I thought I'd also open up discussion of the various forms of the cease hostilities mission. IIRC, you are not always commanded to stop and told you will be excommunicated if you fail to comply. I may be mistaking it with other papal missions, but it sticks in my head that it comes in 3 flavors:
1. Your standing in the eyes of the pope will not be as high as it once was.
2. You risk excommunication.
3. You WILL be excommunicated.
If I haven't remembered that correct, someone just slap me and say so. But if I have, then it's important to take very careful note of which variety of warning you have received! The intent of the OP here seems to have been only to discuss the warning that says you WILL be excommunicated if you don't comply, and I think people are posting and remembering things that happened from the other 2 warning types at the same time, which would muddy the water here horribly. I strongly caution that you make sure you know which you're talking about before posting any experiences in this thread.
Also I know the papal missions in general use at least the 3 levels of punishment above, and I have a speculation as to what determines the wording. I am speculating that the game has designated (i.e. hard, invariable) papal rating hits for failure of each mission type, including ceasefire. It then examines where your rating will be if you fail, and pops up the correct wording for whatever result you'd get. So if you have 4 or less papal rating, and a given mission will subtract 4, it pops the one that guarantees excommunication. This would account for the perception that a higher pope rating makes him more lenient when you have infractions: it sorta does, but only because you have more points to burn through. It would be hurting your rating the same amount, it's just that the low-rating guy gets excommed, where you only go to half on your pope meter. To me, this would make far more sense than to suggest there are varying penalties for the same infractions, decided through some arbitrary method by the AI whenever a mission is issued.
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