Can I produce order knights without a crusade?

[Ktonos]

Maybe stupid Q but anyway, can I produce eg Teutonic Knights without having to declare a crusade?
(without having to mod anything)

[The_Dude]

No you can't, all the units wich requier chapter house can only be available when launching a crusade, but when the crusade is finish you can use it like you want

[chunkynut]

No you can't. The best way to get them other than completing a crusade is to build a chapter house, build a crusade, set destination for a territory that the pope doesn’t charge (i.e. palestine) and then destroy the chapter house. This costs -700 (chapter house), -1000 (crusade) and +350 (chapter house rebate). Some people I understand do this and it has once been advised (I believe anyway) by a dev but it is fairly expensive. Only do this in a very high zeal province so your get a lot of order knights/troops

[Kraxis]

1350... that is rather cheap considering you can often get 2 units of Knights and 3 units of Order Foot. That is the equivalent of (1300 if it is not Templars + 1200) 2500.

The problem is really that you use 4 years to build the Chapter House and 4 more to build the Crusade. This limits you to 4 years of building structures if you go by this the hard way.

[Ktonos]

Nice I did not know about those "tactics". Thanks for the info.

[chunkynut]

The time a major factor aswell but you don't always get 2 Order Knights and 3 Order Foot. At 69% zeal i got 2 order foot, so it will just be a waste of time and money if you get too order foot at 675F each

[Kraxis]

Chunky, 2 Order Foot are worth only 400 each... So that one was not worth it.

But in general if you get just 1 Templar and 2 Foot it is worth it in money, but not in time. Then it would have to be 2 Order Knights and 2 Order Foot.

Btw, when I launched a Crusade from Genoa with 100% zeal and I only got the said 2 knights and 3 foot, I was let down. I had gotten the same forces from a 73% province. I thought I would get 4 Knights and at least 6 Foot. Especially since I had just played as Turks and had gotten almost a full stack of Futuwwas, Ghazis, Saracens and Jannisary Inf from a 77% province.

[chunkynut]

I can see your point kraxis which is why i never do the 'trick' that was in my first post http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

But with the 8 years it takes it would take 5 anyway to produce the units you got so thats only 3 turns away from even. The good thing is aswell that while you build the chapter house your could build any other 4 units then when building a crusade you could build a building of 4 years construction.

I can only see this would be benificial in the early period because you cannot (post-patch) gain high or late cav or spears.

Bit of micromanagement may give you five good units in the early era.

[Kraxis]

Actually I never use the trick myself, I like to play Crusades the way they are meant, but that doesn't mean I don't notice what can be done. I just think that those 5 units were not enough considering you can get as much from much lower levels. Maybe I was just carried away a little, I was so looking forward to that Crusade only because of the units (it was High anyway).

The little trick is much better with the Muslims, though it can hurt to lose the Morale gained from the Ribat.