Blitz All Challenge

[Askthepizzaguy]

Nice, I am eager to try this. But in the very end I will have to be excomunicated, to beat papal states.

Yes, but as the sole remaining Catholic faction, you will OWN the college of cardinals. You will most likely destroy the Pope himself in the process of taking Rome, and you will elect the new Pope and he will lift the excommunication the very next turn, especially if you bribe him with tribute. He's your Pope, after all.

What happens to the papacy afterwards? Obviously a new pope will be selected out of your cardinals (again) but won't he whine for you to give him a new shelter?

What would happen if you kill off all your priests (send them on boat and disband? Does that work?) Then there are no more pope candidates.

The Papal States never die as a faction. Somewhere, there's always a boat ready to land with Papal armies on it. Even if the college of cardinals is empty.
It's not a mater of concern, as the point is to simply take his provinces.

That brings up an interesting point, but I don't think it's possible to disband priests.

The auto-resolve option is my only choice, as the battles are too good for my computer, so I'm just going to have to rely on numbers and weapons, no outsmarting the AI in the battles this time.

You can kill priests even if you can't disband the boat by attacking rebel navies and losing. But what would be the point? It's unneccessary. The Papal States never die.

He meant disband the boat, not the priest. I believe you get the "You cannot disband a naval unit unless the passengers can disembark!" message. But I could be wrong.

I think that depends on the version and mod.

I'm pretty sure you do get that message, as I've been getting at times when trying to get rid of my useless units who were remnants of a past crusade. The Papacy will never die, they cannot, there has to be a college of cardinals.

You can eliminate every single priest in the game. Therefore the college can be emptied.

Hmm, couple of queries for ATPG:

1/ I see you recommend a catholic faction to accomplish the goal. I assume this is due to tighter logistics in western europe (territory density) to give an early boost to conquest coupled with easy availability of heavy infantry to push up autoresolve? I was thinking of trying this with the turks, but could see this putting me at an initial disadvantage over a catholic faction.

2/ Spies and sieging. Do spys travel at crusade stack speed when contained within a crusade stack? or is the stack limited to spy speed? Also, do you settle for taking 2 turns to take each settlement (building siege on site vs logistics/time constraint of training siege engines and lugging them about etc), or do you run spies ahead of your expansion paths to allow spyrushing of settlements?

I'm thinking of giving this a go, and am tempted to use poland or hungary for a bit of variety. (played england/france/HRE in the last few long games, so fancy a change)

1. The point of the Catholics is the ability to crusade through excommunicated Catholics, Orthodox cities, and Muslim lands more easily. It's impossible to Jihad through Muslim lands. Also, since most of the map is Catholic, it is much easier to obtain and HOLD all provinces. Yes, the tighter city density (France/HRE/Italy/Hungary/Poland/Spain as a bloc) makes blitzing early very possible.

2. Spies, in the vanilla version 1.2, which I accomplished this feat in, do not move as fast as crusading generals. Like artillery, they slow down your armies.

Since you can quickly move to a city and seige it, take it next turn and move quickly to the next, artillery and spies are unneccessary. Totally unneccessary.

Ok OK I did use ballistas to take Paris and Rheims both in one turn with one stack. If you HAPPEN to be able to recruit a ballista, and it is near the enemy, you can use it. But honestly, your core territories are usually too far away and your armies are moving too fast to make ballista useful.

Spies are a different story. They can help you after your initial crusade, and by then, you have spies recruited. But still, I didn't use them much.

They CAN be useful to take out entire factions BEFORE the Pope excommunicates you or warns you, in a single turn. Gotta be quick!

Position your crusading stacks to take advantage of the sudden end of a crusade, when it's over, spies open gates and you wipe out an entire faction in a single turn.

Checkmate.