Originally posted by: Bateluer
Originally posted by: Heen05
1)Are crusades worth it?What exactly do they do? i still haven't even done one...
2)Is religion very important in this game? it doesn't really seem to be.
3)Are merchants useful at ALL?
4)would you guys convert Nottingham to a city?
5)Can you go from cities to castles? i don't have the option anymore.
6)How do you capture people? Like, how does it determine who you capture?
1. I've only done a few. They raise your rep with the pope, and I think he pays you some florins for it? Its hard to hold onto a target city though if its in the middle of enemy territory. All the times I've managed to capture Constantinople or Antioch, its been subject to repeated Mongol attacks.
2. Religion does play a role. If you don't build any churches or priests, the % of Catholics in your empire drops while heresy rises. This creates more witches and heretics roaming around. The Pope will send inquisitors to deal with them. Inquisitors will execute your agents for heresy if their piety rating is low. I've lost many generals to those guys. Also, the higher the heresy, the more it effects your public order rating, lowering it. Early on, you need to keep the pope on your side, you don't want to be fighting everybody at once.
3. Meh, debatable. I've used merchants to add a little bit to my income, but its usually a fairly small amount and takes a number of turns to offset the initial cost of training the merchant. They do tend to get bought out by enemy merchants, and I'm not sure how the enemy merchants get their skill so high so quickly. I know training merchants in cities with merchant's banks/guilds in them produces more skilled merchants, but these enemy merchants are almost maxed out by turn 30.
4. I left Nottingham a castle for my of my game as the English, but I also converted the other settlements on the islands to cities, leaving Nottingham as my sole remaining castle there. After I had expanded throughout most of Europe, I still left it as a castle. It was used to train troops for my invasion of the Americas.
5. You can convert cities to castles and vice versa until they reach a point. Not exactly sure where that is, once they get to max status I think?
6. In order to capture people in a battle, you need to have some cavalry in your army, preferably fast moving cavalry. When an enemy routes in combat, run them down with your cavalry. This will generate captured units that you can then execute after the battle.