questions

[gingergenius]

just got the game this week, i've done about 170 turns as the english, and its 1160 odd. i conquered all of britain, plus the rebel cities on the coast of mainland europe. i sent a successful crusade to jerusalem, and also hold cagliari and rhodes. after wars with just about everyone else in western europe, at the same time, i control all af france, a spanish border of leon, toledo and valencia, and bern, staufen, magdeburg, frankfurt, hamburg, arhus and oslo.

but i have some questions:

1. how do you get cardinals?? i have alot of cathedrals/ huge cathedrals, yet all i can make are priests and i've had no papal influence since Aston died.

2. why are assassins so hard to train up... they have to have a really high subterfuge rating if they can get a decent success level on anyone. only one of my assassins has 'made it'.

3. am i doing something wrong... but when i have say 2 full stacks and want to attack another army in the field, why when i attack with the first one does the battle take place before the second stack can join in.

4. do you have to have a family member in a settlement for the auto-manage to actually work?

thats all for now.

[dopp]

1. In M2TW you cannot train cardinals directly. Priests with high piety get promoted to cardinal when an existing one dies. Train priests and send them to non-christian lands to increase their piety.

2. Sabotage is easier so train them on that first before you switch to killing people.

3. Both stacks must be adjacent to the target stack. Move one in next to the target, then attack with the second. Both should fight in the battle, unless your computer can't handle that many troops (you'll get a "reinforcements delayed" message in that case).

4. No.

[knoddy]

1. when ur priest get 5 piety they become eligible to be promoted to cardinals. there must also be spots in the colledge of cardinals for them to be promoted.

2. most people agree assasins are just a pain to train up, if u can get them up high they can be quite good, but generally u have alot of trouble getting that first kill or 2. building assains/theives guilds helps.

3. not sure if ur saying the second doesnt join at all, or is slow. if its not joinging at all u need to make sure there right next to each other, in the little square thingy. if there slow to join i dont think anything can be done about that, thats how reinforcements work, they come in to reinforce :D

4. again not 100% sure wot u mean by this. theres an option at the start of the game to manage all settlements. this means even if u have no general in the town u can still build/train units. if this is on u can still tell the pc to auto manage ur settlement (i think lol), if its off, u have to have a gen there to control wot is built/trained, but i also think there is a way to turn it off so they dont just waste all ur money :D

hope this helps, sorry bout the last one really dont use auto manage at all, i like to do it all myself

Cheers Knoddy

[Grimmy]

Another way to get some bit of training on your priests is to make sure your home provinces are good to go, religiously speaking.

If you click on a priest card, either inside a city or outside, then move your mouse over the various provinces, you'll get information on percentage of religion. If any of my provinces are below 90% I'll march a priest out side the city and let him start working. Priests have to be outside the town/castle to actually convert (I think).

You can also skill up your priests on any witches or heretics that pop up in your area or those areas bordering yours.

[Handel]

You actually don't need assasins for casual killings. This doesn't pay off. But of course you can kill some easy target - although the easy targets are rare. You need assasins to fulfill a dirty offer - kill someone important OR to kill the pope. If you don't reload (this is actually cheating) you still will need just 5-6 assasination tries to kill them.
So as aleready was said - find a suitable enemy city or fortress; send there a spy if you want targeted destruction or just start sending there assasins. Starting with 10 newly reqruited assasins after 20 turns you will have 5-6trained assasins with 8 stars or better. A little bit tedious work, but killing the pope really helps sometimes.