France

[easytarget]

Well, you know, previously I had started one as England and had in fact gotten their general dead and it was pretty cool they took offense to that and attacked me next turn.

Here though nothing had happened in the campaign yet, I sent the Princess to the closest HRE castle the 1st turn, so she got there at like turn 3 and we had an alliance. She didn't have much in the way of any traits as I recall, really just a one heart boring Princess. I did take the closest castle held by rebels that bordered the HRE empire, hence the reason I've focused on the possibility that sharing a border is a potential trigger for hostilities.

I think you'll appreciate this, once they laid siege to my castle we were still on good relations diplomatically, and it eroded over time as I repelled them. My point being you could not predict this happening based on looking at your diplomatic relationship status, now that is where I consider this a game design issue that I can only assume they addressed in later games, because I see relationships go bad in S2 and R2 in advance of them happening, not always with much warning, but certainly not something as absurd as this where we're supposedly still on Good diplomatic relationships at the exact moment they are laying siege to my castle.

[Gregoshi]

It is just a little lovers' spat, easy.

[easytarget]

haha, no doubt

I decided to fall back to an earlier save and see if I could make this work differently. I decided to double down on HRE, they sent a princess for trade rights (can't believe I hadn't already done that w/ a diplo) so I accepted trade and married her to a faction heir, so I've now got a two marriage alliance going with the guys.

And I allied with Milan and Papal so I could forestall what seems to be a bit of an inevitable juggernaut from Milan, those guys make some money, and they appear to not only spend it on armies, those armies quickly decide to attack France at our common border. I'm not expecting that one to last so I'll need to prepare for them. The Pope though and HRE I'm going to try and keep together. One flaw with I anticipate potentially is HRE hacking off the Pope at some point, getting excom'd and the Pope say you need to ditch'em.

We shall see. No matter how it plays out, I love this game. Between this and Shogun 2 I've still got a lot of gaming left to do!!

[Gregoshi]

As HRE, Milan was a pain to deal with too. And you are right - their pockets are deep.

I like the marriage to the faction heir - that should make things a bit more solid between you and the Germans. Hope that works out for you.

You are really agitating my itch to start up another campaign. Maybe this weekend.

[easytarget]

I'll be honest, I can't stop playing this one. It's like Risk in the middle ages. Nothing is ever quite the same from one turn to the next.

I'm thinking the only way to handle Milan is either alliance and try to contain them (risky because they will probably just sit, collect stacks and attack you anyway) or alternatively attack them early in the campaign with the goal of knocking them out. I've done that as England, and while they got one stack free that sneaked off in some direction I never figured out where (possibly off the coast on the island), I booted them off the Italian peninsula where they were such a headache. That did then embroil me in battles with Venice and Sicily, there's not much way to avoid that, but the upside is Milan is managed out of the picture and neither Venice nor Sicily usually prove to be major expressionistic powers.

Hope you get the itch, I need someone to talk to about tactics and strategies.

[Incoherencel]

IIRC, there is a diplomacy bug in vanilla Medieval II that eventually causes everyone to despise you, documented here:
http://t-a-w.blogspot.ca/2009/11/why...edieval-2.html

I can't say whether or not it's been patched out since, but it may be a factor. Stainless Steel fixed this bug as well, I believe.

[Gregoshi]

Thanks for the link Incoherenced. That was quite helpful.