Catholic rulers can pledge their military support to the crusade. When they do, they appear in the list of Pledged Participants. For every crusader that pledges, prestige, piety and artifacts are added to the War Chest. The religion being targeted by the crusade can ‘counter pledge’, and it’s the relative strength of these two sides that is shown as ‘Total Strength’ underneath their portraits. Pledged rulers will automatically be called into the war as it starts.

All Catholic rulers get the option of donating money to the War Chest in exchange for piety and opinion with the Pope. This money is then added to the War Chest, more on that later.

Crusaders who have pledged military support can add a beneficiary to the crusade. This character must be a dynasty member, and depending on your participation in the crusade they might be granted a title in the Crusader Kingdom should the crusade be successful. More on this later.

Players can pay piety to change the target character and/or title. This cost starts fairly low, but doubles each time to avoid spamming. This means that if you’d rather have a crusade target a scary infidel realm on your immediate border, you can make it happen if you’re pious enough!

Players can choose their ‘Stance’ on what they want to happen should they be the most participating crusader. More on this later.

The ‘Selfish’ stance will see the top contributor take the lands for themselves. Doing this completely disqualifies them from the War Chest though, and is seen as impious by the Pope.

The ‘For my Beneficiary’ stance will see your beneficiary become King/Queen of the lands. While still not approved by the Pope, it’s not seen as impious, and you still qualify for (parts) of the War Chest. If the pope has chosen no recipient for the title, this is the default behaviour and carries no penalties.

The ‘Comply with Papal Demands’ stance simply sees whoever the Pope wishes to rule the lands become the King or Queen. If he has no opinion, it will go to the top contributor’s beneficiary.

Greetings!PDXCon is soon upon us, and we hope to see you there! During the event we will reveal the name and theme of the Expansion we’re working on, and after PDXCon is over we’ll have plenty of Dev Diaries that will delve deep into the new expansion features. For now though we’d like to present the main feature of the free patch that’ll accompany the Expansion!The Crusades are a very iconic part of the game, though one that has barely seen any change since the game was released 6 years ago. A lot of fantastic and interesting systems have been added to the game over the years, and we wanted this very central feature to feel as deep and interesting as any one of them.The Catholic faith will no longer use the old Great Holy War system - instead they will use a new and improved system specifically tailored to both increase immersion and enhance the gameplay surrounding the crusades. This system is massive, and it might be hard for us to fit all of the information into this single DD, but we’ll give it our best shot!We have specifically aimed to fix the issue where, unless you intend to win the crusade, there was no real reason for you as a player to participate except to get the ‘Crusader’ trait.To accomplish this we’ve made Catholic crusades work in two phases; first there is a Preparation Phase, followed by the actual war. To communicate this properly we needed a new dedicated interface. Enter, the Crusade View:When the pope decides that it's time for a new Crusade, he will send a call to the Catholic world for support. When he does you can access the Crusade View by clicking the Crusade Banner underneath your portrait.In the Crusade View you will have access to a plethora of useful information, and you’ll be able to take actions to help the crusade or to alter its course. You will be able to see the Pope’s proposed recipient (if any) in the top left corner, and the target character and title in the top right. There will be a timer counting down to the date where the war will start. During this time, the following can be done:If a Catholic ruler chooses to neither pledge to the crusade or donate money to the War Chest, the Pope might get very upset with them. Depending on the rulers tier and influence, this can range from a simple piety hit to an outright excommunication. Revoking your pledge also carries a similar penalty.Regarding the War Chest - when the preparation phase is over, 20% of the money in the War Chest will be divided between the pledged Crusaders, in order to provide for their levies and fleets as they go to war. The rest is saved until the end of the Crusade, where it is used as rewards for the participants and to set up the Crusader Kingdom. The Crusader Kingdom will receive 10% of the War Chest in order to steel them against imminent counterattacks. The rest (including prestige, piety and artifacts) is given out to the Crusaders who participated in the crusade, in order to motivate you as the player to participate as much as you can - even if you don’t expect to win. To ensure that the top contributors don't take all of the War Chest rewards, any one participant can receive at most 20% of it. As the Catholic world tends to be rather… generous with their donations, this often translates into a lot of wealth! Beware though, if the crusade is lost the majority of the contents of the War Chest will be lost, and Christendom will be weaker for it...When the Preparation Phase is over, the war begins and the Crusade View changes:The Countdown Timer is replaced by the warscore and the name of the Crusade is updated, otherwise the functionality remains the same (except for being able to change the target, of course, at this point it’s too late for that).If the Crusade is successful, what will happen depends on the top contributor’s stance. There are three stances; ‘Selfish’, ‘For my Beneficiary’ and ‘Comply with Papal Demands’. The AI will always choose to go with Papal Demands.In the old system, the title and all under it went to the winner of the crusade. You often saw France or the HRE own for example Jerusalem, which in all honesty was very boring, and more often than not only resulted in an inheritance mess. While a player can still choose to use the old system by choosing the ‘Selfish’ stance, the new default behaviour is completely different. Unless the Pope wishes to restore an existing King or Claimant (where the normal, old, behaviour will be used) a Crusader Kingdom will be set up:A Crusader Kingdom is a multicultural kingdom made up of the beneficiaries of all participants. The top contributing participants will have their beneficiaries get higher titles in the target kingdom. To avoid the player gaming the system using inheritance, the Kingdom is always set up to disallow external inheritance - and the AI tends to choose beneficiaries that do not stand to inherit or are married to someone who might inherit.If your beneficiary receives land in a Crusader Kingdom, your entire Dynasty will receive a monthly boon to piety until their death. In a future Dev Diary we will go into more detail regarding the importance of Piety in the Catholic sphere, but rest assured that it’s going to be more important to be seen as pious than it’s ever been before - making the boon from your beneficiary rather significant.The new ruler of the Crusader State, in order to properly rule such a challenging realm, gets a trait appropriately named ‘Crusader King/Queen’ which confers a massive same religion opinion along with some other goodies.And, for the finale, if your beneficiary is selected to be the King or Queen of the Kingdom - you have the option of switching over to them, taking control of the newly established Crusader Kingdom and leaving your old character behind (which is also part of the reason why you can only choose members of your own dynasty as beneficiaries). We believe that doing a thing such as this will provide the quintessential CK2 experience, where you have to both manage unruly vassals and defend against vengeful religious foes!Stay tuned for future Dev Diaries, where we might go into detail on a few… special crusades.