How to hold Rome?

[CountVonStolitz]

Playing as the Byzantine Empire, I conquered Rome and portion of Italy for the imperial restoration mission. The problem I'm having is that the city keeps reverting to Papal States. I have high local authority/loyalty/zero revolt risk and strong garrison army, yet the region just randomly becomes Papal States territory (without any war declaration). Is this some scripted event? Is there a way to prevent this from happening? It occured twice in my campaign and it is really annoying. The accompanying message is "In a cruel twist of fate, Papal States has occupied Roma and claimed to be protecting its people from our rule".

[deadtorius]

Have you tried to leave a permanent garrison there? I took it once in beta for the same reason and if my feeble mind recalls I think I had a similar issue with the sneaky Popes taking it back. I think a permanent garrison was the only answer, but I could be wrong...

[CountVonStolitz]

Army garrisoning Rome makes no difference. The Papal takeover happens anyway. The only solution I found so far is to reload the end-turn save and send insult to the Papal emisary. This somehow postpones the takeover event. Perpetual war with the Pope seems like another solution as the takeover happens only when at peace.

[Pocus]

You need to maintain negative relationships with the Papacy or as a Christian you'll retrocede Roma to the Holy See when you are at peace with them.

[Surt]

I look forward to seeing the papa's spouse being insulted.

[CountVonStolitz]

Thanks for the explanation. The Pope loves me for some reason so it is nigh impossible maintaining poor relationship score with him without sending insults every turn (which is tedious). I think that this would be better handled by an event (like unit upgrade) where the player could decide whether to give Rome to Pope or keep it. In my opinion, the current script implementation removes player agency and makes no sense for the Byzantines and their restoration mission.

To anyone interested, the code responsible for the Rome takeover is in "Field of Glory Kingdoms\Data\scripts\Events.bsf which can be opened in WordPad, I replaced "if ( (ownerID != gHolySee && GetNumOwnedRegions(ownerID) > 1)" to "if ( (ownerID != gHolySee && GetNumOwnedRegions(ownerID) > 1000)" effectively disabling it from ever happening.

[Pocus]

I look forward to seeing the papa's spouse being insulted.

Given they had numerous intercourses with numerous (not always willing) women ...

As for adding a decision, why not in theory, but it's much more work than adding 3 lines of code, and so it is a question of priority and what to not do in exchange of that.