Newbie question: how do I create a cardinal?

**jackbush** · February 18, 2012, 03:53 PM

My Gold Edition came without a manual Is there such a thing available online?

My immediate questions are: how to create a cardinal, a merchant, and so on? And what do you do with princesses? Just let them stand around waiting for a suitable husband to come along? Which is what happened with mine near the beginning. I am playing as England at M/M difficulty.

Thanks for help and guidance.

**Mhaedros** · February 18, 2012, 04:02 PM

The pope elects the cardinals. Merchants, diplomats and priests are recruitable from markets, town halls and churches. The princesses can marry other factions princes, to form alliances, or try to marry their generals. If you succeed to marry an AI general, he will join your faction

**medhma** · February 18, 2012, 04:06 PM

You can't create a cardinal directly you need to create a priest (which will be available once you build a small church and then its upgrade), and then you need to work on it's piety by fighting witches and heretics or converting a region to your faith (send them to region with low Chretien) or by building theoligin (or something like that) guild.

About merchant you'll need a market to recruit them.

And the princesses are used for diplomacy, alliance marriage (it's stronger than normal and I'm not sure but I think you could have some region once your allied faction leader die or something like that ) , to have a good general or to increase the loyalties of your existing general (by marring them to your princess)

edit: I thought that cardinal with the result of piety and it seems that I'm wrong

**Eastern.Europe** · February 18, 2012, 04:27 PM

Hi jackbush! The answer to your question is as follows : There is no online manual that I am aware of. There are several very good guides on here that can answer your questions. You may want to look at those. The others have posted correctly, mainly those "agents" are used as follows. Princesses come of age at 18. You can have them marry a General that is not married by end in the same "square" as that General. You will see your chance of success in the upper middle right of the popup. If successful in marrying a foreign General he will appear in your countriese colors by himself with his bodyguard, if you are unsuccessful you'll get a popup with you Princess saying don't come after me father or something like that.

A Cardinal is created by the death of a cardinal in the college of cardinals. If your piety for your priest is above a 6 then you can be promoted to a cardinal and join the college. You also have a better chance if your relation with the Papal states is better than average. The priest is created in church and follows the same guidelines as the others. Namely 1 per building per upgrade.

Merchants you create with markets and their upgrades. Spies are created with brothels and Inns. Assassins are created in Inns. What medhma was talking about is their are guilds for these agents a merchants guild a theologians guild an assassins guild. What these do are increase the starting "level" of the created agent. So if you set up a merchants guild( and guilds are offerred to a town on your turn and you have t ohave the gold 3000 for the starter buildings in order for it to be placed) your merchants will have a higher starting Income when "recruited" built or purchased however you like to look at that

I see you've already seen the answers above mine but thought I would add my 2pp

**Avatar** · February 18, 2012, 04:36 PM

Originally Posted by medhma

edit: I thought that cardinal with the result of piety and it seems that I'm wrong

You are correct, the Cardinals are elected based on piety, so the higher you build them up, the more Cardinals you end up with. In practice you don't even need to fight many heretics, if you just spam priests and send them to the nearest islamic/orthodox region they will start gaining piety. This in turn improves your chances of getting the theologian guild in your cities, and the process starts to snowball.

It comes to a point where if you have a Cathedral and a master theologian guild, any priest that you recruit starts with a minimum of 5 and probably 7-8 piety points, and if there is a vacancy in the college then he gets to step right in.

In most games I play, I end up in control of the college of Cardinals eventually because of this tactic. Most of the AI Catholic factions don't develop their priests too well, unless its someone like Poland or Portugal with easy access to several convertible regions.

**jackbush** · February 18, 2012, 04:14 PM

Thanks to you both.

**Drachos** · February 18, 2012, 06:01 PM

Just let your priest on a region with low christianity percentage and let him there, once a while check him for his piety (right click his portrait). If a cardinal dies, and if your priest has more than (or has) 6 piety, he may be promoted.

If a region you control (In one region there is one city) has gold or silver and if you point your mouse over them and it says "You can construct mines" , go to the city in that region and build mines.

**lolIsuck** · February 18, 2012, 06:03 PM

Isn't 5 piety enough?

**Mhaedros** · February 19, 2012, 03:06 AM

I dont know how high the piety has to be, but if there are several candidates with equal piety to only one cardinal post, the pope elects the one with most papal favour

**Avatar** · February 19, 2012, 03:11 AM

The minimum piety to be elected Cardinal appears to be 5, and then by becoming one they gain an additional point so you should always see Cardinals with 6 piety minimum.

**Jianadaren** · February 20, 2012, 01:13 AM

Originally Posted by Avatar

The minimum piety to be elected Cardinal appears to be 5, and then by becoming one they gain an additional point so you should always see Cardinals with 6 piety minimum.

