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!!