I have to say that while HRE is not my favorite faction, it's close to it. Their position on the map is one of the most diverse and offers so many options. It requires a good bit of defense as well, but that's part of the fun.

The only mod I'm using is the Vanilla Mod which is more like a bug fix than anything else.

I was allied with Venice and France from almost the beginning of the game, they kept two sides of my frontier from being attacked almost totally. Poland after an early foray into my territory left me alone for the rest of the game. I was lucky in that Scotland, England and Denmark amounted to next to nothing for a large portion of the game and so my northern area was pretty much left alone. It's why I spent so much time in Africa...I didn't want to go causing ripples in a nice calm pond...plus, for some reason even though 3 popes in a row were my own, I was constantly on the bad side of the pope as Hungary and Sicily constantly poked at me and kept poking back some of the time.

I made the tactical blunder of waging an extended campaign in north africa and the middle east region with any close by castles. Both the Mongols and Timurid had invaded very early in this campaign and I joined into the fighting probably 40-50 turns in when the Mongols had already pretty much eradicated everyone from the area up to and including Nicea and Constantinople and some of the Turkish cities in the mountains. I started the slow process of having all 4 of my home castles(Bern/Metz/Hamburg/Innsbruck) pumping out troops which would slog their way over to port near Bologna and then take a ship to North Africa or areas near Antioch, Acre and the like.

It took me quite a while to get a foothold in that area with huge mongol armies all over the place and longer still to get a castle or two up to speed to start pumping out troops locally. I think the one thing I would change now, if I could go back to just before I started my north african campaign is that I would have probably taken Corinth and Palermo at least, to have some closer castles pumping out the much needed re-inforcements. Eventually, somehow, England started producing MASSIVE amount of high end troops from it's broken up hold on the UK and really started going after Brughes and Antwerp, both of which I lost at least once and had to take back right while I'm in a full scale fight with the Mongols and Hungary getting uppity.

Great game though overall!