Originally Posted by DensterNY
If you are excommunicated, it means you are considered as 'fair game' to the other Catholic factions. They stand to make exploitative gains from taking valuable provinces off you and won't incur the penalty of the Pope's wrath as a consequence, hence you become as bad, in their eyes, as the Muslim factions. In the meantime, they can make additional gains from Crusading, whilst you cannot.
Just consider yourself lucky that they don't launch crusades at you, too. Atually, does anyone know if this can smetimes happen, while you're excommed?
What value is there in alliances? I wrote a post in the STW forum, a long while ago, about the various motivations for alliances. If I can find it again, I'll try and stick a link to it in this thread.
In brief, it ranged from: big guy wants no trouble from little guy whilst he's busy someplace else clobbering his biggest threat, to little guy not wanting any trouble from the big guy to play for time while he beavers away on teching up to the uber-weapons that he plans to use to clobber ALL the big guys with...![]()
Lastly, I can't help thinking how many of the game features people comment upon as being almost unnecessary to win the domination game but, as far as I can gather, become near-essential in the GA campaigns (eg fancy buildings which add prestige, maybe give bonuses but don't actually produce troops). I'm wondering if the alliance concept is just another one of those?
By implication, if you're ultimately planning to dominate the entire map, the last thing you need is alliances which you will have to break, treacherously, in the long run. You said as much in your closing para.
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