Well, you do have to give it to CA for programming in all of this to keep things interesting. When things are difficult and nearly desperate its the most fun.

I hate to Rome bash but when I was playing that once my steamroller got rolling I crushed anything and everything without any problems but in MTW there are always monkey wrenches in the works. It seems like all of these Provinces that I've annexed are sitting on the sidelines waiting to rebel and secret heirs running around with hate and revenge in their hearts.... Cool!

Kommodus, you're correct that things weren't really that dire although challenging nevertheless. I put two full stacks of quality troops in Venice which discouraged the Italian resurgent heir and army from doing anything but standing there. Second, I spammed peasant garrison armies to every province without a standing offensive or defensive army so loyalty is assured. Third, the Byzantines aren't much trouble because they have all green troops and all of my armies are hardcore grizzled veterans who stand and fight to the man.

One very interesting thing that I discovered in my war with the Sicilians. Well when I attacked them they were excommunicated and I killed their king which made them righteous again so my conquest of them stopped short with an excommunication warning. However, their provinces were rebellious and they had a popular uprising or Rebels and Sicilian loyalist who attacked automatically. After two rounds of rebellions the Sicilians got excommunicated again even though we had stalemated since we both had gotten ex-comm. warnings. So I guess that's another tactic we have in our arsenal against fellow Catholics... you can engineer their excomm. without their willing cooperation.