Anyone interested in Crusader States mod?

[Minister of Fear]

Kingdom of Heaven has renewed my interest in the history of the crusades and I'm wondering if anyone's interested in a mod that takes the complexities of Outremer into account. I'm particularly thinking of a mod with a new map (centred on Outremer, but this should be discussed) and new factions that takes into account the variety of political/ military actors in Outremer; i.e. the Military Orders, the Assassins, the Mameluks, the Genoese, Pisans, Venetians, the Kings of France and England, Mongols, etc. I'm also interested by the role the Ilkhanate (nominally Christian in the 13th century) could have played if the Western Europeans had not been squabbling amongst themselves over the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples.

I suggest that the mod begin approx. 1248 with St Louis, the King of France, setting sail for Cyprus. You decide what will be the target of this crusade. Historically, the destination was Egypt but after initial success the crusade ended in disaster.

A new or modified map is needed. The brilliant work of BKB could be employed with his kind permission, but it would required admixture of his HIGH and LATE mods.

So, what say all of you, is this mod pregnant with promise, or is it stillborn?

Edit : Renamed thread as requested, now moved to engineers guild, once more as requested.

-Mithrandir

[AggonyDuck]

The idea of the mod is good, except I'd actually suggest starting it in the 12th century in the time between the first and the second crusade.
This pretty much allows the game to have several factions that actually played a role at that time. See perhaps the best thing about starting somewhere after the 1st Crusade is that both the muslims and the crusaders are splintered in several factions.

[CountMRVHS]

Hmm.... some interesting ideas. A few thoughts:

1. I wonder how the "politics" of the era could be enacted in this mod. In other words, if you're thinking about factions like, say, the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as France, what happens when the king of france wants to go on crusade? MTW diplomacy being MTW diplomacy, I imagine there could be a lot of situations where the French end up allying with the Saracens to beat up on the Crusaders -- which is fine I guess, but it might not be the kind of game some people want.

2. What kind of new map are we talking about? First let me say that I have NO experience making new campaign maps, so I would be no help there. But what did you have in mind for the area of the map? Personally, I think it would be great to have Constantinople east to the Caucasus (basically it could end where the MTW map ends on the eastern side). That way you'd have Constantinople itself as the seat of the Byzantine Empire, and you'd have at least a chopped-up Byzantine Empire, its land holdings depending on the start date, which would make things interesting. Also it sounds like you want to include some of the eastern Mediterranean islands, which sounds good.

4. Any ideas on factions/units?

3. Is this mod really feasible? I don't want to sound like a pessimist but the more I think about it the more interesting this seems, and I'm just wondering how willing people would be to work with this. I could offer some research time to help out myself, and I know a bit about basic modding (I've done some campaigns for myself in the past), but you'd need someone who can work with the campaign map and maybe make brand new unit graphics and shield graphics -- all of that stuff is beyond me.

Well it sounds interesting -- keep us posted.
CountMRVHS

[Krusader]

Sounds good.

I would suggest perhaps set a starting year to 1144-45 which was when Edessa fell, and just before Second Crusade. After the Second Crusade, things got more interesting, and the wars quickly flared up.

[Pericles]

I like the idea.

Most of the units are already available.

I think it is worth doing.

I, too, saw KoH and I am in the mood to play crusader type games.

[edyzmedieval]

The idea sounds great!!

I think you should start with the 1st crusade and end with the last crusade...

You should add many new units and stuff to make the game interesting...

[junkmonk]

Kewl

[metatron]

I was planning such a mod no later than last week, but real life issues have taken precedence.

[Minister of Fear]

Good. Sounds as if there is sufficient interest in at least convening a council of war. Those interested in contributing should send me a private message and then we can organise a MSN messenger conference at a time convenient to all regarding the mod.

As to points raised so far:

I'd love to do a mod beginning with the first crusade but my main interest is what happened once they got there. I think the better starting is as a few have suggested: mid 12th century, possible ten year prior to fall of Edessa. LEt's give Outremer some chance in it defence.

Which gives us some moslem and christians factions to work with, and these may include the Mameluks, Fatamids, Duqaq of Dasmascus, Assassins, Danishmends, Seldjuks, Caliph of Bagdad, Armenians, Gerogians, Byzantines, Hospitalliers, Templars, Aragonese, Genoese, Venetians, Pisans, English, HRE and Papact and Outremer itself. I wouls also like to include Khwarazim if it were possible.

The campaign map I think should include South western Europe and North Western Africa in the west of map and sourth Eurasia and arabia in the east (the Red and Caspian Seas and Persian Gulf should be on the map. And, no, i can't mod the campaign map but we should be able to find someone who can, or I'll just have to give it a go myself.

The units - we could use BKB's units-supplemented with one's of our own creation. This all depends on the factions, etc. And BKB's permission.

Diplomacy may be a problem, but if you consider the Venetians alliance with the Egyptians in the face of calamity, it may not be such a problem. My enemies enemy is my friend was coined by Machiavelli, but was practiced by the Venetians, et al long before.

[The Blind King of Bohemia]

Feel free to use whatever you want. Sounds like a good project!

