Pope's a big papal pain in my back side.

[antipope]

Hello folk's,
Let me make your aquaintance with a question that's been bugging me. Has anyone out there successfully assassinated the Pope ever. I just beat one Crusade, and I'm not looking forward to the next several. So I send my rank 4 assassin down to Rome, turns out he's got a 66% chance to pull it off. Now Robo-Pope is just sitting there mind you with no spies or military units of his own to protect him. My assassin fails. Out of curiosity (and the fact that the Pope is really ticking me off) I reload the save game and try again. Fails. Again. Fails, fails , fails some more. And everytime he's got a 66% chance of success. Nice friggin' random number generator, huh!?
What gives. Anybody else try this before?
(P.S. Ive already got patch 1.1).

[KukriKhan]

Hello antipope, welcome to the Org!

I succeeded in assassinating the Pope one time (out of probably 45-50 attempts). I built 5 5-star killers and sent them all on the same turn (as the Danish, no less). The first 3 failed - tho' with 75% chance of success. The fourth guy got past security and achieved the deed.

My best guess, is that you have to overcome both the border forts AND the number of (invisible to us players) enemy assassins in the province. The number of papal command stars and influence crowns may play a factor as well.

I've found it much easier to defeat him militarily than via assassination, or spies revealing corruption, etc. Getting 5 killers to 5-star status was pretty expensive in manpower - 25 bishops, emmisaries & princesses had to to be found and killed first.

[econ21]

Has anyone out there successfully assassinated the Pope ever.

No, but then again I never tried. I did drop a rock from a catapult on his head in a battle once, though.

[2faced]

Unless I'm mistaken, which is hardly a comforting qualifier, the game decides beforehand based on your agent's chance of success whether he will carry out his mission each turn. Reloading won't help, but it certainly isn't impossible.

[antipope]

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If I give him the dirt nap via military butt-kicking, he comes back in a couple turns or so, a la Jesus style, only more P.O.'ed and packing a lot of heat.
But if I assassinate him successfully, when a new Pope shows up in a few turns, I get recommunicated, and Whoooo-hoooooooooo no more Crusades knocking on my front door.
True?

You know I've seen my Kings die in their 50's, this Pope is 61 and still kicking. Maybe I'll just wait. Damn, it sucks being Catholic!

[m52nickerson]

Always send multiple assassins after heads of state. I better way of dealing with the pope is to train up a five, or six star Grand Inquisitor, then is pope burgers for all.

[antipope]

Ha! Just killed him with a rank 5 assassin. Ding dong the witch is dead!

[Samurai Waki]

I've always found that If you kick the pope's *** all well and good, he'll retreat to his castle in Rome, so I pull all of my troops to Florence. The Next Turn, I reinvade Rome, and usually the pope will flee to the Papal States. That way, I don't have to worry about the Pope ever being powerful (the papal states suck). And I won't have to worry about a re-emergance. Works beautifully every time.

[doc_bean]

I once assassinated the pope with a bunch (five or so) of high level syrian assassins, I think only one died during the attempt.

Generally speaking killing the pope is rather useless except for getting rid of excommunications or stopping crusades for a while.

I once started a game were I was planning on playing crusade heavy, but then the italians killed the pope very early on, and there didn't emerge a new pope for a looong time. I ended up just giving up on that game

[Geezer57]

Out of curiosity (and the fact that the Pope is really ticking me off) I reload the save game and try again. Fails. Again. Fails, fails , fails some more. And everytime he's got a 66% chance of success. Nice friggin' random number generator, huh!?
What gives. Anybody else try this before?
(P.S. Ive already got patch 1.1).

I've assassinated the Pope lots of times, even got rid of him with high-level Grand Inquisitors on numerous occasions. But if you reload to give your Assassins another chance, keep in mind several things.
This game, like almost all games, uses a "seed number" to set up the random number generator. Unless you change one of the conditions that impacts the seed number, the results from the random number generator will be the same. When you reload, if you don't change the seed number, nothing will be different from your last try. So move a Princess, reorder your build queues, change your Emmissary's assignment, etc., etc.
And, as KukriKhan said, your Assassins have to slip by any Border Forts present in the target province, then escape the defensive gauntlet of any enemy agents present (there's a reason they default to "counterspying"), finally avoid the Pope's personal bodyguard before making an attack with the 66% chance of success you see in the parchment. Generally, a pack of 20 zero-star killers will have better odds than one or two 5-star ones.
For Inquisitor attacks on the Pope, the province needs good zeal, the Pope's piety should be fairly low, Bishops/Cardinals shouldn't be present (not a deal-breaker, but helpful), and your Inquisitor or GI should have lots of valor stars. If your target has some piety, don't just send one Inquisitor, send them in packs. When you trail for heresy repeatedly, the subject gains positive piety virtues at first, then gets the Atheist line of vices, which drop piety by -8. Your trial should succeed after that, unless you're very unlucky.

