Quote Originally Posted by Nerd-o-rama View Post
That sounds a lot more practical, thank you. I need to find a lot of smart guys to sacrifice to Sunni rebels administer my new Kingdom.


EDIT, see, this is why I'm bothering you guys, that's already way more comprehensive strategy than I've been getting from the wiki. Of course, most of this is going to be irrelevant when I inevitably get pasted by the ensuing Jihad.
Yup. Winning the Crusade is the easy part. If you want to hold it, you have to be prepared to fight for it.. and do it pretty much on your own, because while most of Christian Europe will show up for the conquest, they don't especially care about defending it. Bonus: The counter-Jihad is probably going to hit while Jerusalem's holdings are still in their New Administration penalties, which means you can't even really use Jerusalem's own levies in its defense. Hope you're ready to ship your entire army plus as many mercenaries as you can find back over to the Holy Lands (..although it's not that bad if most or all of the Christian Holy Orders are available, and IIRC the Crusade triggers the formation of most of them. You can use them to handle the brunt of the fighting and then dismiss them once they've cut down the invaders to more manageable stacks. Also holding King Jerusalem gives you a decision to vassalize one or two Holy Orders, which is amazing both for defense of Jerusalem and expanding your influence in that area via Holy War.)

So come 1180, Aztecs come and wreck Scotland and Ireland, and I'm left with two holdings in Wales. My 30k + mercenaries died instantly.
This is pretty much exactly what happened to me the first time I played with Sunset Invasion on; both waves of Aztecs landed on Ireland and immediately overwhelmed my core power base. I could probably have handled one, and then recovered a bit and gone out to clean up the other if it had landed in Spain or France. But no, two separate doomstacks of pre-stacked invaders hit my shores, and I don't have anywhere safe to try to consolidate forces or kite them around to try to let attrition work for me.