Quote Originally Posted by Geezer57
This sort of loss may be pretty common, but it doesn't always happen. I left a Crusade sitting in its start province for over ten years before it started losing troops. Every year before that the darn thing just kept getting bigger. Of course it helped that the province zeal there was 100%, and the General I put in charge of the stack had max zeal too.
This is verrry interesting news. Well, it is to me, anyway.

I think blackmarket was hoping that launching his crusade from Malta would generate Hospitaller Knights and I'd be interested to find out if he got increasing numbers of them by leaving it there for a few years before setting off.

I can't do any testing myself, at the moment, as the Pope declared war on me in my latest campaign, then wouldn't accept ceasefire. I have a marker trained but he refuses to permit me to launch any crusades, at anywhere!

The only one I've launched in this campaign was a short hop (2 moves) against the excommed English. I only got One unit of Teutonic Knights, two of Teutonic Sergeants and ZERO fanatics at the start (but the Pope charged me nothing, so only to be expected). However, it did pick up a couple of full units of mounted crossbows, from out of nowhere, after its first move. Certainly not 'absorbed' from my normal stacks, I hasten to add. For the record, the province lacked the facilities to create that unit type, so there's no link there either.

Users who bought the bargain-bucket edition really have been sold short, it seems, in that they don't even get the tech tree chart (I gather it's downloadable from somewhere), without which it isn't made clear that some units are only obtainable via crusade launch. Direct mention of one of these, in Malta's unit bonus description is something of a teaser.