Strong position, where to next?

[Sensei Warrior]

Ahh the Pope and his wiley ways. I'll start out with a small review about how not to get excommed, and then move into various ways to be recommed.

To avoid excommunication from the Pope:
1. When the Pope chastises you for attacking another Catho Faction, wrap it up or back off. What I mean is, you want French lands, so you attack, let's say, Il de France, you win initial combat and the Provence is under seige. The Pope says withdraw troops, and be nice for 10 years. You have 2 options. The first one is abandon the Provence. The second one is attack the castle and win the Provence before the next year. In the end the French will be off limits for 10 years.

2. Don't go to war with the Pope. IIRC, its an auto excomm.

3. After that don't invade Catho lands, if you are at war with another faction, you can defend your lands but not take anymore of theirs until the Pope stops paying attention.

How to get recommed:

1. Death of your faction leader.

2. Death of Pope.

What does this all mean to you right now? Well, first you have to get recommed to Crusade. As others have said there are a number of ways to do this, either suicide your king, assasinate the Pope (you can try to burn him as a heretic as well), or the ever popular take over all his lands, raze all his lands, let them go rebel, and when he reemerges he'll be an easily controlled Pope.

Here is where I put in my 2 cents about the last one. Proceed very carefully in regardes to Pope reemergences, they have the capacity to get really messy. Every time the Pope reemerges, he is given more troops. That's good right? More troops = more $$ spent on troop maintenance = no more probs with the Pope, right? Not necessarily.

I have on more than one occassion had the Pope reemerge with huge stacks into a razed provence thinking he won't bother anyone. In reality what happened is the Pope went on a killing spree and took over the map. Used his uber troops to invade any rebel lands nearby him, wait for any faction to attack him (like the stupid Sicilians, and/or Italians) and then blast them into obscurity, too. It was insanity. It was a long time ago but I'm pretty sure at some point he was initiating attacks against Catho-Factions aka me even while those factions were at peace with them. I cant remember the details very well but I do remember them enough to say, "I will never ever do this plan of burn raze reemerge ever again".

That said once you get back into the Pope's good graces remember warnings are a gift that can be used to help you. Luckily the Pope has a one track mind, that is he one keeps track of one warning at a time. So you want lets say all the Spanish lands? Attack the Aragonese, when the Pope warns you off withdraw from their lands (thats right withdraw). Then proceed to attack Spain with impunity for the next 10 years. The Pope spends so much time making sure you aren't attacking the Argonese that he doesn't seem to notice you have taken over all the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.

I had a campaign where I used this tactic to engage in my own little Hundreds Years war with France, Spain, Aragon, Italy, and the HRE. I would attack one until warned off by the Pope, then attack the next one for 10 years until the Pope warned me off of them, then moved on to the next victim until they were all gone.

Phew, man that was a long post feel free to use, object and edit as you see fit.