Papal Dominion

Would like to document here any erratic behaviour of the Papacy...share your stories. :beam:

All it takes for the Papacy to explode into an empire is for a Catholic faction to attack it or if it declares a crusade against another faction.

Yep, my Pope destroyed Milan, which he crusaded upon. So he has half of Italy up to Dijon. He's got tons of full stack armies of Papal Guard and Swiss Pikes outside my border, and it seems he's preparing to strike at my Danish allies (whom I had driven into France early in the game).

I know that usually the Pope does not attack anyone if he is left alone in Rome. However, I'm curious as to whether he'll attack me with those stacks near me since his 'expansionist side' has been triggered by Milan...

Frustratingly enough, he took Milan and Genoa, 2 very wealthy cities!

I migrated to the holy land as venice, giving the pope venice and irkirlon.

Around turn 20 i noticed that he was the most powerful and richest nation.

A quick toggle_fow showed that he'd gobbled up territories all the way to the border of byzantium

I was playing HRE and had just taken rome. Bloody pope gave me hell so I started hunting down the papacy. I search all around to find him, hes not there. I toggle fow and I find hes camped out in the desert of africa:inquisitive: Talk about hands on

I doubt he'll attack you TBH, theirs a limiter in the Ai files that prevents him from attacking a faction that is not excommunicated.

I don't usually see a papal empire, though if I'm not an Italian faction, every so often they'll take florence, and in a game as Milan I saw a stack and a half of Papal units marching across Italy into France, and found them fighting rebels and the excommunicated Portugese in Iberia, ignoring the excommed Sicilians below them.

In the 3 camphines I have played the Pope never really expanded? In this however Sicily has declared war on the Pope and got X-com and sine I'm in the neighborhood I'm starting to attack Sicily to get some cities :beam: . Will that trigger the Pope to start being aggressive and snatch up land :thinking: . let me know plz.

I was playing a campaign as France and had P.O.'ed the Pope big time and he came at me and hammered my city in Marseilles. His army stacks were huge and I did not want to contend with that.

Took serious bribery to get him to back off.

this is strange, on all my games i have found that the pope is very passive often with only rome:inquisitive: :inquisitive:

I had a minor squabble with the Papacy in my current Milanese campaign.

He decided at one point, when the HRE attacked me, that his alliance with the HRE was more important than his alliance with me, and excommunicated me and declared war on me. I was irritated, because my standing with the Pope had been "perfect". So I killed him. Well, first I killed off the entire college of cardinals, aside from my own of course. And then I killed him.

So my cardinal became Pope and I was reconciled and all was well. Until I hit end turn. Then, because I was still at war with the HRE, and the Papacy was still allied with them, I was excommunicated again.

So now I was really annoyed. And I sent my elite assassination squad through the HRE, executing every family member in sight. Finally, all that was left was their Emperor, but he was too difficult to kill with an assassin. So I sent a full stack army to attack him. I told my men I didn't care how many of them died, I didn't even care if they won or lost the battle, but if the Emperor didn't fall, they better not come home.

So ten units of Italian Spear Militia encircled his army while 10 units of Genoese Crossbow Militia rained quarrels down on the general's unit. It was bloody, but eventually the Emperor went down, and his remaining army routed and were mostly slaughtered trying to break through the encircling spearmen.

So, now that the Holy Roman Empire had collapsed, I assassinated the Pope, again. Next turn, another Milanese Pope is elected (Surprise, surprise) and I had a diplomat pay him a few thousand florins to reach perfect relations. Again, at the end of the turn, he excommunicates me, for no apparent reason that I could see, since there was no longer an HRE for them to be allied with, and this time a Papal army attacks Florence.

I'm finally fed up. I crush his puny army, lay siege to Rome, sack it, and kill the new Pope.

Now the Papacy is left with no lands. But next turn another Milanese Pope is elected. He has no land, he's just wandering around the countryside. But he doesn't seem to want to fight with me hehe.

Right now up in Heaven the three last Popes are sitting around looking down on things, and saying to the one who started the mess, "You really shouldn't have backed the HRE man."

From my experiences the only times when the Pope starts to go for anything resembling 'Empire' status is after I have given him one or two territories. Once he has a couple territories under his control he usually goes on the offense in a big way. The faction/s I am at war with when I do it usually attack him too and that gets him riled up and off he goes.This seems to work only in the Catholic lands however. Over in Asia Minor and the MiddleEast he seems to not do much other than lose lands I give him. Most times the city I give him rebels and turns to rebels.

