1099

[lugh]

Is it possible to take Jerusalaem by 1099 for any faction? I can't use MTW at the moment but the idea just popped into my head (reading some chronicles of the Crusaders at the moment)
Is it even possible to get a crusade up and running that quick, never mind the slog across the world, the Chapter House is a Castle-level building I think.

Anyway, if they ever make a seconf MTW, they'll have to include a treaty that could be negotiated, allowing the Crusaders to pass through a Kingdom in a single year or something to make this possible.

[EatYerGreens]

I still find the concept of unit/agent movement restricted to one province per year to be somewhat absurd.

Okay, it makes sense that you can only invade 1 province deep into enemy territory in that space of time - it represents one 'fighting season' and so on - but, within the boundaries of one's own domain, you should be able to move any unit over just about any distance in that time. Maybe a maximum movement allowance (to use boardgame terminology) of 6-10 provinces per year.

We all know about Harold Godwinson marching from Stamford Bridge to Hastings, so 150-200 miles per week isn't unreasonable expectations for an army on foot in those times. How long to walk to the Holy Land from northern Europe, one wonders? One year?

Basically, this is all apropos of the idea that a large standing army was unusual in those days. You'd raise it only when necessary, then march it over whatever distance required to deal with the enemy threat. I suppose, for game purposes, this is a lot harder to simulate.

Would a Chapter House really take 6 years to build, as well? Maybe mod that down to 4 years, or maybe even as little as 2?

[lugh]

I was thinking of maybe giving every faction one as standard. It's not as if the Chapter House actually launched Crusades, they were a byproduct of the Holy Orders. You'd have to leave Crusades at 4 years though really, otherwise they'd be spammed en masse.
I think that might do it, at least if the Crusade was moving from Swabia or maybe IledeFrance. You'd beggar yourself putting enough troops in it to make it a viable force though.
Still no PC so I can't test it.

[EatYerGreens]

Just thinking out loud for a moment. It might be handy to set out the build times, for ease of reference.

Assume faction starts with at last a fort. Presence of town watch or training facilities within it considered irrelevant for the time being, on the assumption that the chosen province builds towards Chapter House and nothing else, with necessary troops being trained at outlying provinces.

1087 Startpos. Watchtowers; Motte; Motte & bailey all skipped. Build Keep.
1094 Keep completed.
1095 Order Castle.
1106 Castle completed
1107 Order Church
1110 Church completed
1111 Order Chapter house
1116 Chapter House completed
1117 Order Crusade
1120 Crusade Marker completed.
1121 Launch crusade

Note that the year counter does not click forward until after you've received all the 'building completed' notices. That's why I'm careful to point out that ordering & year-1 of any build is actually the year after.

For a launch in Isle de France, the shortest route not involving ships is likely to be Lorraine, Franconia, Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Constantinople, Anatolia, Lesser Armenia, Antioch, Tripoli, Palestine. 11 years' movement plus 'n' years for the siege. Mid 1130's, shall we say?

Rather late, in other words.

I can never understand how the Spanish sometimes crusade the Almos so soon into the game. Do they kick off with a ready-made keep, or something?

[lugh]

That sounds about right. I know I've built the Krak de Chevalier in time to get the GA points before and thats a 50 odd year build time. That's still way too late though, especially something is bound to go wrong.

I think the Spainish start with a church and a keep in Castille. I know Icrusaded very early in my Spanish campaign, so soon that I couldn't afford the troops generated and ended in a viscous spiral of starting new crusades to get them out of my hair every few years.

[EatYerGreens]

Hee hee. Get a mass of troops for free, the target province is given up with nil or few casualties and then you get stuck with the maintainance bill.

I must admit that my HRE crusade to Anjou, short hop as it was, lasted for ages as it kept getting pushed out by an allied force. All the time it was failing, I didn't mind a bit as it boosted my cashflow from 400/500 up to over 1000 per turn and I could get some significant buildings started and train new troops.

Story Spoiler alert! Click & drag to highlight and read the next bit.

It did eventually achieve its mission and things were okay for about two turns but the cashflow dropped right down to ~250, once another counter attack had pushed it out again.

Still excommed at the mo, so I don't even get the 'cheese' option. ~D

End of spoiler.

