction is the one who is attacking me ?

Intially I allied with everyone. But then as I took all the surrounding rebel provinces, people started to backstab me one by one. First the Milanese attacked me, so I rampaged all over their sorry behinds, but get Papal warning.

???

2. What happens if you kill ALL the Cardinals AND you are already excommed ?

Ok, so I DID stop attacking when the Pope so requested. I also right from turn one built churches and priest spammed the Baltics. However, soon the land wars on every front got the better of my attention and I did'nt have enough Cardinals to get elected. Anyway, in a war against Venice I got excommed.

Then the Pope declared on me, I proceeded to take Rome and kill him in battle. Taking Rome is a victory condition so yahoo!!! I thought..... not.

The Pope kept returning to Rome and I kept slaughtering him. Now ALL the Cardinals are dead, and I'm still excommed. 20% excom penalty all over.

3. How do I get reconciled ?

Thanks for the help.

Salute !

Ignore question 1... I found the answer here:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...highlight=pope

Apparently it matters what your papl standing was at the time of war. If yours is higher then he will poke the other guy. If your papl standing is lower (which must have been the case for me though I'm really not sure) he will poke you.

Sinan, as an HRE fan, I'll try and touch on your questions a bit. I'm still new to M2 myself though, so take this with a grain of salt.

1) The Pope will side with whomever he likes more. So if you are fighting someone with a higher Papal rating than you, you get the slap-down. Your rep with the Pope will fall if you rampage over your enemies. Sacking, and extermination espescially are bad. I've been playing an HRE game in turtle mode, and I've made Very Reliable in reputation and kept high on the Papal scale. You need to ally with him fast, and feed him 1000 florin bribes repeatedly to get to the "Perfect" relations that you need.

2) The Pope will always return. Somewhere. :)

3) You need to have a Pope to get reconciled. I think it requires either a large bribe, or the death of your king. I know when I'm crusading against an ex-commed faction, I have to be very careful not to kill their king or the crusade is over. The heir isn't ex-commed, so regicide is the best way to reconcile.

Thanks TK. I'm really enjoying this game as well.

So I guess the way out of this is to get my leader killed, as there's no cardinals, and no Pope. Going to try that now.

Edit:

Having said that the next issue will be who's the next Pope ? I guess there needs to be a Pope in the first place in order for the cardinals to get promoted ?

I usually build a diplomat right off the bat and send him to the Pope with an attractive alliance offer...that usually fills the Pope-o-meter...also if you set up a tribute of 2-300 florins/turn for a long duration, your sins will tend to be forgiven as you commit them...

Thanks.

Ok meanwhile all I had to was hit end turn and my King died. But HRE is STILL at war with Papal States and is excommed (20% hit in settlements).

I think this is a loop, you can't get out of it if you've killed all the college of cardinals.

Heh. Looks like you are going to finish out the campaign as a servant of Satan. :)

Let us know what happens.

LOL.

Well this is what happens now... I install some of the fixes already published and then restart as HRE... take GREAT care not to kill all the cardinals !!

BTW have you seen the HRE chronicles on:
http://total-war-campaign-chronicles.blogspot.com/

Not excellent quality vids but got me inspired anyway.