Crusade armies and battles

Crusade armies and battles

The crusade system is two games bolted together: a kingdom-management layer (resources, projects, events) and a tactical army layer (squads, leaders, spell power). Both run on formulas the UI never surfaces. Here is what the decompile says they do.

The projects and events graph

The crusade's content wiring is 2,256 typed edges from 1,413 kingdom projects and 843 events:

RelationEdgesMeaning
gated_by_flag515appears only after a save flag
applies_buff401grants a kingdom/unit buff
location368tied to a map location
etude_link228tied to story state
reward_item200pays out items
cost_item159consumes materials
event_link / objective / army176chains and armies

Every project's cost/reward/buff/gate is browsable per entry in our Crusade section.

Tactical combat: the dice sometimes don't roll

Three verified behaviors players never see:

  1. Big dice are fake. When an army roll would exceed 10, the game does not roll at all — it interpolates between max and min using a sampled probability distribution curve (GetDiceRollResult). Only rolls of ten or less are honest dierolls.
  2. Leader spell dice multiply hard: the effective dice count scales as rolls × (5 + SpellPower²). A leader with SpellPower 5 throws ×30 dice.
  3. Tactical damage reduction scales as factor × UnitsCount × SpellStrength — big stacks with strong casters get disproportionately tough.

Plus one for movement: squad move points convert from real meters per second by speed × 6 / 2 / 0.3048, rounded — your cavalry's tactical range is a metric-units conversion, not a designed number.

Kingdom math

  • Recruit growth per turn: (Recruits + FlatBonus) × (100 + PercentBonus) / 100, then a morale bonus of growth × morale / 100 on top.
  • Resources per turn ride two multipliers: Royal Court confidence bands (+10 at confidence ≥ 50; −10/−15 penalties below) and a final × (1 + morale/100).
  • Mercenary pricing scales inversely with your leadership morale — the worse a leader you appoint, the more mercenaries charge.