Fix Fatamids

[theKing1988]

Indeed. It can´t be stressed enough that jihads are ALWAYS a defensive 'last option' reaction to foreign invasion/occupation of muslim territory. A (holy) war initiated against a non-muslim area can NEVER be a proper Jihad.

Also speaking of Spain their should be animosity between the Muslims in Iberia and those in Northern Africa because historically the main reason why Iberia ended up as christian was because muslims outside of Iberia didn´t want to get involved there.

It has to be noted that under the Umayyad Caliphate aggresive Jihading was very much the order of the day. According to what i have read, it was even so central that peace with infidels where not allowed and respites from the fighting were seen as cease-fires basically. So the concept of Jihad was never statically defensive of nature. But once continous expansion stopped and the Abbasid Caliphate succeeded the Umayyad, the notion of constant offensive religious warfare was eventually dropped completely, so as when the crusades came along the Jihads were now solely defensive of nature.

So for our period, yes, i think it might be a good idea of a historical accurate representation of the concept. But it might end up nerfing the muslims too much, so i don't know if it is a good idea gameplay-wise.

 

[TheLionHeart]

It has to be noted that under the Umayyad Caliphate aggresive Jihading was very much the order of the day. According to what i have read, it was even so central that peace with infidels where not allowed and respites from the fighting were seen as cease-fires basically. So the concept of Jihad was never statically defensive of nature. But once continous expansion stopped and the Abbasid Caliphate succeeded the Umayyad, the notion of constant offensive religious warfare was eventually dropped completely, so as when the crusades came along the Jihads were now solely defensive of nature.

So for our period, yes, i think it might be a good idea of a historical accurate representation of the concept. But it might end up nerfing the muslims too much, so i don't know if it is a good idea gameplay-wise.

No, what I am trying to say is that holy wars for Muslims should still be allowed and be able to be called on any christian kingdom just not invasions or aggressive jihads. Because I'm not trying to make the Muslims completely incapable of conquering lands that were not part of the caliphate I just don't want them to agressively spread into greece and Iberia in just a few decades if they are going to attack, at least make it take a century or so to completely conquer them.

 

[Frozen_Predator]

So far I have done two games in LoR and in both the Fatimids failed.

First game I was the Byzzies, testing out the schism mending and Roman restoration so it should be expected, though faction wars really hurried it up.

in my Brittany game (currently ongoing) the Fatimids essentially rolled over an barely resisted the first crusade, barely any resistance, except for capturing my duke. Somehow I became king of Jerusalem. The Fatimids remained stable enough to holy war me for Galilee which they won despite the grand alliance that formed to stop them (France, England and HRE). However after this moment of glory and me making preparations to stay safe in Brittany, the Fatimids began to fall to faction wars. Slowly I took back Galilee (county by county during faction wars) With de jure Jerusalem again secured I used the second faction war to take first Sinaï, then the duchy of Arabia, and now my forces have crossed into Africa and taken Damietta. As soon as my troops have recovered (and my cash reserves for the holy orders) I'll move in on Alexandria and usurp the title.

 

[Theddude]

Whelp. Notice how it's only 11 years into the game. I literally didn't even see what happened because I play in windowed mode and was browsing stuff. Then I came back and... yea.

Looks pretty normal to me. :sad: Usually they end up with Anatolia and Abyssinia too, but I'm sure they'll get there in the next ten years. Galicia is a must too, and more often then not most of Italy. This is all par for the course, sadly. The Fatimids don't collapse like the Seljuks or Byzantines do, they just grow, grow, grow like an all consuming monster.

Really though, Shia Jihads aren't a thing, they never happened historically, probably because as it's been pointed out here only the Imam can call a Jihad. They should not be in the game, although I'm sure it's for "gameplay balance" when in reality it just unbalances things. Invasions are pretty insane too, the requirements are hilariously low, 500 piety? You can get that from 0 in less than a year for most Muslim rulers, more so for Sultans.

Also, Shias and Sunnis don't hate each other in the game, it's just "religious differences" when it should be "heretic". The Fatimids shouldn't be fixated on conquering Greece (they never were), they should be focused on holding off the rest of the Muslim world that borders them and hates them with a fiery passion. The Fatimids really should feel under siege from the Sunnis, and be struggling against them for doctrinal supremacy in Islam, not forming some kind of united front against Christianity.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is absolutely no meaningful interreligious interaction in this game aside from war. This is pretty inaccurate, considering how religion took a back seat to politics in Iberia especially as well as in Sicily and the Middle East. It was not a clear cut "us vs. them", rulers most often acted in their own interests, not out of blind religious fanaticism.

 

[NezzeOne]

So far I have done two games in LoR and in both the Fatimids failed.

