Is there a standard best-practice for expanding into heathen land as a Catholic? Expanding into Christian land is quite easy by marrying into weak claims and waiting for a regency. Doing this, in my current game Christianity has split into 3 blobs consisting of my own empire, the HRE, and the Byzantines. I'm not strong enough to take out the HRE yet and the Byzantines are out of diplo range, which has left me trying to expand into Muslim Spain and Norse Scandinavia. Without being able to consistently marry into top-level titles my expansion has been much slower. Here are the methods I've used so far:
What methods have other people used? Are there other options I could add to my toolbelt, or are Christians doomed to be the slowest expanding religion in the game?
- Invite a heathen claimant by favor, land him, then press his claim.
- Pros: You can freely revoke his title afterwards and nobody will care since he's a heathen. You can also revoke the land of any heathen vassals under him, essentially making this a free player-called crusade in terms of land rewards.
- Cons: Very inconsistent. There are a silly number of stipulations to be able to use a favor to get a heathen into your court (not residing in a court of his close family member, no wife, and no council position eliminate 95% of claimants). Nearly the entire world becomes Agnatic Elective within a century or two, which doesn't give you a lot of claimants to work with. Then, if you succeed in getting a claimant you'll still need to push the current title holder into a regency (assuming you have a weak claimant). Waiting for regencies isn't horrendously difficult with assassination-by-dueling and plots pushing them into hiding, but it can take time to set up. If your claimant is an old geezer then you're rolling the dice on whether he'll survive for long enough.
- Crusades
- Pros: You can get an entire kingdom, the war is usually a cakewalk, and you can get bonus rewards from contributions.
- Cons: Slow and inconsistent. At most, it can only happen once every 30 years. The player has no influence on whether the Pope chooses a big kingdom like Egypt or something irrelevant like a 2 duchy Bohemia. It's very possible you won't get the land for yourself, especially early on, requiring more work to get the land through traditional Christian marriage games. If the game files are any indication then eventually crusades will stop getting called altogether (many kingdoms have a weight of 0 for crusade calling).
- Holy wars
- Pros: Always available when neighboring heathens. Very useful in areas with lots of small pagans.
- Cons: Very slow. You only get 1 duchy per truce, meaning it can take a century to take over good chunks of some of the larger Muslim blobs. The war also tends to be far more difficult than the previous 2 methods.
What methods have other people used? Are there other options I could add to my toolbelt, or are Christians doomed to be the slowest expanding religion in the game?
