Does anyone have tips on how to keep your citizens happy when you've been excommunicated? I'm in an English campaign and I keep getting the pope saying that he will excommunicate me if I continue my campaign against Spain. And its not like once in a while. Everytime I complete his request, within 1 turn another one comes up (I kept count). Its annoying since that gives me only time to seige one city in the timespan.

But I don't want to be excommunicated as last time that happened my pop started revolting and crap. It was not a pleasant site. Any suggestions? I know building churchs and happy buildings help but even with cities with them, they aren't fine.

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Excommunication causes a -20% happiness penalty in all of your cities. So, if you can spare a 20% loss in happiness without your cities revolting, you shouldn't have any problems from excommunication. Of course, this only accounts for the cities you currently have and the current state that they are in. Newly conquered cities have a good deal of unrest, which makes them extra hard to control while excommunicated. Also, that extra 20% loss will be a huge hit if the AI slips a spy into your city, further increasing unrest.

My general advice would be that if your empire can only maintain order on Low or Normal taxes, you really don't want to be excommunicated. If you're on High of Very High everywhere, you should be able to handle the extra unrest. A good idea is to prepare for excommunication is to recruit a few more units for garrison duty and put spies in your border cities to defend against enemy spies.

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Tips to dealing with the Pope:

1. Give him a bit of cash regularly. It doesn't have to be a lot - just set up a tribute of, say 300 florins/turn for 10 turns or so. Repeat as often as necessary. This will keep your relations with him quite high.

2. Build lots of priests and send them to non-Catholic regions. This will get them promoted to the college of cardinals. It won't take long and you'll be the pope.

3. Excommunication is nothing more than the Pope's way of saying he wants a bigger tip. Offer him 20,000 florins or so in exchange for reconciliation. It make take a little more, or it may not take that much - that's just the amount that worked for me once.

I just finished a long campaign as Spain. I used these tactics to keep the Pope happy while I "unified" virtually all of Catholic Europe. I was excommunicated only once, and it lasted for one turn (see tip #3).

Happy Pope-pacifying!

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In my expierence, it takes repeated ignorance of the popes orders to be excommunicated, you can usually break an order of his with one losing one point of papal standing.

NOTE: this was on 1.0 vanilla, it might be different in 1.02

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The generally accepted method to avoid this is to park a diplomat outside of Rome. This diplomat's only duty is to periodically provide cash infusions to get your relations with the Pope up to perfect. If you keep him at perfect or thereabouts, you can pretty much campaign against other catholics with impunity. It can cost hundreds if not thousands of florins each turn if you are campaigning heavily, but the gains to be had are almost always worth the money spent.

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Well I already have a pope that was a member of my faction and my relations are pretty good (not perfect, though) and every turn I keep getting the stop attacking Spain or get excommunicated, if I constantly keep perfect relationship with the Papal States, will I not get these?

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As long as you're 8-10 crosses up on the pope-o-meter, His Holiness could care less if you sacrifice christians on pagan altars to Banjo the Handuppet God.

At least that's my experience. The worse he could do is say "stop, or our relations will worsen", which can be countered by "hey, how about this new bling I bought back from Venice ?". But he should not excommunicate you unless you reach the bottom half of the scale.

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Kobal's right (as are the other gents). If the Pope and you get along generally well, "excommunication" is nothing more than a Pope-o-meter hit. Pay him and it goes right back up. If he doesn't like you, though, it will take a lot more payments a lot more frequently to keep the meter high enough to avoid the excom. And generally, if I get the warning message, its because the blasted other Catholic faction attacked me, and I am just repaying them in kind. *Bleep* the Pope, most of the time. :D

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