Stainless Steel 6.2 Hotseat - Dogs of War (completed, winner Nightbringer)

[phonicsmonkey]

well its kinda impossible to maintain decent relations as this simply would limit options too much.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this but what I am suggesting is that we simply each keep a diplomat at Rome and offer tribute deals of 50fl per turn to the Pope for some small number of turns. If you keep doing this over and over, turn by turn, increasing the number of turns the deal stands for, the Pope-o-meter shoots up. There's an inbuilt limit when the Pope is AI because they will not accept overly-generous deals, but if Flax is playing the faction he can simply accept all the deals at the beginning of each turn, thus maintaining good-enough ingame relations to avoid in-game excommunication, at little cost to us and little benefit to him.

…getting excommunicated in game just happens too easily like even when u are just fighting back aggression.

This is not my experience. If you stay in your own lands you can defend yourself easily enough without the Pope getting shirty with you. It's only if you attack other catholic factions in their lands that you suffer a penalty in papal relations, right?

I was at war with Poland in this game and got a cooling-off order from the Pope. In order to avoid excommunication I waited it out before invading again to finish them off, but it did not stop me in the meantime from wiping out any armies they sent across the borders at me.

…being excommunicated doesnt really effect one in game

I haven't allowed myself to be excommunicated in any campaign since way back when, so I'm a bit rusty on this, but doesn't getting excommunicated mean you suffer a happiness penalty across all your settlements, which means lower taxes and bigger garrisons? Could be pretty costly in a hotseat context where you are trying to keep pace with everyone else from an economic perspective..