[lugh]

Yeah, every time I finished a crusade I'd start leaking 4-5k a year. I literally had thousands of fanatics, I never seemed to get so much as a single Knight of Santiago. I ended up disbanding all but the crazily valoured and command* ones.

I don't think crusades are cheese, but I only use them semi-realistically, crusade up the Baltic for Dranf nach Osten, against the Almos for the Spanish and to the Holy Land for everyone. I'll also take out the heritics in France if France is excommed at the time, install a few inquisitors and burn everything I can find!

[EatYerGreens]

Yes, I was going to ask about the Spanish. I've had priests shuttling about, trying to dampen down the 'leakage' of Muslim faith into their provinces and even had an inquisitor trying to boost zeal in Castile but was slow to realise that they lack churches, let alone a Chapter House. In the meantime, my agents witness some intense military activity.

The Spanish are just about holding their own and refuse an alliance (complications of alliances with folk I'm at war with) but I nevertheless feel I could help out a little by Crusading the Almos out of Cordoba and norrowing the front.

The problem, then, is how to hand over control of my crusade target province to the Spanish without it automatically registering as a war between us? My three med ships would certainly allow my troops to completely vacate Cordoba, if the port's not detroyed, and return to Genoa. It's then a question of which of the Almos or Spanish (or both) has the sense to react to the vacuum and move in. Being an Almo homeland, it would be just as likely for the Almos to be aided by dome freebie loyalists...

I am currently able to trade from Genoa to Valencia but I think ship contact with land counts like land border contact. So, if Spain moves into my crusade-won province, we are at war for one year and I need to move ships out of contact with the Spanish coast, pronto, to end the 'war'.

Is that roughly how you'd go about it? (It's slightly complicated for me in that the Spaniards are being defiantly neutral).

Actually, the whole alliance aspect of the game could have been made MUCH more interesting with only a few extras assed to the coding.

1) Ability to voluntarily hand over control of a province to an ally - such as in the crusade assistance scenario above.
2) Ability to donate cash to prop up an ailing faction, ally or not, where the prescence of their armies aid you by being surrogate defences against a separate faction, hostile to you.
3) Ability to voluntarily donate troops to another faction's crusade passing through your lands.
4) Two modes of abilty to donate troops to another faction for conventional purposes. Mode 1) you control its movement through their lands, decide where it is deployed but you pay maintainance costs and cannot control its fate in battles. Mode 2) The receiving faction 'adopts' it, decides where its deployed and pays maintainance costs.
5) Whole stacks can pass through allied lands and can attack out of there into a third faction's lands. You control the movement, pay the maintainance and you can control its fate on the battlefield one on the third party's land.
5b) If the ally decides to join in, you get one of those fun 2v1 battles or, with this feature enabled, higher odds of 2v2 and other permutations. Much more interesting!
6) Breaking of alliances will become exceedingly complex, with mutual army exchanges on one another's lands causing some provinces to immediately get inveigled in battles to resolve who gets control of what - potentially resulting in a patchwork of 'island' states scattered about, or instant ransoming exchanges and so on.

So, instead of the "Breaking Treaty!" dialogue, you should get a choice between actually declaring war and conducting allied action.

As for historical reality? This may be the way Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo - an allied army of something like 4 nations - but I have no historical references I can draw upon to know if similar things happened in medieval times, other than in Crusades and we have 'troop suckage' to account for that.

[ajaxfetish]

Very common in the medieval period as well. Like John of England allied with Otto IV of Germany, the Count of Flanders, etc. against Philip Augustus, or the numerous allies present with the French at Crecy, including our own Blind King of Bohemia!

I'd love to see more in depth diplomacy. I feel very unrealistically limited by not being able to campaign cooperatively with allies (or have allied factions campaign together against me ~:) . I like all EYG's suggestions for possible diplomatic actions.

[lugh]

Sounds a lot like the old CTP diplomacy model, you'd need to include a trust model aswell. I think a lot of this is in RTW, at least from the little I've read over in the Coliseum it is a much more advanced campaign map.
Their intractibility is a problem. If they were allied you could send in a small high tech force and hope the Spainish send in a larger force to vback you up. IIRC, it's the largest allied force that claims the province in victory.

