Quote Originally Posted by sapi
That only works, iirc, if you enabled hotseat mode before playing, and it can cause unintended problems with regards to autoresolving battles.
I'm pretty sure you only have to enable hotseat mode right when you want to control the other faction, then load the game up. In fact I'm almost certain that I was reading about hotseating, and enabled it to see how Spain was doing in a campaign that had not started as hotseat. I don't remember the exact settings to enable it in the cfg file, but you can get them out of any of the various threads about controlling mongols/timurids.

As for actually getting control of the faction you want, let's use an example: English campaign, but you want to control Spain for the moment. You open the console and do this:

"control spain"
hit enter.
"control england"
hit enter.

Obviously don't type the quotes, they're only there to make explicitly clear exactly what you type into the console.

The control command toggles player control of the named faction, so the first line puts you in control of spain, and the second turns off your control of england. It wouldn't even be necessary to stop controlling your main faction for your purposes - you seem to be allowed to control as many factions at once as you wish, so when you hit end turn you'd end up controlling the spanish turn next. From there, you should be able to get any information your little heart may desire