First game I was the Byzzies, testing out the schism mending and Roman restoration so it should be expected, though faction wars really hurried it up.

in my Brittany game (currently ongoing) the Fatimids essentially rolled over an barely resisted the first crusade, barely any resistance, except for capturing my duke. Somehow I became king of Jerusalem. The Fatimids remained stable enough to holy war me for Galilee which they won despite the grand alliance that formed to stop them (France, England and HRE). However after this moment of glory and me making preparations to stay safe in Brittany, the Fatimids began to fall to faction wars. Slowly I took back Galilee (county by county during faction wars) With de jure Jerusalem again secured I used the second faction war to take first Sinaï, then the duchy of Arabia, and now my forces have crossed into Africa and taken Damietta. As soon as my troops have recovered (and my cash reserves for the holy orders) I'll move in on Alexandria and usurp the title.

I also just had an experience with failed Fatimids. They were originally unstoppable juggernauts, but after they were bogged down with civil wars, I made a power grab for Damietta.

Turns out that's where a huge chunk of their man power comes from. So I'd be willing to suggest gouging out a few of the baronies from the Duchies of Damietta and Cairo.

 

[maidros]

The worst part of the whole overpowered Fatimids (and Muslims in general) is that there is no `Crusade' in the Crusader Kings anymore - not successful ones at least. There is only an obnoxious green blob that never collapses (except to change names and return more powerful than ever). And 1.07 has made things easier for the Muslims to overrun western Europe. France and England are unstable as hell - everyday, Aquitaine, Toulouse, Flanders and Burgundy plot against the king of France who has no recourse except to keep fending off these plotters. And in my latest game, after the death of the Conqueror, the throne of England is changing hands like nobody's business. The vassals put someone on the throne, then have a faction to put his grandmother on the throne, and turn around and put him back on the throne. Rinse and repeat and you have England. Only that abominable grey blob is a kinda sorta match for the obnoxious green blob - although they lose Italy, and often even Burgundy to the Fatimids.. And the Byazntines are more interested in Croatia, Adriatic Italy, Caucasus and Hungary, happily losing their core lands in Anatolia and Greece to the Muslims. All in all, while the factions are a great idea, 1.07 has made sure there will be no successful Crusades anymore. The only way to have a successful crusade is for the player to have a huge empire to challenge the Fatimids. In my latest game, the Fatimids won a Jihad for Anatolia against the Byzantines while fending off a Crusade in the early 12th Century.

Funnily enough, the one country that seems to be spared by the factions is the Fatimids, and it is they that should be racked with factions. In late 11th century Egypt, the vazir feuded against other nobles, the Turkish soldiers fought the Sudanese and the Nubians, the emirs feuded with the Caliph's Council, the Seljuks loathed the Fatimids and were aiding all kinds of malcontents in Egypt, the Assassins were murdering rulers left and right, so on and so forth. But noooo - everyone in the game loves the Shia Caliph, and he has a world spanning empire, from Mali in the south to England in the north, from the Atlantic in the west to Baghdad in the east.

 

[Comradebot]

I also just had an experience with failed Fatimids. They were originally unstoppable juggernauts, but after they were bogged down with civil wars, I made a power grab for Damietta.

Turns out that's where a huge chunk of their man power comes from. So I'd be willing to suggest gouging out a few of the baronies from the Duchies of Damietta and Cairo.

Its true: as Nubia, the Fatimids loom over you as an omnipresent threat for much of the game... until you take Cairo and Damietta for yourself. Once you ninja those away, you go from looking for every little advantage you can just to stay alive to suddenly being one of the biggest players in the game world.

And Alexandria is worth noting, too: not quite as valuable as Cairo or Damietta, but its not a bad chunk of desert... especially the county of Alexandria itself. Oh well, all of Egypt except Sinai now bows to House Azim... sadly, the (super crappy) duchy of Sinai isn't mine because its firmly in the grips of the Seljuks (well, now the people who replaced them). My only attempt to take it was met with the exiled Fatimids calling a Jihad against me... even with the Catholics trying to Crusade for Jerusalem, I couldn't handle both sides stacks. Got bogged down, settled for focusing on insuring the Fatimids (with the Hashishin and Mamluk LOLstacks...) couldn't re-take Egypt, and gave up on Sinai. Which, without help, I don't have much chance of taking: Seljuks built a massive empire that can field nearly 70k men. I'll need a Crusade or Mongols to put a dent in them... and until then, back to keeping the HRE, ERE, France, England, and the Cumans allied with me as often as possible to help prevent the Persians from overrunning me. Ain't no rest for the Nubians.