[Meneldil]

Well, there was no Outremer state, but a bunch of rival kingdoms, counties, principalties. Having only one outremer kingdom faction would be quite bland, as crusader states spent a lot of time fighting themselves.
There should also be more than 1 byzantine faction, if you plan to go farther than 1204.

[rojak]

this crusader mod is cool!

[metatron]

We could use that to help us plan the Anatolian provinces...

[metatron]

Erm, that would take up 1/3 of our allotted provinces. I feel 1/4th (for Greece and Anatolia) would be better...

[CountMRVHS]

Metatron, where'd you get that map?

But yeah, there's way too many provinces there. How many do we get, 99? I was just doing a rough sketch of what provinces would be good to have and for Anatolia I think I came up with something like a dozen total. Here are the cities I figured should be included in Anatolia:

Nicaea
Pergamum
Smyrna
Laodicea
Attaleia
Dorylaeum
Sinope
Gangra
Ankara
Iconium
Trebizond
Nicopolis
Caesaria
Tarsus
Mopsuestia

Ok, so that's 15. That can even be cut down a little bit if you think it's too many. This is just a rough first attempt compiled from several maps, so some of those cities may change.

For Greece and the Balkans, I came up with these cities:

Constantinople
Adrianople (for the province of Thrace)
Thessalonica (for Thessalonica)
Larissa (for Thessaly)
Athens
Corinth
Mistra
Corfu (for Epirus)
Dyrrachium or Durazzo
Nis
Zara
Sardica
Varna

So that's another 13. 28 provinces in all for Greece/Anatolia. I haven't gone East into Armenia or Georgia yet. Again for the western half of the Empire I could cut down the number of provinces by several if necessary. If someone could give me a rough number of what we'll need on the rest of the map I could make the northern part fit that a little bit more.

Basically, I want to have several longish, thin coastal provinces around the edges of Anatolia that the Byzantines can be in possession of at the start of our campaign, as well as maybe 7 inland provinces for the various Turkish factions and rebels. I'm sure we can pull that off without robbing too much from the Levant.

What do you guys think we should do about the part of Italy that we're including? Should we just call it all Apulia and call Sicily Sicily and let it be like that?

Anyway, tell me what you think about the cities I'm proposing. Also, can I use a regular Paint program to cut up the provinces and post that here to show everyone? Never done that before so I'll need a bit of guidance to get that up and running. Until then I'm left just listing off cities and hope they ring bells.

CountMRVHS

[metatron]

http://www.microgamedesigngroup.ca/BYZ.html

[Total War Merc]

sounds good

[Fader_it]

Hi boys, how's going?
I'm waiting for news about the strategic map.. did you decide anything about the map to use, the regions, etc.?
Send me all i need as soon as you can, so i can start working on the strat map for this mod!

F.

[CountMRVHS]

Hi Fader!

I think a couple weeks ago I sent a list of regions and cities to Minister of Fear. We'd split up the map so I was responsible for the northern half and he was working on the southern half. Haven't heard back from him yet on that, but perhaps he has been waiting for me to send him a map all along?

I'll try to get in touch with him and figure out where we need to go from here. What I may need to do is find a suitable map somewhere, then mark off the region borders and city locations with some sort of paint program...

I'm glad you're still interested in working on our mod! I'll be away this weekend but my summer vacation just began, so I'll have much free time.

I'm going to set an arbitrary deadline for next Friday. If I can't get hold of Minister of Fear before then, I'll go ahead and work out the map as well as I can myself and get it to you. If anyone else wants to get going on this, by all means, let me know. But probably Minister is just waiting for me to send him a map of my work so far. I'll get going on it by Monday.

CountMRVHS

[Minister of Fear]

Sorry guys. Just been a little busy then a little slack. I'll respond in kind this week to the Counts suggestions re map and then we'll be able to see where this is at.

I've been playing R:TW, having a break from M:TW, and I'm starting to see the attractions of the R:TW for this mod. I know; this sounds almost blasphamous, I feel like I need to take a cold shower and come to my senses but the diplomatic nuances available in R:TW are much better than in M:TW, we have a ready-made map that only needs the provinces to be tweaked, we can have more units than in M:TW, I prefer the manner in which armies can move around in the field, etc, etc. The only thing I much prefer in M:TW is the battlemap and that is mostly to do with familiarity.

I write this only as something to think about at this early stage.

Will update soon.

[CountMRVHS]

Woh, that's an interesting suggestion....

What do you mean when you say "we have a ready-made map"? I agree that the diplomatic options are greater, and do like the possibilities for army movement on the strategic map. However, it seems like an awful lot more work would be needed to turn it into a medieval game. And I have to say I'm generally not too impressed with the battles in RTW: the AI simply doesn't maneuvre, and the battles are over very quickly compared to MTW.

Maybe that's something to look at once BI comes out. I think, though, for now, if we could get a working campmap, then we can look at getting the rest of this mod completed for an MTW standpoint. Just selfishly, I'd like to get my own hands on a working campmap so I could start playing around with the factions, units, etc.

Anyway, do you want me to send you some sort of map, or is the list I sent you enough to go on? At some point there will need to be a map sent to Fader_It so he can commence getting everything put together.

No need to apologize about anything!

CountMRVHS