After a little advice from bly08 I learned that conversions are secondary to just getting the land if you're going for one faith, though certainly quite tedious. Subject spam and cathedral spam can get you there very fast if you're not already close.
Cathoman has a slower opening due to switch time/prestige hit/worse rulers and has to play the HRE game while doing expansion. I expect most players would find this more difficult than 10-15 years extra mop-up tops.
Yup, conversions are secondary. They're also annoying. Saves you a ton of IRL time.
And you can get more land with the HRE. While you're grabbing whatever you want in the east and south your vassals can take 'unlimited OE', because all you need is a single core to release a new prince which you can then feed.
HRE game will never be played. It's just a matter of blobbing, adding, blobbing, adding and killing your ruler as often as possible.
Got emperor in 1464 and revoked around 1500 in my last Cathoman run on 1.19 (or 1.20? dunno, been a while).
It's more difficult to learn the mechanics, but once you got those down a pre1700 non-Horde WC will suddenly become almost unavoidable and the difficulty level will be similar to annexing Mzab as Tunis.
Regarding rulers, that's kind of an issue, true.
But you save so many MP and so much time, it pales in comparison.
Not to mention that your prestige is permacapped for the whole run anyways. The loss of AE reduction and morale doesn't really matter. Most of your fighting early on will be done by your vassals and later on your rate of expansion exceeds institution spread which means your enemies are usually 3-5 mil techs behind you.
I wouldn't do it again, but it was definitely fun to experiment with. Cathoman was also the first time I ever experimented with rebel conversion, so it'll hold a special place in my heart