With one exception: Bishops don't get the +1 Cardinal Bonus because it replaces the +1 Bishop Bonus. So if your 5-piety Bishop becomes a Cardinal then he stays at 5 piety.

For OP's benefit: any clergy trained in a settlement with a Cathedral is a Bishop; if he's trained in a smaller church then he's a Priest.

**jackbush** · February 19, 2012, 07:20 AM

Thanks for the responses. More questions: I'm playing as England which gave me a cardinal to begin with, along with one merchant, and one princess. I've just captured York from the rebels. Do I need to put the cardinal somewhere in the York region or will it automatically become my religion? I ask that because I could move him north into Scotland. How do I know how much religion a region has?

**Avatar** · February 19, 2012, 10:38 AM

Originally Posted by jackbush

Thanks for the responses. More questions: I'm playing as England which gave me a cardinal to begin with, along with one merchant, and one princess. I've just captured York from the rebels. Do I need to put the cardinal somewhere in the York region or will it automatically become my religion? I ask that because I could move him north into Scotland. How do I know how much religion a region has?

People have already answered the part about checking the % of a religion, but in general terms you can assume all of Europe that doesnt start as Moorish territory is highly Catholic. To make best use of your starting Cardinal (and in all honesty, Aston is not going to achieve a lot for you) you might want to send him over to somewhere like Stettin which I seem to remember starts as quite pagan. The baltic states are another good spot. That gives him something to work with in terms of converting, and as a result improves your papal favour a bit.

**Mhaedros** · February 19, 2012, 07:36 AM

Some regions are catholic from the beginning. There's a % scale, and the religions are catholic, orthodox, islam, pagan and heretic. You need to make sure your regions have catholic as majority by placing cardinals and priests in your own regions. You can also make your enemies unrest by converting their population if they have another religion

**Eastern.Europe** · February 19, 2012, 08:16 AM

And by building churches in York you also will assist your priest/cardinal in conversion and help arrest any religious unrest. Once it is above 70% you are clear to move forward. Even 50% is ok. To find out what your religion mix is do this. On your build screen in the city of York you will see 3 small buttons on the bottom left of the popup. click on the one furtherst to the right(It should be a white background with a house with arrows pointing up/down) click it and on the left side of the screen you will see another popup with symbols and numbers. Here you can look at unrest, percentage of income due to trade, farms, etc. I want to say the 4th bar down is for religions. Make sure you have more crosses than any of the other symbols to show your people are catholic.

In addition on that popup in the lower left you will see 2 buttons. Click on the on that is a measuring scale to get another popup. This one shows how you are making your money in trade. F.E. York is trading 8 florins of wool to London. It will have the symbol of the traded item and how many florins it is. In addition at the bottom where it totals up it will tell you how much you made for the harvest and also what type(poor,good,excellent)of harvest it was.

These screens I described, you should look at once in awhile(I look every turn) to get a handle on what type of town you have. Does it trade well? What are the harvests like? This lets you know somewhat how to build the city. If it does well with trade build up the merchant buildings. If it is good farmland build up the land upgrades.

**Adamat** · February 19, 2012, 08:13 AM

You can see the % by selecting your priest/cardinal and moving the cursor over the target region. you can also see it in the city details.

**lolIsuck** · February 19, 2012, 11:47 AM

Yea, the only regions to use cardinals are Iberia, the east and the far-far-east. If you're bored and have enough money you could create a priest to make all of the Isles catholic

. Ow and later in game you have to build a cathedral so you'll get a bishop who has higher piety from the start so a bigger chance to become cardinal. (other faction's cardinals always "magically" dissappear

)

**Daqin** · February 19, 2012, 12:48 PM

Favor with the papacy also helps you get cardinals elected. If the pope has a low opinion of you, your priests will often get overlooked in favor of factions with a higher standing. The ideal solution to this is to get one your own cardinals elected to the papacy itself, because he'll fill the college with cardinals from your faction (assuming you have eligible priests). With a little luck and if you play your cards right, you can basically create a monopoly with the Vatican and have a string of popes from your own faction. This is very handy for calling crusades when and where you want them, and it'll dissuade most other Catholic factions from attacking you.

**Sitalkes** · February 19, 2012, 07:46 PM

Originally Posted by jackbush

My Gold Edition came without a manual Is there such a thing available online?

Yes, it's called the Medaevalopedia and it's here: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=358791 You will find that this answers most of your questions.

For other guides look at the 12th line down from the top of the screen and you will see the "Collection of MTW2 Guides" thread

I don't know about Steam downloads but if you have a disk version there should be a .pdf manual on your disk if you search the disk.