Piety / Inquisitor

[nunchakuking]

First time posting / viewing these forums... looking for some much appreciated advice.

First question, How do you increase a Generals Piety Rating?
2nd, Is there a way to avoid an inquisitor simply walking by and killing your general or priest other than a higher piety rating?
3rd, I'm currently on a Hard campaign with Holy Roman Empire and I'm wondering if their are tips on how to retain favor with the Pope when another catholic faction is attacking you and you simply defend yourself? Venice is in high favor with the pope, a few bars ahead of me.. and yet when I defend against their assaults it seems we're both punished.. me more severely??? Any tips??

Its mostly this religion aspects im having to pay more attention to now that im playing on a more difficult level, on medium its easy to simply smash and grab settlements... definantly not the case on Hard or higher..

- NunChakuKing

[spanish_emperor]

well,

1st question: you increase piety by releasing prisoners, not exterminating settlements, building church and cathedral in the settlement where your general is, make your general go on crusade..

i can't think of any more.

2nd question:
hmm, killing the inquisidor but if they find out you will go to war with the pope and get excommunicated. so i only recommend if you have an assassin with many stars. On the other hand building churches and improving your faith in your regions so they go away. Send your priests to Africa or middle east so they get piety up and escape the inquisitors in Europe. Kill many heretics and witches.

3rd: go on crusade, do what the pope asks you, build cathedrals, get your cardinal to become pope, don't become allies with Muslim factions or orthodox, be at war with Muslims or orthodox.

i hope that helps...if your playing normal M2tw then the pope and others will make stupid actions for no reason. You can get mods if you want to improve the game. i suggest Stainless Steel

[pwijnands]

You do not get more piety for releasing prisoners / occupying towns. Doing those things gets you chivalry.
Easy ways of getting piety for your priests is to build them all from one city (preferably your biggest one) and attracting the theologians guild headquarters. All of your starting priests will start out with an additional 2 Piety. Other methods are to move them to areas with low catholic faith, but move them around in groups. A single priest won't change much about religion as he cannot compete against a religious building in the settlement. If the religion in a region doesn't shift towards more catholics, move more priests in or get the current ones out. Or risk getting lower piety due to wavering in faith and risk turning them into heretics.

To get more papal rating you can also just gift them money, map information and if that doesn't help enough, a settlement. It's also a good thing to get an alliance with the papal states early on.

About the inquisitors (if you don't mind cheating), use the move_character cheat to transport them to some inaccessible island.

[spanish_emperor]

woops, your right releasing prisoners does give you chivalry instead of piety

[nunchakuking]

Cool Cool, thanks for the advice. As for the Mods, I am running MDKII normally... you said Stainless Steel?? I think I may just look that up... are their any mods for improving Troop responsiveness on the Battle map? I've noticed throughout the TOtal war games this may be the only aspect of the chain that hasn't improved dramatically. I click for the troops to attack a mod and they end up sending one guy at a time to get slaughtered or do other funky stuff..... anywho...

[pwijnands]

Cool Cool, thanks for the advice. As for the Mods, I am running MDKII normally... you said Stainless Steel?? I think I may just look that up... are their any mods for improving Troop responsiveness on the Battle map? I've noticed throughout the TOtal war games this may be the only aspect of the chain that hasn't improved dramatically. I click for the troops to attack a mod and they end up sending one guy at a time to get slaughtered or do other funky stuff..... anywho...

Unit cohesion is better with Stainless Steel, but it's not perfect. In sieges troops still won't stick together like they should and you occasionally have a few troops running in advance of the rest of the unit, causing the entire unit to stop and slowly shuffle forwards. Large masses of troops still cause a lit of backwards shuffling, which is a big pain when assualting town squares where the AI clumps all his troops together in a big mob.
On the field everything works pretty well, except when chasing routers and when fighting in some funky 45 degree angled terrain.

[Scorch]

This just belongs in the M2TW regular discussion forum.

[Pyrebound]

Building churches and training priests give your generals piety. Also placing your general in a town with theologs guild/masters/hq might net you some +piety traits.