Anyone interested in Crusader States mod?

[CountMRVHS]

My vote's for Metatron's second map as well. My knowledge fades out when it starts to go south into Africa and farther east, but I'm sure you guys can fill in those gaps.

Just one thing I noticed: the Black Sea is cut into 2 pieces. Any way we could raise the norther border a teeny bit so ships could get from Constantinople to Georgia?

Other than that, I think the only thing we're going to have to do is make sure the province around Constantinople itself is rich enough to help support the Empire, to sort of represent the lands to the west that aren't being included.

Minister, that would be *great* to see the map you're talking about, with the borders for factions. Would of course make things much easier.

Outremer is a good name for the mod.

How would the Pope be represented here? Would he need to actually have lands? If so, where on this map could he be?

Or could we forgo the presence of the Pope entirely here.... I mean, how much influence did he have directly on the Crusader states themselves? It seems to me that Popes concentrated more on the raising & directing of Crusades than the workings of the kingdoms in the Levant, but I don't know.

One thing I think is for sure: In order to prevent the crusader states from behaving like the Danes and Aragonese, we're going to need to give them at least a few provinces to start with. It'd be no fun to have a bunch of Royal Knights sitting in Jerusalem for 100 years.

CountMRVHS

[Krusader]

What about Cross & Crescent?

[metatron]

Heh, the map I was dealing with predetermined the northern and western borders, but I figured it would be a good starting point.

I read somewhere we could put the Pope on a province that doesn't border any others.

I second the vote for "Outremer", just "Outremer". Let's not use "Outremer: Total War", because "Total War" is tacky and cliched.

[metatron]

This map shows how west and north (but not east or south!) I think we should go. (Maybe even the "heel" of Italy).

[Krusader]

What about this?

[metatron]

What about this?

Not bad, but if we're going to include Greece and Italy, we need more of Iraq and Saudi Arabia too.

[CountMRVHS]

Metatron, are you being serious? Krusader's map seems quite a bit larger than what you were willing to do ... however it's a perfect map if we were focusing on the Byzantines.

If you guys all want to go with one of these maps then pretty much whatever you choose will be fine with me. If necessary I could come up with a preference, but what I want - namely Constantinople and at least a good chunk of byzantium - looks like it's going to be in there in all of these maps.

Metatron, we could use Heresy for the pagan Mongols, and use Paganism for Oriental orthodox I suppose. There wasn't a whole lot of Inquisiting going on around here so Heresy wouldn't have much of a use as it is. I don't know if you can make a faction have "heresy" as a religion though.

[Malachus]

The factions in the game can only be set to orthodox, catholic, pagan, or muslim. Though Jewish and Heretic exist, factions are not allowed to have those religions. However, you can indeed change the name of either the orthodox, catholic, islamic, or pagan religions to make a certain faction a different religion like oriental orthodox or whatever.

[metatron]

Metatron, are you being serious? Krusader's map seems quite a bit larger than what you were willing to do ...

I'm not a stubborn man.

I would much rather have a smaller map, but I do appreciate and will accept the larger maps.

[Minister of Fear]

Krusader's map is great, except that I agree with Metatron, if your going to have the heel of Italy and Greece, we need to include atleast the west and south coast of the Caspian, as well as the north west of the Persian Gulf. So I'm sticking with Metatron's second map at the moment.

Re the Pope. His influence starts to wane Crusader-wise by the end of the 12th century. The authority to initiate Crusades became an instrument used by successive Popes in influencing European affairs rather than the Levant. For God's sake, he called for a Crusade against Byzantium in the early 12th century!
Do we really need a Pope? Game-wise, can crusades be initiated without the Pope or papal faction? And if we don't have a Pope what other faction could call them (not including those in the Levant)?

As far as the religions are concerned, we have: Catholics, Orthodox, Oriental (eastern) Christians, Shite, Shia, pagans. Its difficult to represent the available religious diversity. What does heretic actually represent or reflect in the game? Could we just admit the oriental Christians as orthodox but make them different/ difficult another way? And do the same for the Moslem?

Cross & Crescent is good, but we have three votes for Outremer at the moment. The polls are still open, however...

[metatron]

I was hoping we could use the Pagan religion to make "Oriental Orthodox" factions, but the Mongols might curtail that...

[King Henry V]

I've found a map which could fit in most things, including the Eastern Roman Empire.
it also fits in Italy and there's the possibility for Mongol territory in the eastern Black sea. Perhaps the English, the French and the HRE could be external forces like the Golden Horde. They appear if you can manage to convince the Pope that a crusade is needed, which could be an interesting aspect (say if Jerusalem or another importan place is lost). Just a suggestion.

[CountMRVHS]

Update on progress.

I've been working on which cities/provinces to include in the northern half of the map. At this point I have around 40, but we may want to think about cutting that down a bit. I think it would be better to have *more* provinces in the south of the map than in the north, so the Crusader states wouldn't need to conquer huge tracts of Asia Minor in order to get their 2/3 victory. To me, it would be nice if a Crusader kingdom could conquer from Egypt through the Holy land eastward and call it good; but that may be just me. Anyway, I think the number of provinces I have right now will give the opportunity for plenty of action; the Sicilians/Italians would be able to invade several parts of Greece and the Balkans, and Asia Minor is split up into about a dozen provinces. East of that I'm just making cautious guesses, but hopefully it'll work.

