Strategos' Risk said:
Any recommendations for who I should play in the Catholic Reformation campaign? And on what difficulty?
To answer a few of the things you have raised (cause I've, like, been here from the beginning) the Cathars have remained one of those issues that won't go away. Of all the historical 'what ifs' that we have rejected, it's the one that has been revisited the most. We have changed how Catharism was wiped out, if that is any recompense ...
One of the key things about the RW reformation was that Luther was just the next in a long series of heresies, all of which were rooted out and destroyed. If we permit a heresy to flourish from the 1200s then really we cannot have any kind of reformation in the 15th century, or we'd have to rethink it in a huge way. This woul do three things, I believe:
1. Move the mod one or two steps further away from the sense of 'familiar but different' that is an important part of the Interregnum milieu. There are mods out there that do that - like the mod that presupposes a tribe in the Americas advances, discovers Europe in the 10th century and invades. It's really no less plauisible than any AH, but it does take the feel of the game into a more distant realm of imagination.
2. We'd lose one of the core periods in a 400 year game, one that can be full of surprises and throws the existing power balances out the window. (Of course, we could replace it with something else that has the same effect ...)
3. BUT, most tellingly of all, we could not have Lartin Luther be elected as the Pope. Which, when it happens, is just waaay to f-ing cool for words.
As for difficulty, always play on Coward to have a more challenging AI and on extremely hard, unless you are either new to the game or a sissy.
Please remember that it is also still a work in progress. ome nations have been well fleshed out (Eire, for example) while others (much of Gaul after the reformation) really need more attention.
