1099

[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.

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?