 

[ZechsMerquise73]

Fatamids need to be more disliked by their vassals and surrounding rulers, but they're not really that hard to deal with yourself. The AI usually wears down doomstacks pretty fast with attrition, and they're usually at war with someone else to get in the way. And even if you loose, this game is pretty forgiving when you surrender. Unless you're Nubia, of course.

 

[maidros]

Mathilda of Tuscany got hammered by the Fatimid doomstacks. She tried to stop the Jihad for Sicily, failed and then, her own kingdom was overrun in my current Savoie game. Guess that is the punishment for her trying to leave the HRE. Poor Mattie - she tried so hard to stop Henry from reaching the pope. Looks like her attention should have been focussed the other way - trying to stop the Fatimids from overrunning Italy.

Ten minutes later, it was the turn of Henry IV. He lost all of Italy. The Pope called a Crusade was was promptly overrun. The Crusade went nowhere, and now the Fatimids are invading Burgundy. Wanna see if they overrun France, England and the other countries as well.

My current Savoie game is a keeper just for the incongruities. The Fatimids fortunately did not overrun my last counties in Savoie - they got a succession crisis and had to head home, so the invasion of Burgundy failed. But no fears - they are back. They have now started a jihad alongside Sultan Alp Arslan (the Seljuk Sultan, who, by the way, is Sunni) for Galicia! Joy! IOTL, if anything, Sultan Alp Arslan would be starting a Jihad against the Fatimids, but not here! Sultan Alp Arslan loves the Fatimid Caliph, for reasons unknown to me.

 

[Voy]

Mathilda is a saint, but not even a saint could stop the ravaging forces of the unibrow Caliph.

 

[maidros]

Mathilda is a saint, but not even a saint could stop the ravaging forces of the unibrow Caliph.

In this game, Mathilda turned Shia, got slow fever and died in 1091. My heir (of Savoie) is married to one of her daughters. Fortunately for me, the girl is not Shia. But my game is not likely to last for more than a few minutes, now. Fatmiids have invaded Burgundy and my Savoyard counties have all been conquered.

 

[Die Nacht]

They have always been a bit OP, especially when they do things like, you know, launch freaking jihads on Italy. In fact, that just happened to me in my first LOR game.

Really frustrating, almost impossible to play Sicily...almost. What with the constant Jihads and all.

Well this just happened to me in LOR too. We beat them, I captured the Caliph and we won.

Idk what you guys are talking about.

 

[riknap]

Well this just happened to me in LOR too. We beat them, I captured the Caliph and we won.

Idk what you guys are talking about.

I think they're trying to refer to how it works out WITHOUT player intervention. The chance that you're trolling is high, but I'll take it

In my current ERE game (with the ck2+ mod), there was a time where the Fatimids launched a jihad against a recently united Kingdom of Sicily and won. That wouldn't be much ahistorical by itself, except that england owned one of the baronies in the sicilian duchy.
The end result was a two way invasion where English armies occupied a large portion of the fatimid Sicily, while Fatimid armies controlled the southern half of England. I forgot to check how it ended because there was a crusade ongoing... against Byzantium, ie. me, the player. A crusade against the orthodox christians... while a major christian kingdom is still under muslim hands (not to mention that only the de jure area kingdoms of Leon and Aragon were still christian in Iberia).

 

[Hystarea]

In my game they always invade the Byzantines and conquer greece.

 

[maidros]

Out of curiosity, exactly what bonuses are given to the Fatimids to enable them to steamroll everyone? In my latest Tuscany game, for the first crusade of Jerusalem in the 1090s, I saved the game and added the kings of France, England and the HRE to join the Crusade. The Fatimids were, at this point, invading Armenia. They thrashed the Byzantines, the HRE, the French, and the English, along with a horde of other smaller kingdoms without breaking a sweat. The keep winning against odds of 3 to 2 and sometimes even more. In 1098, they have all of Armenia and have beaten off the Crusade.

 

[riknap]

Out of curiosity, exactly what bonuses are given to the Fatimids to enable them to steamroll everyone? In my latest Tuscany game, for the first crusade of Jerusalem in the 1090s, I saved the game and added the kings of France, England and the HRE to join the Crusade. The Fatimids were, at this point, invading Armenia. They thrashed the Byzantines, the HRE, the French, and the English, along with a horde of other smaller kingdoms without breaking a sweat. The keep winning against odds of 3 to 2 and sometimes even more. In 1098, they have all of Armenia and have beaten off the Crusade.

in vanilla:
they have a (historically accurate) tech superiority, plus on moments that they are stable, they have a much larger realm manpower than christian realms of the same size since they have a lot of buildings pre-constructed (the same goes with the ERE anyway) therefore larger armies. this combined with their superior tech means they they have the advantage in combat

it doesn't help that they are defenders in crusades after all (thus they can defeat the enemy which often arrives piecemeal) while their armies are already combined

 

[maidros]

in vanilla:
they have a (historically accurate) tech superiority, plus on moments that they are stable, they have a much larger realm manpower than christian realms of the same size since they have a lot of buildings pre-constructed (the same goes with the ERE anyway) therefore larger armies. this combined with their superior tech means they they have the advantage in combat

it doesn't help that they are defenders in crusades after all (thus they can defeat the enemy which often arrives piecemeal) while their armies are already combined

Excuse me?!!! Historically accurate military tech superiority??!!

