Trading or giving away settlements

[justinwhitaker11]

I was thinking of ways to make the game more interesting. Any ideas? One thing I thought of was the HRE. I love the hre but I hate that they start off with so many territories. I was thinking about giving away or trading settlements. I would like to start off weaker or in a different posisition such as the british isles. Has anyone ever done anything like this? Any suggestions? Also is it easy to mod so that the hre could have longbowmen? Thanks.

[magraev]

If you can mod the possibilities are endless (with backup!). Simply swap cities and armies with england and start over there. Ok - it's not that simple, but I've done it many times - the trick is to copy army placements from one faction to the other and vice versa).

You can also put your leaders and best armies in a boat and invade somewhere. Maybe go to Africa or Greece from Bologna and carve up a new empire. It won't be easy, but it's fun.

[TWWolfe]

The "pack up and migrate to england" playthrough is one of the most fun things you can do. bonus points if you do it as one of the eastern factions, since the western factions are almost comepletely unable to deal with massed cavalry archers

[Old Geezer]

I once gave the Pope several regions in the east and he up and moved his capital to one of them and then I traded him another town and some money for Rome. About 10 turns later he started asking for it back; so I destroyed all the buildings and made it revolt. Then I used it to attack and get losses in my units so that I could retrain them to higher levels. Machiavellian enough?