r/Medieval2TotalWar

I come from a ton of other strategy games (eu4, vicky 3, total war empire, etc) and got interested in medieval 3 from random yt videos, I've seen the mods are amazing, is it worth to play vanilla or should I just install stainless steel?

So, I have expanded relatively quickly (Dijon and Bert, all of Italy and Sicily minus Rome, islands to the west of Italy, Tunis, and Venice and Bologna) by like turn 70. This was too much for the AI and now I'm dealing with France, Venice, HRE, and the Moors for some reason. The money is pretty good (though I'm basically always barely making even every turn due to spending on units and buildings to deal with a 4 front war).

My question is whether diplomacy going to be an option with any of these or is the only way through to conquer their castles to limit their unit production? Or did i just overextend too quickly and have to give up territory to consolidate my Italian cities and armies?

As a heads up the Pope is from Milan and keeps excommunicating my enemies lol.

Hello. No complicated question, actually. I know there have been many similar questions, but every time the answer is different.

I was playing a lot of vanilla many, many... many years ago. After that, I played a lot of SS - 6.3, 6.4. It was good, nicely complex. But I am not sure if I am not missing more/better features. I have seen some mods that looked more complex and more entertaining.

What is your opinion on that? Is Stainless Steel the king? Do you prefer different mods? Please suggest. Otherwise I will do another run of SS! I swear to allmighty byzantine emperor!

Advantages: Jerusalem is placed pretty close to some sweet marketing nodes, your general gets good traits, no upkeep for the army while on crusade, (a pittance of 1000 florins as reward), all army units get 1 free xp chevron.

Disadvantages: you gotta spend a ton of cash to hold the city and surrounding areas, the populace hates you due to distance and religion, because of religious differences you get tons of heretics/witches, the enemy merchants will destroy your newer ones so no chance to exploit economy, early-midgame you don't have that much cash, the mongols will eventually appear.

I still do it occasionally if i happen to have an army lying around and i can recruit neat crusader knights and unhorsed knights.

I wanna play the HRE, but I am concerned about hitting a brick wall with them in the late period. What does it mean of the HRE where it says "lacks late period professional armies of France and England?"