Guys, this is about republics, not muslims. Make a muslim thread about muslims.
Nope, i kept saying if they wanted to add playable republics they needed to take out the coastal horde CB, but it's in.
It's gonna be trivial to just conquer everything with your endless mercs, money and free CBs.
They have weakened the CB so now you need first to build a trade post and then two wars to conquer a county. And conquering the county might actually give you little benefit compared to just conquering the city since what you are usually after is more money from the extended trade range.
The problem is that the AI will not take into consideration the human factors but will instead calculate mathematically, like a computer. That's probably a good way to reflect a sociopathic individual, which is not unlike republics really behaved in dealings especially with the Byzantine Empire but still...
As for gaining the coasts, mercenaries dropped off their ships and assaulting the holdings to 100% may work too well for them. Coastal county CB can often lead to creating or usurping ducal titles, which can lead to de iure claims for non-coastal provinces or coastal provinces without even a trade post (much less a city). In some cases, that can lead to forming kingdoms, for example Brittany or Wales, as there is only one Welsh province that doesn't have a coastline and none in Brittany. In fact, Scotland would be doable and especially those scores of independent and feuding Irish dukes and counts could easily lead to the formation of a Republic of Ireland in 12th century by Venice or Genoa, let alone Sicily close to home. Norway, Denmark, even Sweden, possibly Finland. Gallicia and Portugal closer to home. They will have even more cash, remember? The only real drawback being the lack of marital alliances. In the early period, when hiring every merc band present in the game already gives you a 25K stack while kingdoms can't get much above 8K stacks, they could become unstoppable.
Speaking of "even more cash", being Christian they will be able to combine the standard mercenaries with holy orders as long as they have the piety, and should certainly be able to hire the ships. Should make it easy to form stuff in Africa, along with whatever they take off any Christian princes winning holy wars there, in addition to snatching rebelling emirs in time.
Oh, and snatching entire counties will eventually give them levies, especially when they create or usurp duchies and conquer the remaining de iure counties. If they manage to complete a 20K levy base + cash for mercs, it's gonna be hard to resist them.
Well, we'll see. For one, I surely think they don't meddle nearly as much as they historically should.
