Giving land to the Vicar of Rome...

**Tokus*Maximus** · April 01, 2010, 12:11 PM

Playing as England, whenever I take a rebel province or in a successful crusade and I feel unable to protect my new conquest (being too stretched without more troops) I often gift the captured settlement to Rome (or sell it to them if they're game). If not I often strip the place bare beforehand before offering it to my enemy's enemy. It's be attacked or rebel and I can give it to Rome if I can't be bothered tying down a sizable army to protect it.

If you've a dodgy neighbour giving a region between you to Mr Pope can be a great firewall to have. If your unfortunate enemies are other Princes of Chrisidom then they dare not attack for getting Excomm'd.

Plus, with good relations with the new far-from-home Rome colony means fair trade from it and an easy place to send immediate diplomats.

Is this cheating?

-- Tokus

**PhilipO'Hayda** · April 01, 2010, 12:12 PM

NO!

**Taiji** · April 01, 2010, 12:36 PM

Yeah, I would call it cheating. I never give the Pope land because it's a disabled faction. And it's something the AI is incapable of doing to the player.

In fact I'm beginning to think that an alliance with the pope is cheating too. I'm interested if anyone has a handy way to make it impossible to ally with him...

**Furin** · April 01, 2010, 05:28 PM

I believe that anything possible within the design of the mod cannot be considered cheating. If the designer does not want it possible to have the pope given land, he must build in a counter measure, for example, if the papacy has more than one region, which can only come from the player unless the pope got it from a crusade, which he will not as he is always out of money and will not join a crusade under the current settings, unless the player gave him money, then a script can excommunicate the player, popup a message like "the pope has seen through your shemes" and voila, the player will avoid giving the papacy regions at all cost.

On top of that , the only way to get that region back is with force, as the papacy will not give it back for money, as it only has two regions at that time, so giving that region now is only asking for trouble later on.

If you want to follow certain house rules it is fine, if you break them you might have "cheated" yourself of a certain difficulty level, but you have put that upon yourself to begin with.

In short, I don't consider it cheating, everything possible without doing cheat codes or modding something clearly in your favor is fine imo. I also do not believe there is only one correct way to play DLV and that some people can tell others what it is, that's too much of a limited mindset for my taste.

**toluas** · April 01, 2010, 07:27 PM

Technically it's not cheating, but exploiting the AI's weakness. But that's what you, the player, do all the time, in other words: thinking! (And never to forget: it's your game, so feel free to do what you want regardless of what others might call it...

)

**TaronQuinn** · April 06, 2010, 04:03 PM

Hmmm, I did something like this in past versions, but only if the region in question was in Italy. i.e., as HRE or France, I'd gift Florence, Bologna or even Genoa to the Pope. To keep him happy, to get the territories off my back to focus on something else, and/or to keep it out of my enemy's hand. Basically just like the historical Papal States in Northern italy.

That being said, the whole gifting of regions anywhere on the map does seem like a cheat given the game's mechanics. I think Dominion of the Sword will bedoing something like this for conquered crusade targets, but that's with a very different system.