I am a late comer to M2TW too, and presently i'm playing HRE on H/H difficulty, and it's been quite an interesting one. i sent my only spy (starting spy) to rome and made sure the pope was in the city and gathered all my army and went and took rome in 2 turns 1st turn i got excommunicated and then as i took the city the pope died, so got reconciled by the new pope :) well to win as hre u need Rome and 45 regions in the long campaign :) hardly bothered with crusades, cos it's not a winning requirement for HRE (holy roman empire). One adv playing HRE is u start right in the middle and and have frankfurt, nuremberg, stauffen, innsburck, vienna and bologna :D six starting regions!!! so that means another 38-39 regions to take if rome is excluded. as gollum said HRE has almost the same situation as france and cannot stop from taking the rich provinces of milan and venice. the trick to not get excommunicated is leave one peasent unit on each border/choke points/ bridges; so that if a neutral christna army is to attack ur city they have to "most probably" attack ur 1 unit of peasant army to get to ur city :) there by they have more chances of getting excomm :) and once they are excomm attack back their cities, in a blitz :) but try not kill their faction leader early on or they get reconcilled :( have a fun game jakob09.