Friday Update: Crusading civset news - Knights and Barbarians mod for Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

Continuing the series of introducing features of all three Civsets appearing in the Prologue (read the first part about Europeans here), this time it's about Crusading civset. In the Prologue there are only Crusaders in this particular civset but in later versions Germans and Spanish are included as well.

Pilgrimage techs. From left to right: Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Pilgrimage to Monte Sant'Angelo and Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

There are three thing to remember when playing as a Crusading civ:

1. all Crusading civs have Chapter House, which allows choosing a Knightly Order providing different bonuses, units and techs. Chapter House units are powerful units costing Papal Favour, which is automatically trickled whenever your Pilgrims or Farmers are gathering. Therefore, you don't need to "waste" resources to train Chapter House units. To name some bonuses, Templar Order allows Chapter House to generate coin and Order of Santiago grants you the Ceasefire ability.
2. all Crusading civs have Headquarters, which we haven't talked about either. Headquarters is buildable by Wagon granted when reaching the Age II and therefore cannot be rebuilt. It works like a Dojo from TAD by autotraining units of your choice. The units trained from Headquarters are UUs of that particular civ so for Crusaders, they are Lebanese, Edessan and Armenian Auxiliary. You can train these units from normal military buildings as well, however Headquarters does it automatically although having longer training times. Headquarters possesses also a different feature, the Pilgrimage. It's basically a set of three infinite techs which upgrade certain unit in different ways. For Crusaders, they upgrade either Pilgrim's gather rates, HP & Attack or speed. After researching, the cost of Pilgrimage tech goes up.
3. all Crusading civs have their unique politicians, which are similar to TAD's Asian Wonders. Now, don't expect to see a Taj Mahal in Levant but Flags instead. Instead of having auras or bonuses like Wonders, Flags provide only population increasing every age. Age II Flag provides only 5 population while Age 5 is much more useful with bonus 20 population. For the actual politicians, there are always three choices with their own focuses. Crusaders can either choose Constable, Chamberlain or Chancellor, former providing bonuses for Military units and Mercenaries, Chamberlain helping your buildings and economic units and Chancellor giving you resources or religious units and bonuses. Unlike in TAD, you can choose each politician as many times as you want. Also, each politician gives you both bonuses and units/resources.

Crusader Flags. Each flag is attached to a House-looking building, which can't be seen in the picture.

In general, the Crusading civset is the ultimate military civset with "free" Chapter House units and Headquarters' autotraining. Crusading civs have some unpredictability with possibility to change the active Knightly Order and having politicians with their own focuses. You shouldn't have troubles playing with Crusading civs if you have played with TAD civs.

Here is Pepp asking about Catapult and have its 5-meters tall Engineers been removed...

Pepp wrote: Just regarding catapult, has its engineer been removed?

K&B salutes... death of Hugo Chávez. One less dictator in the world...
K&B refutes... fixing mobile phones. Mine was being repaired for a week and it went back after having it for two hours!