I've called two crusades in Europe now, (one a Milanese city, the other a Portuguese one) and the pope (my pope, no less) accepted the crusade, and sent an army to besiege the crusade target city both times. However, he didn't JOIN the crusade, and he wouldn't accept any of my alliance proposals, so all I could do was have my crusading army just sit there next to them until the pope conquered. Bastard! :wall: Haha

Yup, the annoying thing is that when he attacks you can't really fight back since there's lots of repercussions.

My Pope's moved upwards where he's taken some HRE territory.

However, I've managed to deplete his armies by tricking him into a Crusade on faraway lands, while keeping a lvl 9 assassin nearby to kill Crusader generals.

In my current campaign I've killed off most of the other factions. Pope excommed Hungary one turn. Then the next turned declared crusade on Hungary. Now mind you the papal state was in Rome and Florence only and there were no Hungarian troop anywhere near the area. Granted the Pope is Spanish and I'm playing Spain. Hungary has been attacking me but that's also in retaliation to my attacks. Guess sometimes you get warrior Popes

In my opinion, the best pope is a dead pope. Every time in the campaigns, I do mass blitzs which usually gets me about a region a turn up around 20 turns. The thing is the pope alwasy tells me to stop fighting or get excommed and so i ignore him. Then, the popularity hit forces me to get my awesome faction leader to suicide since my blitz doesnt allow for very large garrisons. I have been through about 6 faction leaders in 2 campaigns because of this

I have recently declared war on the Pope and have proceeded to take two cities of his. I noticed that most, if not all of my cities suffered an unhappiness penalty after declaring war. Is this just me imagining things?

nope, if you attack him you get excommunicated and that hits you with a fairly BIG unhappiness penalty.

I started a game as Milan and allied with the Pope. Then I watched him personally lead nearly all his starting forces north into my territory, then through southern France and into Spain, where he took the rebel settlement in eastern Spain (the one with El Cid). Never seen the Pope go so agressively for a rebel territory that was so far away.

In my current campaign with milan, Pope have excommunicated me on turn 15 and attacked me on the next turn besieging Genoa. I defeated him and took Rome. I killed 5 popes in a row but noone wants to reconcile me even after my faction leader died and my cardinals elected the new pope. My "pope-meter" doesn't go above one cross. I gave up trying to get peace with pope. I've been excommunicated for 80 turns so far, in war with almost all catholic factions except England and Portugal. I defeated one crusade against me but is annoying when nobody wants peace with you. I think that the Pope hates Milan, because playing with other fractions i have been excommunicated but after my faction leader or Pope died I have been reconciled. For me this is weird behavior of the pope.

I played Papal States before, only for a short time because I got bored after conquering all the Italian factions. But here're some things I noticed that give Papal States the edge:

-Papal States have all the nice militias that other Italian factions have. Plus, they can also make papal guards units from the cities, which are statwise equivalent to 3rd or 4th level infantry units from castles. (or Swiss Guards later on)

-If you attack a Catholic faction, THEY automatically get excommunicated and other Catholic factions are likely to turn against them.

-If you want peace, it's much easier. In the negotiations window, there's an additional option to "remove excommunication" which plays a huge factor.

-I'm not sure on this, but it seems that your reputation doesn't take much of a hit after doing something bad. I started a war with 3 factions, wiped them out, and the reputation was still at "mixed". That was within 30 turns with me doing nothing "good" like make alliances, and my Pope was at max dread (I just had way too much fun with assasin/inquisitor combo).

I think that if Milan can explode into an empire, it's no surprise that Papal States can do the same if they want to. As a side note, it's really fun running around with 10 piety inquisitors and whacking everything in sight, though unlike AI inquisitors, they can't whack whatever is in cities. On the plus side, it's ridiculously easy to level them up, there're no penalties to failed mission, and they can easily take out targets that assassins have trouble with like spies.

I definitely think the Papacy has a hate factor for Milan, because I've never had the Pope act so unreasonably towards me as the first time I played as Milan.

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Originally Posted by Carl

nope, if you attack him you get excommunicated and that hits you with a fairly BIG unhappiness penalty.

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Is there any way to remedy this without making peace with the Papal States?

No.

I have never seen a papal empire .. in my sicilian campaign i had 3 assassins and 3 spys in rome region making sure that their only income comes from my small tributes for them ... managed to keep the pope in rome and their army in rome region :)
perhaps if you give to the pope some land he will become greedy and the papal empire is born :P

Yeah, he needs land to expand as his initial income just about covers his upkeep costs, so unless you give him region/s he never has enough income and that seems to trigger the AI into going passive. It only attacks when it has the forces to do so and enough spare cash to develop the target. Give him a few provinces though and he's got enough income to easilly form large armies and have money to spare.

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Originally Posted by Carl

Yeah, he needs land to expand as his initial income just about covers his upkeep costs, so unless you give him region/s he never has enough income and that seems to trigger the AI into going passive. It only attacks when it has the forces to do so and enough spare cash to develop the target. Give him a few provinces though and he's got enough income to easilly form large armies and have money to spare.

