The Pope and Excommunication

Hi guys..

I've been searching around for ages, and I cant find any tips on this.

I love to play as england, but the problem is that I cant actually have "Total War" because the pope gets irritated when i attack the french and threatens to excommunicate me.

Now.... Historically, England and france have been whooping each other for 1000's of years... and i find it totally silly that i cant pursue a war with them.

This whoe "dont attack a catholic faction" thing seems wholey inaccurate to me.

Id really like some advice on how to play this game without worrying about the pope.

Also .... inquisitors ... ive manged to keep them out of my own lands by building loads of priests .... but they sometimes cross my borders and kill all my generals anyway.

This again is quite frankly very annoying.

I really need help witht hsi concept guys... please, can anyone help?

Quite certain some of this is in the FAQ. If not, bribe the pope to like you and get some piety for your generals and convert more people in your lands to catholicism

My method to resolve this issue is to send a diplomat to outside Rome. Then basically bung money to the Pope as a gift, give map information as a gift as well.

Everytime I took a city I gave a few thousand florins to the Pope and basically kept my relations at excellent.

The effect was that although he told me not to kill the French he never excommunicated me. Also most of my priests got made cardinals so I could control the elections.

hmmmm ... ok .... the other problem i have is money ...... how do i keep it coming in at a rate that will both allow me to pay off the pope... and maintain my army... and advance ?

ps... sorry if this is in the faq.... i was just getting real frustrated... thankyou for you help guys

Or just get excommunicated? The effects of being excommunicated aren't that bad and if your faction leader dies or the pope dies, then it's back to normal again.

oooo ... i thought excommunication was bad... really bad, I had images of every other nation all attacking me at once.

Quote:

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Q: What are the effects of excommunication?

A: Your settlements suffer a 20% unrest penalty. And you become a potential target for Catholics to crusade against.

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Don't whish to be impolite; but people who cannot be bothered to do a 10 second search in a faq tick me off.

people who dont read the OP tick me off aswell.

Did i ask the effects you dullard ?!

Hang on ill answer that for you since your clearly too lazy to read my first post .....
.....
.....
NO !

Don't worry I read your original post just fine the first time :).

It reads between the lines that you are really worried about the pope and excommunication; as you probably did read the manual...
What ticked me off is that someone with this worry wouldn't look up what the effects are for excommunication since they are perfectly relevant to your current predicamment.

So don't get your knickers into a twist. Others and me have now given you the info you need to make an informed decision. And all it cost us was a sprinkle of aggravation; since you could've found it yourself in the faq.

I would strongly recommend that you have a look throught the existing advice and guidance here.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=185

You'll find a lot of useful information and tips organised in a way that should make it reasonalby easy to focuss on what you need to know.

On the specific issue of cash flow.....I know where your coming from. There is an art to managing finances in MTW2 which is quite different to previous titles in the series, and to be quite honest I found it so frustrating I actually shelved the game for something like a year before coming back to it quite recently.

The break-through for me was finding OG Gleeps guide to handling merchants. It was located here http://forums.totalrealism.net/showthread.php?t=2798 but for some reason I am having trouble accessing it today.

However, that guide got me playing again and gave me the inspiration to actually play factions as economies rather than war machines. I summarized the key points here https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=81603 just in case OG GLeeps guide has been deleted from the web.

Merchants become less important in the late game, but can be a make or break option in the early years.

I would also ask if you have patched your game yet?

If you haven't then you may be sufferring from the infamous revenue re-calculation bug which used to nerf all trade income during the initial version of the game. So, I would recommend patching to 1.2 before getting to heavily involved in a campaign.

Finally, I get the impression that there are two fundemental strategies for playing this game which I will classify as 'War' or 'Trade', and you really need to decide which is the most suited to your playing style and interest.

In the extreme examples, the Warrior ignores trade and relies upon the money he gains by 'sacking' enemy cities to feed his troops and keep his country afloat. If you follow this path then salvation depends upon continued conquest, if you stop taking cities you starve.

The Trader on the other hand relies upon trading to keep his people fed. That means he can't afford to be at war with everyone, because people who are trying to kill you don't want to trade with you. So, typically you would only want to wage war on one faction at a time e.g. 'The Perfidious French' and keep everyone else happy and co-operative. Which basically, means you can't afford to piss-off the Pope.

Both approaches present a challenge in their own way, but the sure way to disaster is to try to steer some sort of middle road. There is no use investing in trade if everyone is at war with you, likewise there is no use investing in a military advancements if your not going to use them.

So, I think right at the start you need to decide which strategy to adopt and stick too it. If you go for the Warrior strategy, which it sounds like you have, then forget the Pope, just pump everything you can into the army and keep taking cities.

Now... you see thats all well and good ..... Im pretty sure that virtually everything appears in a faq somewhere.

So, forums arent needed right ?

Well.... in my opinion this one isnt needed, so, i shall go and find a more welcoming forum somewhere.

Bye

Well thats your perogative, but I think you will find most forums have an FAQ and guidance board where commonly asked questions are dealt with by expereinced players or the game designers themselves.

Thats doesn't prevent you asking the question, but it does mean that you are likely to get pointed to the FAQ for the answer.

I'm sorry if you were hoping for something different from this forum.

@ accurax : Bon Voyage...

Quite amusing in a sad sort of way.

Accurax joins the forum only (5 posts), asks a question, gets a rather blunt response from hisnoobness, another person with only (5 posts), immediately assumes everyone on this forum are unhelpful gits and quits.

Bit like walking into a Doctors waiting room, discovering its full of sick people and concluding that the doctor must be a quack.

....lol !!!

pla

Oh dear I really must learn to keep my trap shut.


Wasn't my intention to scare him off at all.

But people should learn to read faqs dargnammit.

Well he did claim that he had been 'searching around for ages' so one must assume he could not find what he was looking for.

To be fair the Guides on this forum are in a rather odd place, it took me a while to realise they were under Guild not MTW2. In fact, still have trouble finding some of the stuff I want to refer to and frequently end up going back to a previous thread on this forum and using a link to find it.