Just saw Kingdom of Heaven again in theaters today with my wife to keep up inspiration for the mod . I can't wait for this thing to be playable!

I don't know if I'm violating any protocol here, but just to keep everyone informed about what's up: Fader_It, who has recently posted his great-looking Italy mod on this same page, has kindly volunteered to help us with making the campaign map for this mod. At this point we're working out cities and provinces, and then we'll ship the whole thing over to him to get started. Big thanks to Fader for this support!!!

I wanted to respond to a bunch of suggestions that have come up recently, at least from my own perspective. Of course I can't speak for everyone else involved:

@KingHenry: we've already got a basic map to work from, but thanks for the offer! If you look back I think on page 2 you can see it. Basically it doesn't have as much to the West but has more to the East.

@Iustinus: it's great that you're working on the music. Keep it up and let us know when you get close to finishing it. For the Byzantine units, I honestly hadn't given it a lot of thought, but I think there should be *some* mix of cav and infantry. Anyone who's more of an expert on that aspect of military history? All input appreciated.

@newagebassist: For the Assassins, again this is an area that I'm not 100% sure of. Sheerly for gameplay smoothness, I'd think we should give them the opportunity to train *some* kind of regular infantry other than just trebuchets, crossbows and hashishin. Maybe some fanatical axe unit or something. My history is lacking here as well, but in order to make them a viable faction I think we'd need to include some more stuff for them.

And here's a new idea I wanted to bring up for everyone: On the .com modding forums, there was some experimentation with increasing castle garrison limits, for the purpose of making longer sieges. This is something that apparently can be done through Gnome editor. Basically, by increasing the amount of soldiers that can fit in a castle, you increase the number of years the garrison will last, and therefore increase the probability of an AI assault. Also, when the AI assault comes, your garrison will not be scraps of beat-up forces that managed to run from the last battle, but they could be a full stack of hardened troops. So you'd get the chance to defend with a decent force, in other words. Some tests were done and it was found that only 1 stack could fit in the castle, no matter how big the limit was, but that still that 1 stack could be made to last for a very long time.

My question to everyone is, Is this a feature you'd like to see implemented in this mod? It would obviously work both ways: not only would the AI be more obliged to assault your citadel, but you'd likewise be obliged to assault an AI castle -- but to me this seems like an advantage in a game that is sadly usually lacking in fun siege battles. As long as it's tweaked so that the castle would fall SOMEtime, like in 10 years, so you wouldn't always be required to assault, this is something I'd be interested in. Anyone else?

OK I think that's it for now. I'm getting really excited about this -- hopefully the map will get done within a couple weeks and we can get started on the factions and everything else. Keep the suggestions coming,

CountMRVHS

[Minister of Fear]

Great work, Count. I've roughly divided the Levant into about 46 provinces, either housing a major city, or a strategic centre, i.e. Kerak Castle. Depending on how your going with Asia minor, etc. we could then do a little give/take, taking into account game balance, etc.

@Iustinus:
keep it up, the idea of having a sound track to go along with the mod is great;

@newagebassist: as a faction, the strength of the Assassins will be in manipulating other factions through targeted assassinations. They will I think have a limited unit list, will be the only faction that fields the Hashishin, and may also be the only faction to field the Nizari or Futuwwa. As always, I'm open to suggestion or flattery.

@CountMRVHS:
I like the idea you present re castle seiges. Lets at least give it ago during play-testing. Is there a way of selecting the units available in the stack that will garrison the castle?

Yes, lets please get the map done in the next few weeks.

[Radier]

I like the idea of longer sieges Count

Good luck!

[Malachus]

[QUOTE=Minister of Fear]
@newagebassist: as a faction, the strength of the Assassins will be in manipulating other factions through targeted assassinations. They will I think have a limited unit list, will be the only faction that fields the Hashishin, and may also be the only faction to field the Nizari or Futuwwa. As always, I'm open to suggestion or flattery.


That sounds like a great roster... they should have to focus primarily on assassinations... not battle.

[CountMRVHS]

The only problem with that is, I'm not sure how we can get the AI to handle it properly. I'm afraid that if the Assassins are being played by the computer, we'll soon encounter a huge invasion of whatever unit they can recruit rather than the subtler method of assassination. Setting their behavior might help in making them more/less aggressive, but I don't know if there's any way we can influence how often they use strategic agents.

That said, I don't want to see a buffed, rampaging Assassins faction myself. So if we limit their unit roster, we should probably set their behavior to something defensive and give them a very defensible position -- so that whoever invades them needs to fight on territory that is very good for the Assassins' archers. Maybe some rivers, some mountains... not sure about the geography of that area.

Anyway, just something to think about.

[Malachus]

Well for the Assassins, you could try and give them a really high preference for building their assassin units. This should make them focus a lot on building those assassins and putting them to use rather than acting like any other old faction.