DESIGN: Crusades

[SMIFFGIG]

Dont give me credit for this idea, its taken directly from Medieval Total War, I have just adapted it and added/changed a few things to suite CTP2. But i think it would work well

I originally posted it here:

http://apolyton.net/forums/editpost.php?s=&action=editpost&postid=3110673

but decided to make this new thread
Crusades

when religion is a big part of CTP2, you could prevent riots etc. By simply calling your random act of war a "Crusade"
Of course other considerations would come into hand, and not all culture types would have this ability.
The crusade could be a starting block of 2 to 4 units and gather up/change more recruits the longer and more cities it travels through, with each move having to be a step towards its destination city (which would likely HAVE to be on the same continent). When it finally got to its destination (now being a huge stack having recruited many (and lost some) on its voyage to the city, it must attack. Any turn on which it does not attack (assuming it fails to take the city first time) it will lose recruits. All units in the stack will be merged together, until you have successfully taken the target city.

Furthermore, crusades would only become available either after a certain advance(s) (Chivalry) or something (just a bad example) or within a time period, the better technology you have, the better random units would appear within the starting block of the crusade. The recruits would depend on the civs cities in which the crusade passes through. When you do pass through these cities, they would have a choice. to either accept the passing of the crusade (and lose some population [peasants] and lose small ammounts of there military) but preventing a war, or they could decline and have to fight off your crusade and thus causing a war.

It could possibly be implemented that if the crusade did not pass through a city for a certain number of turns, the armies within it would start loosing health. There health would NOT be regained from entering friendly cities but would randomly be added too (or brand new unit types be added to the crusade) when they did pass through. Not all the new units added would be at full strength (to represent the fact that not all would be full sized armies and just recruits).
Going through cities of an opposing culture would allow u to pillage gold (or other things i cannot think of at the moment)

After a certain time period/technology crusades will no longer be available and for the backwards civilizations they will be considered an attrocity.

Also when you first build the crusade unit (which will originally be quite small and gather strength as it passes through cities) you will designate a city for it, which you are going to attack (likely have to be on the same continent otherwise it would be abit silly). There would then be a message displayed to other players (or to you if it was the AI doing it) that Player X has launched a Crusade against Player Y on City Z

-SMIFFGIG

[Mihai]

Your plan sounds pretty complex.

I think that a crusade can be done in a few ways:
1. A teological civ declare crusade/Jihad against another teological civ. That would give you an initial happiness bust, maybe some free rush of units for a period of time (to simulate mass enthusiasm to enlist to the cruciade) or some units just pop up (that could work better if creating units takes population too). You cannot make peace with your enemy without a serious happiness penalty. Taking happiness hits for long periods of time without fighting with the infidels.

2. Declare crusade to take (back?) a city or a region (that would mean all cities in that region). All cities start or swich to produce crusade military units. You have a limited time (depending of the distance to the city/region) to attack that city. Crusade military units cannot be used for anything else except for crusade (you cannot send them in another direction or attack a neutral civ).

That's it for the moment. My well of wisdom went dry.