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...Have you actually played a crusade in this game?
Lazy leeches would stay home, or fight around the periphery and go for easy targets (it's trivially easy for the player's team to win even massively outmatched if they just avoid the deathball). They don't do that. They mill around with 100k troops in the same 3-4 counties and starve to death bankrupting themselves and a dozen other participating dukes/kings over a 10-year span or until a rebellion breaks out at home and none of their soldiers are there to defend. Or they waltz in single file 5k at a time into an enormous doomstack to get annihilated. If they actually do by some miracle start sieging while starving to death they'll overcommit way too many forces to it and if approached by an enemy a fraction of its size they all abandon the siege to chase the squirrel. I had one crusade where attackers took one target county before enemies really got there, so they lost the passive score boost gain for defended territory. The whole thing was locked in that ridiculous stalemate scenario for half a century where a siege would be almost complete and then fifty thousand (starving) troops would go chase random nearby levy patrols. All while the big empires were racking up a few hundred or thousand gold in debt.
On one hand that sort of outcome is fine as while none of the "crusades" lasted that long irl, this particular one in the game happened in Aquitaine after Andalus consolidated all of Iberia somehow in a suprisingly short timeframe after 867. So maybe that case is more analogous to the Reconquista and in that sense it's unusually short. But that's off topic because the reason for the stalemate wasn't equally matched forces with obscure and elusive objectives, it was pure idiocy because they just. don't. siege. ever.
Hmm. Personally, I look at the Ais loading up their armies, traveling half way across the map, and then running round in circles trying to avoid a fight and think *amateurs*. They're pretty bad at leaching. I mean, you don't take you're whole army and run round in circles. You split off like 5 guys for each person you want the crusader trait, touch the dirt at acre then sit on the beach in Crete sipping chilled mead until the pope says it's time to go home. Then sprinkle a bit on sand on yourself, swagger on back to Europe and actlike, phew, "made it back in one piece."
The great irony of my last crusade is some numbskull leacher decided toput one of my dynasty - a useless, no good ex count who'd been overthrown by a hunchback midget - on the throne of jerusalem. Hey, |ll take the renown.
Seems the AI behavior is pretty historical. The crusades/jihads weren't exactly perfect in their logistics of how to go about a crusade and the nobility letting their realms go to sh-t while they're off playing crusader sounds about right. The shenanigans of the AI lifting sieges before they finished to chase a larger host of enemy infidels sounds about right now that I think about it as well.
The outcome might be similar in some places but the reasons why are absolutely not and the consistency just isn't there.
Equally matched forces, constantly winning and losing battles, resieging cities, strategic withdrawals from amassed forces, regrouping and resupplying, and strikes of opportunity on exposed flanks -> a long stalemate where nobody gets an upper hand but ruins empires on both sides = reasonable.
What happens is (frequently) the opposite: Immensely disproportionate sides, one team that would have 10000% war score if battles weren't capped, nobody sieging anything ever, conveyor belts of doom feeding armies of ~1k into the slaughter against ~100k one piece at a time (this one on it's own might actually be historically plausible), constant starvation and attrition everywhere, and always blobbing into the single deathstack -> a long stalemate where nobody gets an upper hand but ruins empires on both sides until the "held objectives" war score finally ticks up to 150% = not reasonable.
I mean, it's just the way it is, they likely won't change the AI appreciably. Doesn't stop me from enjoying all the other parts of the game but man do I dread crusades and avoid the central goal in them as much as I can.
Supply limit causes a lot of seemingly random behavior as the AI transverses the most efficient supply lines with other weighted variables.
lol
I suggested that the crusade war chest be used to increase supply limits in the war target counties. Bigger war chest = bigger supply limit bonuses.
The longer the war drags on, the more the war chest depletes as the "supplies" are used up. If the war drags on *too* long, you might win it, but there won't be anything but cobwebs in the war chest when it's over.
This would get the AI to perhaps focus on the war target area, instead of rip-roaring across the Arabian peninsula in search of a spot where they won't go over supply limits.
I suggested that on the official suggestions sub-forum but was shot down from all angles. "It works fine as-is!"
"Yeah okay."
One trick I've learned is that, at least to some degree, the AI will try to follow the largest stack it can without going over the supply limit. So you can sort of lead the AI like a carrot on a stick, if you break off a small stack (say, a levy group of maybe 100 levies and 50 siege weapons), they'll usually follow it around as long as there aren't any enemy stacks around. This is really useful when you're trying to get them to besiege a particular barony. (otherwise they'll run off and try to besiege something themselves and likely get separated and destroyed).