Controlling the Pope via Crusades
Everyone knows that controlling the pope is the best way to insure that your cause is always the righteous one. However, when you're making opportunistic land grabs (the French left Paris with only 3 garrison and you have catapults within a turn's march?), it's really easy to burn through your popescore in a hurry and cause the pope to dislike you. Giving away florins to the pope is nice, but it costs a lot to get perfect relations. Luckily for the abusive M2TW player, there's a better way to do it.
In short, crusade to take lots of cities. Gift these cities to the pope or potential allies to keep relations high.
In long: First, get yourself set up for a big crusade. Put together 2 or 3 young family members and just enough units to join a crusade. Don't bother sending good units you can make because it's cheaper and easier to buy crusader mercenaries en route to the holy land. This army is never coming home, so make sure you have a few young characters - a couple spies and maybe a merchant and diplomat. Put these all in a stack and get them moving towards the holy land. Assemble another big stack in your heartland and get ready to make some land grabs on catholic nations. This is why you don't want to use good units in your crusade - you need them at home.
Next, if your relations aren't great with the pope, gift him a few thousand dollars or whatever it takes to get 8 or 9 popescore or higher. Leave this diplomat near Rome. Then, ask for a crusade on someplace far far away. Jerusalem is perfect. Make your crusader stack join and buy up crusader mercenaries. Try not to get bogged down by enemy armies while moving through europe, they really slow you down and your guys will desert.
Eventually you'll hit non catholic land, probably the Byzantines near Sophia or Durazzo. Here's where the magic begins. Start burning your way through the land, seiging cities and sacking them the next turn, or allow spies to open the gate if you can. Against small garrisons you can auto resolve and take few casualties. After you sack the city, destroy every building you can and move your entire stack out and on towards the next city. Because you're still on a crusade and have huge movement, you can almost always seige the next city on the same turn. Destroy any fragmented armies that stick around so they don't coalesce into something major. This will also gain you experience.
Moving through Constantinople, Iconium and Antioch and then Acre and Jerusalem there are 7-8 big cities worth a lot of money. Between sacking and burning buildings you'll make 15-30k per city. Meanwhile, start land grabbing any neighbours you have close to your heartland. Every time you take a city out east, gift it to the pope and you will keep your relations at perfect even if you're constantly attacking catholics in Europe. If you get excommunicated, offer a city in return for reconciliation.
The pope doesn't care that he's getting a gutted city a million miles away, he's thrilled regardless. Other factions feel the same way. However, these are really just loaner cities since they're almost certainly going to rebel or get taken back by other factions. But diplomacy doesn't seem to mind. So not only are you gaining huge favour with the people you care about, but you're also really destabilizing the east. By dropping all these huge rebel cities all over and removing their ability to take care of themselves (by smashing buildings), you can pretty much write off the Turks, Egyptians or Byzantines for a long time. Not to mention the fact that you'll end up with a very highly experienced army.
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Originally Posted by Vor