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same thing happens to scotland in most campaigns...they just sit on their rump like the Pope most times...soon as they take a city though, the Pope/Scot's can get dangerous. I've yet to see a Papal Empire though...

I gave Papal Anitoch after my crusade.
Mongols arrive soon after that.
Papal didnt expand much in the muslim area and got kicked out by the mongols...
Im considering to get a few castle for them there. They might just kick the mongols out of the map if wat said in the posts are true.

In my current Turkish campaign, the pope has gone ape and took all of Italy, Sicily, Southern France, and encroaching into the Iberian Peninsula. I believe what triggered the expansionism was on 1 turn, 1 sicilian unit (not army) was trying to move across Naples or something and accidentally stepped into Papal territory. Well the pope got mad and declared war on Sicily, Sicily was immediately excommunicated and the pope calls a crusade on them. Next turn you see every Papal stack join the crusade, and each surviving catholic country also sends a crusade (France, Portugal, and Venice bit the dust).

Well the Pope wipes out the hapless Sicilians in short order, and for no apparent reason declares war on Milanese now. The same process is repeated, pope starts a crusade and all of his amries join crusade and attack. So now Milan is wiped out. So Pope now shares a common border with Spain, so guess what he does, yup he declares war on Spain and calls in the crusade. And ironically, the only ally of pope is not even catholic its the Moors lol.

My Turks have taken everything up to Vienna and are all ready to teach the pope a lesson in humility but then Timurids thought it was convenient to pop out just now, so the Pope is saved for another decade or so.

I was Spain and gave the pope Jerusalem when I had all the cities in that Area (Jerusalem, Gaza, Cairo) to make the area more catholic and give me stability in the region. It never really worked so I gave him Gaza aswell. He expanded north to Antioch and within 15 turns he had huge armies and most of the area. He was of course extremely friendly with me when I gave him the area and he never once attacked me. I decided to abandon Alexandria and Cairo anyways because I needed the huge armies keeping unrest down in those cities to crush the French. I destroyed everything in the cities to get as much cash and left them. Later on the Pope took them and built them up again. The muslims were more or less wiped out. I never got as far to see what happened when the Mongols and Timurids arrived.

I'm currently playing HRE. One of the first things I did was take florence and then gift it to the Papal states in return for an alliance. This gave me a nice buffer from Sicily.

Then I simply wound up the Milanese until they attacked me and got excommunicated. Then I called for a crusade on Milan and took it the next turn. Then I did the same thing to the Venetians, culminating in the Sacking of Venice in the Crusade of, um, turn 30 or so.

Anyway, both these crusades left the Papal States with full stacks floating around and the gift of Florence must have woken their expansionist territories because the next thing I realise, when I send my Merchants out for rare resources, is that the Papal States have wiped out the Moors in North Africa and taken everything from Arguin to Tripoli.

However, they didn't expand much from there, even when Spain and Portugal were excommunicated and they could/should have taken their lands. Of course, later on, during my annexing of the Middle East, I dumped Damascus their way just as the Mongols hit Edessa. That seemed to work very well at distracting almost everyone for a while...

I have had a few games where the Pope ran rampant but one sticks out in particular. Early in a Sicilian campaign I wanted to grab some Milanese territory though I was mainly focusing on Africa (Still quite early in the game at that point). The Pope was my ally, and I got them involved by attacking a Milan fleet that the pope was prked next to, thus dragging them into the conflict. I got what I wanted in that I got to call a crusade on Milan and took Genoa that way. I picked up the pace in Africa and scooped up the island territories throughout the Med and paid very little attention to mainland Europe for a fair number of turns. In mainland Italy I had Florence in addition to Naples&Genoa and had Marseilles as well. I started into what was left of Milan with the attention of hitting France next and started sending out my spies. The Pope had gone conquest crazy! Milan had Bern left as their only territory. The Pope had complete control of the Balkans with the exception of Constantinople, and had acquired a couple ex-HRE territories as well. Though I was not keeping track they managed to get all that in around 20-25 turns, certainly no more than that. I was pretty impressed I have to say!

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Originally Posted by diablodelmar

Is there any way to remedy this without making peace with the Papal States?

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easily... assassinate the current pope.. Usually you are then able to vote in a pope who will reconcile you =P

it also allows for blitzing Christian factions with impunity...

although even with a newly voted Pope with only a trait of +1 my +11 (well technically only +10) assassin has at best a 40% chance of killing him

Also, England is OP because early on I got ex-comm'd for fighting too much with France and my people didn't really give a shit... Must be that whole Church of England thing =P