[antipope]

Ahhhh, seed numbers, eh? Well that explains alot. Still that is a weasely kind of shot I made reloading in an attempt to get the successful assassination result I wanted. I've only done that in this particular instance. My ire at the pope drove me to it, but you have to admit he is one annoying, holier-than-thou force in the game.
Anyhow one turn later I hit him with a rank 5 assassin, like you described different circumstances (different turn altogether too!), different seed number, dead pope.
In the future I prefer your idea of cranking out multiple low rank assassins for a particular target. It's just to frustrating to invest the time in building fewer high rank assassins to lose them on one bad mission.

Thanks for your input, everyone.

[Martok]

For Inquisitor attacks on the Pope, the province needs good zeal, the Pope's piety should be fairly low, Bishops/Cardinals shouldn't be present (not a deal-breaker, but helpful), and your Inquisitor or GI should have lots of valor stars. If your target has some piety, don't just send one Inquisitor, send them in packs. When you trail for heresy repeatedly, the subject gains positive piety virtues at first, then gets the Atheist line of vices, which drop piety by -8. Your trial should succeed after that, unless you're very unlucky.

Aside from occasional military action, trying the Pope for heresy is my preferred method of dealing with him. A few Grand Inquisitors with decent valour are generally far more effective than flocks of assassins.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Ha! Just killed him with a rank 5 assassin. Ding dong the witch is dead!

...that'll be three "Pater Nosters," 10 Ave Marias," and please build a church in Lourdes you bad, bad boy.

[Mooks]

Lol. I thought this thread was about what the pope said about muslims a while ago.

[Geezer57]

In my current Aragon campaign (GA, Late, Expert), I just sent ten zero-star Assassins after the Pope in Rome (with a Border Fort). The fourth one killed him, all of them died either that turn or next from the border fort. But it was worth it, in order to lift the excom.

[caravel]

I reload the save game and try again. Fails. Again. Fails, fails , fails some more. And everytime he's got a 66% chance of success. Nice friggin' random number generator, huh!?

You could sit there reloading until you're old and grey. The outcome of the random number generation is based on a seed number. You could alter this by sending another agent on another mission to effect the randomisation. Reloading always gives the same result.

[Subedei]

Lol. I thought this thread was about what the pope said about muslims a while ago.

Me2....

[macsen rufus]

Lol. I thought this thread was about what the pope said about muslims a while ago.

Yeah, I thought - looks like a backroom thread! Then I thought "What if... " the NSA/GCHQ/KGB et al are sniffing out keystrokes and we're all sat here typing up stuff like "I sent five assassins after the Pope, I'm ready to launch multiple jihads, my muslim armies are ready to strike the infidel..." Might explain a lot of mistaken arrests recently!

[wizardrj]

Yes, you can kill the pope using assasins, even using level 0 assassins, but sometimes you will have to be patient.

I have once killed the pope using an level 2 assasin in the first try, and once a level 0 assasin got him after only 5 or 6 tries, but normally you will have to go through 20-30 assasins before someone is succesfull.

I normally buildup 2 locations to produce assasins, and then I send 2 assasins pr. round to kill him. This way you will normally get him in 8 to 12 rounds.

Best way to deal with the pope, is to isolate him in the papal states,with a weak army, so that he´s no threath to neighboring lands.

Don´t attack and replace with puppet pope, the pope always respawns an his resurging army tend to be very large and very upgraded !!!!

[antipope]

Yeah, I thought - looks like a backroom thread! Then I thought "What if... " the NSA/GCHQ/KGB et al are sniffing out keystrokes and we're all sat here typing up stuff like "I sent five assassins after the Pope, I'm ready to launch multiple jihads, my muslim armies are ready to strike the infidel..." Might explain a lot of mistaken arrests recently!

LOL! Dang, maybe I should change my nickname now.

[SCRIBE]

Lol. I thought this thread was about what the pope said about muslims a while ago.

PALEOLOGOS!
- Jon Stewart

[Kavhan Isbul]

From my experience the mass assassin tactics work only in vanilla MTW. In VI and the mods you only get two attempts per strategic unit - that is, even if you send 10 assassins after him, only two of them will actually make an attempt and most will probably fail, especially if he has a star or two. Not only that, but the rest will be caught and die too. The same seems to apply to emissaries bribing armies - if you send more than two, still only two attempts at bribery will be made. I am not sure, however, if it apples to inquisitors. I believe it does not, and if this is correct, then inquisitors might be the bets way of dealing with him, especially since that if they do not succeed, they will remain to try over and over again. Not realisitc at all though, and I avoid doing it.
What happens if you kill him during a battle? If you win the battle, then you should be besieging his castle and if this is his last province, then the Papacy gets conquered only for the Pope to reappear with a vengeance a few yeras later and cause even more trouble. If it is not his last province, then you are still in war with him and besieging his castle should get you excommunicated again almost immediately, I think. So my question is what happens in case you win the battle and capture all of his routers, so that you do not have a castle to besiege - are you still in war with him, and if so, do you get excommunicated by the new Pope, or is it an automatic ceasefire in that case? Also, if you kill the Pope, but lose the battle (simply withdraw before winning), is it a ceasefire with his successor? Should probably try it out fo curiosity to see exactly how it works.