Quote Originally Posted by Caliburn
It's not that often that you see a permanently purple East, at least it will be torn apart at some point.
I sure hope that you're right.

In my current Spanish campaign (hard/early), I finished the Elmo quickly but need to slow down to build fleets in order to avoid an annoying Italian invasion ... When one of my fleet eventually reached the middle east (about 1155), Tripoli was owned by the Byz ... Since they were at war with the Turks, egyptians, Polish, Sicilians, Hungarians and Polish I thought that it was not too bad and that they would collapse at some points ... Few years went by ... Received message that the Turks and Hungarian were history ... Byz added Sicily, Lesser Poland and Venice to their holdings and will probably finish the Poles and Egyptian within a few turns ... Don't know how they are doing in the Northern part of the Steppes (Kiev, Crimea and Khazar are alreayd theirs) ........ My best general has five stars (got pretty unlucky with my heirs ...all the others haev three at best) and they have a pretty fine bunch of 8-9 stars natural leader/charistmatic/killer instinct general ... Even if the GH shows up "en masse" I am in for a tough ride ...