[EatYerGreens]

What is/was CTP?

Also, what's the story on The Blind King of Bohemia? I recently saw a comment along the lines of "blind at Crecy", which I thought was 'blinded' but mistyped. It's funny how I'd never heard of this guy until I came to this forum. Are there any threads going into detail about it, or should I just try wikepoeadia, or something?

[professorspatula]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

[Marquis de Said]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

Yeah, and buildings took forever to build. I lost my interest in the game when I noticed that the forces of the AI civilization neighbouring me, which was my enemy, were three times bigger than mine and more advanced, but they were just milling about on the border while I was invading their cities. The AI was absolutely rubbish!

[EatYerGreens]

Thanks for the replies.

...Brought to you by the Campaign against unexplained abbreviations. ~;)

[p_nutter]

EYG -

A faster crusade is theoretically possible by taking Constantinople with a non-crusade army first, then building church+chapter house from there. The Italians might be able to pull this one off.

Is it faster to send an amphibious attack, or just march a huge stack over there? Provinces along the way would just have to be pillaged and then abandoned to the inevitable revolts.

Even so, it takes 13 years to build church+chapter house+crusade marker, so there's no way to do it before 1099. And it you lose Constantinople, then you've just wasted half your army on a totally insane plan.~D

[EatYerGreens]

I think we'll have to accept that the departure from historical accuracy is a necessary evil. Crusades have the potential to be very large in size and the Muslim factions need time to accumulate training facilities and train units in sufficient numbers to put up a decent fight against them, if they started as early as turn 5 of the game (factions modded to have Chapter Houses right from the start), that would be the case - walkover victories.

If you then compensate by modding the Muslim factions to have more units on turn 1, then you must also mod all the other factions as well, to prevent early army-imbalance blitzes from upsetting the rest of the campaign. As well as saddling them all with higher maintainance costs before farms improvements are in place, more starting units will probably mean wars start sooner and provinces change hands rapidly anyway - Crusades get their path blocked by hostilities in Western Europe, say.

As fast as you adjust one thing, to make X possible, it opens up a whole can of other possibilities, some of which work against what you were attempting to do!

The 1087 starting date probably wasn't arbitrary, though I hesitate to suggest a reason why this was chosen, other than that the provinces held by each faction were clear cut by that time. Move it back just a little, to 1065, and the 'English' (aka Normans) wouldn't own any provinces within the Isles, nor the tracts of France they start the game with. They'd get probably get wiped out within a few turns.

Intuitively, we know that Churches and Chapter Houses existed across Europe well before 1087 but, as far as the game is concerned, one building trains 'reconnaisance' agents for the king and the other trains an army under his control. The expenditure and the build/train time represents that this control took time for a ruler to establish.

[ajaxfetish]

John 1 of Luxembourg was the blind king of Bohemia. He was a great and admired warrior in his day. He fought with the French at the battle of Crecy, even though by that time he was blind. Here's a link to an account of his involvement, by contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart:

http://www.chronique.com/Library/Knights/crecy.htm

[EatYerGreens]

Many thanks, ajax. I'll go check that out.

EDIT: An interesting account. I didn't previously know that the French had as many as 15,000 crossbowmen, nor that the French men at arms spent time killing some of their own men, namely the crossbowmen who weren't killed by longbow fire and attempted to run away.

I was wondering how the blind King would have been able to swing a sword without accidentally killing his own men, either side of him but it explained he was out in front of a formation, with his guides in a rank behind.

[Budwise]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

Capture the Providences? Makes more sence.

[lugh]

Yeah, twas Call to Power, sorry 'bout that. It wasn't a great game, extremely unbalaanced as mentioned, but I like the AI model a little, you could extract exorbitant bribes, steal technology, that kind of stuff. I got it in the bargain bin for about £5 I think. It's from 93 I think.
There was also thge blind Doge of Venice that was one of the driving forces behind the Fourth Crusade (the one that conquered Constantinople and established a Latin Empire in place of Byzantium)

I think you're right about the balance issues. I'd imagine CA had so many historical factors to balance against faction strength that some historical realities had to be abandoned. I still haven't given up my hope for a 100k strong HRE crusade though!

The only signifigant things I can think of for the starting date was that William II ascended to the throne in England that year.