Early decisions

This guide will allow The Knights to go from a one province minor to a large power in Japan. You won't be the biggest Knights possible, but you'll have a real challenge.When you start out as The Knights before you can think about going to Japan, you'll be faced with many desicions. The most important, do you want to return? If you do, culture convert to Greek and flip to Orthodox (which can be done by the nonfunded missionary trick). This will allow you to form Byzantium if you return as well as giving a nice missionary strength bonus.After this, you must now decide to either go around Africa or bypass it altogether. Bypassing can be done by a war with The Mamluks and getting a Red Sea port (I tried this way, I won the war but went bankrupt).