I've just reached the 90th or so turn of my Venetian campaign, things are not going well at all, despite being very friendly with France and having the Papacy practically in my pocket (with the last two Pope's being Venetian and the previous two very much in favour of me), I am under heavy attack from all sides by HRE, Milan and Hungary, I'm also at war with Byzantium and though they haven't fought me for a very long time a huge army has just appeared on my Eastern borders. I've lost the sacred soil of Venice on several occasions and just lost it again, this time to an enormous Imperial stack, I lost Zergeb, one of my key economic prospect towns, to a small force of elite Hungarian foot knights. It's getting to the point where I don't think I can recover, not since Shogun have I fought such a bitter struggle or felt so close to utter defeat. I'm tempted to delete my saves and start afresh, possibly with Venice as again, as I do really like them, and perhaps be less rash in my early campaign, or I could play as any of the other factions (I used the preferences edit to unlock them just to examine what their goals are, I'm rather dissapointed that the only faction that appeals to me unit-wise and DOESN'T have Jerusalem as the ultimate goal, is Venice, I can't be arsed with Jerusalem particularly since my first crusade lost me two key family members at sea to pirates and Byzantine fleets) speaking of which I have been tremendously unlucky with my family members and agents continually being assassinated/burnt at the stake/merchants assets seized - it seems as though every other faction has much better agents than me, mine can't seem to do anything wheras the enemies seem capable of anything their masters desire, and I've never in previous games had so many generals assassinated/drowned/lost in battle, my family tree is mostly greyed out wiht never more than three living members at any one time.

So I'm wondering what does everyone else do when all seems lost? Restart? New faction? Continue to the last? I don't know which faction to play if I do restart, I really like Venice for the units and the mission objective, I like the look of alot of other factions (HRE and England amongst others) but most others objectives are either Jerusalem or in the case of HRE Rome which means annoying the Pope, big no-no.