Crusades?

I was recently playing as the Hungarians on VI and I have destroyed the Byzantines and are now at the borders of the Egyptian empire, which ends at Nicaea.

I know Catholic nations can build crusades, so I tried to build a chapter house to wage war on the Egyptians with. However, I can't find one.

Are the Hungarians able to build crusades?

Also, can mercenaries join crusades (I destroyed the Byzantines with a army made up of 95% mercenary soldiers. Expensive, but they can hit the enemy so hard, so quickly. And 5 mercenary faris took Greece from 1800 Byzantine warriors. And that's not a lie).

I can't tell you from experience (haven't ever launched a crusade myself) but I can tell you that the Hungarians, Polish, Danish and Sicilians don't have access to crusader units, so I believe this also means that these factions can't launch crusades.

But I'm sure someone here more learned in the ways of crusades can confirm.

The Hungarians, Poles and Danes cannot crusade, thus the chapter house cannot be built. The Sicilians can crusade along with the other catholic factions.

Bugger. That's depressing. I guess the mercenary armies will have to be thrown against the Egyptians instead of a crusade.

Also, can the Papacy crusade? I've never seen it, but I was just wondering.

No. In XL, you can play as the Papacy, and for them it isn't possible to build a chapter house, either.

Concerning your other question: Mercenaries, as well as any other unit, can join a crusade. In fact, it's quite a good idea to do so because you won't have to pay for a unit's upkeep as long as it's in the crusade. So pump a crusade full of mercs and make sure to send them to the slaughter before the crusade disbands.

Slightly off-topic here, but also slightly not...

I love crusades (and jihads), and to me any game without them just doesn't feel complete; when I installed the XL mod recently, I played a brilliant campaign with the Scots but quit pretty much as soon as I realised that they too could not crusade...

Is it possible to mod the game so that currently-non-crusadable factions can crusade? I'd be interested in playing around with this, but having never really modded the game before any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I've heard that the issue is that these factions cannot produce crusade units (I presume this means things like the Crusade cross, Knights Templar, Order Foot Soldiers, Fanatics etc.) and in some cases possibly the Chapter House as well? (I know the Scots can build this in XL.) Would adding these units back in be sufficient, or are there likely to be other problems?

I also presume CA restriced crusades for a reason - could balance become an issue?

Finally (a challenge to differentiate the men from the boys), would it be possible to add any similar feature for Orthodox factions? Any ideas as to how that should/could work?

Somewhere around the MTW mod forum is a small mod that allows all catholic factions to crusade. All-crusade Mod, or something like that.

Thanks, Drone - [HTML=https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?p=1121856]found it[/HTML].

It's for VI vanilla only, but there's also some discussion on it in [HTML=https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/archive/index.php/t-78061.html]this archived post[/HTML].

Those threads raise some interesting points, notably about the Muslims getting crusade-spammed if every catholic faction can crusade. Upping the tech level of the chapter house and the cost of crusades might help this (and also prevent me sending my early crusades - I always make Chapter House a priority for one province), but personally I'd rather see some other kind of limitation - a minimum number of provinces would be nice.

I might give this a play...