CHAMPOS wrote:i think for playability and the fact these countries would have had significant pagan populations (and neighboured pagan regions) we should keep these countries as pagan. I note the place name change for vladimir suzdal. OK??
that sounds reasonable. i also like ur explanation for having the +3 bonus for holding the holy lands.
in the latest update, the island of sicily is a different colour from the peninsular italy part of sicily. did u simply choose the wrong colour for the island?
i'd actually like to suggest a more radical change to our map. so that the game focusses more on the holy land crusades, how about eliminating the remotest territories (scotland-ireland, norwegians, esths, novgorod, tchuds-vladimir-suzdal, golden horde and white horde) by cutting off the extreme left, right and top of the map?
we can then stretch the remainder of the map to make the territories bigger. this will enable us to put in one or two of the most important political units of the time that were central to the later crusades, such as the papal states (u did, earlier on, toy with the idea of giving special status to the papal states before removing this territory completely, i presume for reasons of space or territory count) and empire of nicaea.
the latter, together with the (catholic-ruled) latin empire that controlled constantinople, was the strongest successor state to the original byzantine empire that had splintered into several pieces after the fourth crusade. a unified byzantine empire was no longer in existence by the time the mongol hordes arrived on the scene.
to give some idea of dates: of the places on our map, khwarez shah was the first victim of genghis khan, in ad 1220,
after the byzantine empire had broken up and
before the purple territories succumbed.
ian.
