1099

[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?

[professorspatula]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

[Marquis de Said]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

Yeah, and buildings took forever to build. I lost my interest in the game when I noticed that the forces of the AI civilization neighbouring me, which was my enemy, were three times bigger than mine and more advanced, but they were just milling about on the border while I was invading their cities. The AI was absolutely rubbish!

[EatYerGreens]

Thanks for the replies.

...Brought to you by the Campaign against unexplained abbreviations.

[p_nutter]

EYG -

A faster crusade is theoretically possible by taking Constantinople with a non-crusade army first, then building church+chapter house from there. The Italians might be able to pull this one off.

Is it faster to send an amphibious attack, or just march a huge stack over there? Provinces along the way would just have to be pillaged and then abandoned to the inevitable revolts.

Even so, it takes 13 years to build church+chapter house+crusade marker, so there's no way to do it before 1099. And it you lose Constantinople, then you've just wasted half your army on a totally insane plan.

[EatYerGreens]

I think we'll have to accept that the departure from historical accuracy is a necessary evil. Crusades have the potential to be very large in size and the Muslim factions need time to accumulate training facilities and train units in sufficient numbers to put up a decent fight against them, if they started as early as turn 5 of the game (factions modded to have Chapter Houses right from the start), that would be the case - walkover victories.

If you then compensate by modding the Muslim factions to have more units on turn 1, then you must also mod all the other factions as well, to prevent early army-imbalance blitzes from upsetting the rest of the campaign. As well as saddling them all with higher maintainance costs before farms improvements are in place, more starting units will probably mean wars start sooner and provinces change hands rapidly anyway - Crusades get their path blocked by hostilities in Western Europe, say.

As fast as you adjust one thing, to make X possible, it opens up a whole can of other possibilities, some of which work against what you were attempting to do!

The 1087 starting date probably wasn't arbitrary, though I hesitate to suggest a reason why this was chosen, other than that the provinces held by each faction were clear cut by that time. Move it back just a little, to 1065, and the 'English' (aka Normans) wouldn't own any provinces within the Isles, nor the tracts of France they start the game with. They'd get probably get wiped out within a few turns.

Intuitively, we know that Churches and Chapter Houses existed across Europe well before 1087 but, as far as the game is concerned, one building trains 'reconnaisance' agents for the king and the other trains an army under his control. The expenditure and the build/train time represents that this control took time for a ruler to establish.

[ajaxfetish]

John 1 of Luxembourg was the blind king of Bohemia. He was a great and admired warrior in his day. He fought with the French at the battle of Crecy, even though by that time he was blind. Here's a link to an account of his involvement, by contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart:

http://www.chronique.com/Library/Knights/crecy.htm

[Budwise]

'Call to Power' probably. A Civilisation game. I have CTP2. Rubbish AI and some dodgy unbalanced unit stats are my memories of that game.

Capture the Providences? Makes more sence.

[lugh]

Yeah, twas Call to Power, sorry 'bout that. It wasn't a great game, extremely unbalaanced as mentioned, but I like the AI model a little, you could extract exorbitant bribes, steal technology, that kind of stuff. I got it in the bargain bin for about £5 I think. It's from 93 I think.
There was also thge blind Doge of Venice that was one of the driving forces behind the Fourth Crusade (the one that conquered Constantinople and established a Latin Empire in place of Byzantium)

I think you're right about the balance issues. I'd imagine CA had so many historical factors to balance against faction strength that some historical realities had to be abandoned. I still haven't given up my hope for a 100k strong HRE crusade though!

The only signifigant things I can think of for the starting date was that William II ascended to the throne in England that year.