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Well, my fail safe against excommunication depends on whether or not you like your faction leader. The Pope only has a problem with him, not your whole faction, so if he's out of the picture, no more excommunication. If my faction leader's not very exceptional, I will allow myself to be excommunicated to gain an advantage of some sort (capturing a city, etc.) and then I'll send him on a solo suicide mission against a superior force. I usually plan on all of this ahead of time and have him in position to throw himself on somebody's sword within a turn or two, if not the same turn. I do try to take as many of the enemy as possible with him, though, so I use that one cavalry unit to it's maximum potential. It once took me five or six tries to kill him off when I was playing the Scots. I sent him against various 18-20 unit armies that consisted of mostly missle and artillery troops. He killed and captured perhaps a thousand or so of the enemy during those engagements (over 400 in one battle alone) before he died. By the time I finally killed him off, he had 2 gold chevrons worth of experience plus every sort of trait and retinue member that was effective on the battlefield. The bad news was that the Pope died a turn or two later himself, so I didn't even really need to kill him off.

I never said my fail safe was a best case option, just effective.


Anyway, I'm on turn 81 in the challenge now (31 turns into it). I've captured 7 more settlements (for a total of 17), but two of those were captured incidentally on my way to a crusade, so I sacked them, razed every building I could for the money and then gave the denuded cities to the Papal States. That means England's net profit is only 15 settlements so far, but I now have good relations with the Pope despite the fact that I'm at war with a majority of the Catholic factions. All the additional money also means I can build more large, effective armies to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, blah, blah, blah. The French are down to two settlements and the HRE is down to three, but they're sneaky and always seem to capture a settlement or two of their own when the Pope decides I've picked on them enough and tells me to cease hostilities for a few rounds.


A side note: it states in the handbook that "The option to save a replay does not occur in campaign battles.", so unless there's some trick I don't know of, there won't be any videos of battles from this challange. Is there some trick I'm not aware of?

Turn 90 and challenge complete. I captured 27 settlements in the 40 turns under my watch, destroyed the three other factions and only got excommunicated once. I probably could have finished it sooner if I hadn't concerned myself so much with papal approval. Oh, well.

On the Balance of Power section on the End of Turn report, I was #1 on all points except financial (#3 at 16% with over 13,000 in the treasury which means the Mongols had at least 80,000), so I guess that comes close enough to fullfilling the "bring about dominant English power" portion of the challenge.

I didn't do the fancy screenshots some others did, so you'll just have to take my word for it. minant English powerddominant English powerominant English power