How to hold the League together
You are the Pope. You command nothing: you persuade, pay and arbitrate. The treaty of 1571 makes you ✦ judge of every quarrel among the allies, and that is the whole of your power. This guide gives the lessons of the game, each tested against 400 games played by the built-in bot with and without the advice. The numbers are there so you can judge the advice, not so you can trust it.
1. Resolve before galleys
The most tempting move is the weakest. Buying galleys with every spare action, as the bot does when told to, drops its battle wins from 72 % to 55 %: the ducats and actions spent on hulls are missing where the League is actually decided, in the partners' willingness.
Resolve does three things at once. A partner at Resolve 1 brings only half its squadrons to the battle; at 0 it leaves the League. At Resolve 3 or more, Venice brings its six galleasses (worth three squadrons in the battle) and Spain its infantry (worth two). And the League is only signed if all three partners stand at 3.
So: negotiate first, subsidise second. Buy galleys only when every partner is at 3 or more and you have ducats to spare.
2. The first year: getting the League signed
The capitulations come up in spring 1571 and pass only if Venice, Spain and the Papacy all stand at Resolve 3. If one does not, they stall and come back the next season, and the whole campaign slips.
Spain is the weak partner. It starts at 3 and the cards pull it down ("Algiers first", the quarrels of the 1570 relief fleet). Once a year you may grant church revenues to Philip: Spain +2 and a squadron, at the price of Venetian jealousy (Venice −1). Use it in 1570, when Venice still has Resolve to spare.
3. Famagusta: the one real choice of 1570
Relief can reach Famagusta only until the winter of 1570–71; from spring 1571 the Ottoman fleet holds the sea around Cyprus. Each run brings powder and a wall's worth of men, and risks a Venetian squadron (one run in three loses one).
Relieve it every season of 1570 (summer, autumn and winter) and it holds until the fleet arrives in 56 % of games, against 5 % otherwise. That is the best median score of any single strategy (38). But it costs the fleet: decisive victories drop from 43 % to 27 %, and battles won from 72 % to 65 %.
Letting it fall has its own logic, and it is the historical one: the news of Mustafa's tent and the flaying of Bragadin reached the fleet before the battle and hardened Venice (Venice +2). Neither choice is wrong; the game asks which loss you will carry.
4. 1571: timing the battle
The fleet can only muster once Don John has reached Messina (summer 1571), and it needs a season to gather. Muster in summer, and seek battle in autumn, as the League did. There is one battle a year; after the first, the Ottoman fleet may refuse to come out, as it did at Navarino in 1572.
Unity of command adds to the battle and, at its maximum of 3, stops Uluç Ali escaping with his squadron. But councils cost actions: forcing unity to 3 through extra councils brought no gain (70 % won, against 72 %). Get to 2 cheaply; hold a third council only if you have an action and a ducat to spare.
5. After the victory: keeping Venice
From spring 1572 Venice tires of the war: its Resolve falls by 2 every season, and each season the chance of a separate peace grows with every point it has lost. In the last season it holds only at full Resolve (6). Pius V's death in spring 1572 costs the League further.
Left to ordinary play, Venice makes its peace in 84 % of games. Courting it with every spare action from the winter of 1571–72 prevents the peace in 58 %, and a League that holds into 1573 is worth ten points in the accounting. It is the hardest thing in the game, and it breaks the treaty's own terms in only four games out of ten instead of eight.
A decisive victory keeps the fleet together for the rest of the season, and with everything in place (unity 3, all partners at 3, the Ottoman fleet down to 6 squadrons) you may strike for Cyprus. It succeeds rarely. In most games the ducats do more for Venice.
6. Reading the accounting
The accounting asks what the victory bought, and separately what was remembered. The historical course (a decisive victory, fifteen thousand galley slaves freed, Famagusta and Cyprus lost, a new Ottoman fleet within a winter, and Venice's peace) scores in the mid-thirties, around the median of the bot. A strong game reaches the sixties or seventies, usually by saving Famagusta or keeping Venice; the best games do both.
What was remembered (the day itself, the feast of the victory, the prints and medals) comes almost entirely from winning the battle. What was bought is where your choices show.
The numbers come from 400 games of the built-in bot for each strategy (seeds 9000–9399), on the balance of 30 September 2026; they will shift a little as the game is tuned. The bot plays simply; a thoughtful player does better on every count.