The only military superiority the eleventh century Fatimids should have is in factional feuding. If the Europeans knights were a bunch of conniving and backstabbing bastards, the Fatmids were ten times worse and would any day, beat them hands down at it! As an example of the kind of dysfunctional military the Fatimids had, the King Baldwin in 1101 at the Battle of Ramillat was outnumbered nine to one, and still handily defeated the Egyptian army. The reason for this was simple - the morale of Egyptian forces was abysmal, and the Arabs, Berbers, Turks and the Sudanese all kept trying to get each other killed much more perfervidly than trying to defeat the Crusaders. All of them distrusted everyone else, and none of them had any initiative. And you want me to believe that this bunch of misfits and dysfunctional conspirators had military superiority over the Europeans?!?!?

 

[riknap]

Excuse me?!!! Historically accurate military tech superiority??!!

The only military superiority the eleventh century Fatimids should have is in factional feuding. If the Europeans knights were a bunch of conniving and backstabbing bastards, the Fatmids were ten times worse and would any day, beat them hands down at it! As an example of the kind of dysfunctional military the Fatimids had, the King Baldwin in 1101 at the Battle of Ramillat was outnumbered nine to one, and still handily defeated the Egyptian army. The reason for this was simple - the morale of Egyptian forces was abysmal, and the Arabs, Berbers, Turks and the Sudanese all kept trying to get each other killed much more perfervidly than trying to defeat the Crusaders. All of them distrusted everyone else, and none of them had any initiative. And you want me to believe that this bunch of misfits and dysfunctional conspirators had military superiority over the Europeans?!?!?

I'm not saying they had military superiority (a lot of the texts I read about the crusades squarely put the reason why Jerusalem survived long as it did was mostly because of the in-fighting of the caliphate)

what the game does acknowledge in an abstracted form though is their superior technology relative to western standards (think damascus steel for example). what then game FAILS to properly simulate is pop-specific intrigues and its general effects, whether in politics or military (the game treats soldiers as a homogenous resource, and for good reason since properly making mechanics wherein soldier-culture matters and generals plot against each other, as happened in Manzikert, would make a whole-different game. Or at least require mechanics as extant as the current feudal mechanics of CK2).

This is what made the Fatimids historically "weak" relative to the crusaders, but since the game cannot fully abstract this, the fatimids end up overpowered due to their tech-bonus and ahistorical stability and internal cooperation. They end up with more men than the crusaders could field at the Levant due to the game's wonky military strategic AI (the AI just sends what men it can and whenever without regard for "strategy" -- the crusaders wouldn't have transported 2,000 men from England in one month and then 400 men from some italian count on another then 5,000 men under the emperor after the third month -- they would have arrived as one, disregarding feuding kings for a while). this combined with the tech bonus, and they end up defeating crusaders in in-game wars.

So to answer your original question: the "bonuses" they receive is the slightly-historically justifiable tech advantage and pre-upgraded holdings which gives them more men than western christian realms. This is made worse by the game's insufficient abstraction of in-fighting and intrigue that historically nullified the aforementioned advantage (the christian realms themselves weren't immune from this, hell even the modern military is occasionally hampered by inter-service rivalry [ie. the development of the US Airforce was slowed down because of the Navy], but the Fatimids were more affected)
So long as the game cannot fully simulate every factor in reality (and it shouldn't be expected to), a lot of ahistorical "imbalances" will show up. They can be fixed with nerf bat patches that artificially weaken them one way or another (such as the decadence mechanic), but its effect is limited and situational since it doesn't "correct" the fundamental cause

That said, the most accurate crusader-era game would be one that combines the in-depth army simulation of Hearts of Iron, the Pop-mechanic of Victoria, parts of the general's ambitions in EU Rome, and feudal-mechanics of CK2 as a whole. Only then can we have a more-or-less better simulation of the Crusades in a game.

 

[Immortal Impi]

Tech superiority is not the same as military disciplinary superiority, and it's not true anyways. There was no appreciable difference in Muslim and Christian military technologies. The places where Muslims had some sort of edge on Christendom are irrelevant to this conversation.

Plain and simple, there are a number of things which need to be done to nerf the Fatimids.

1) They should be in a civil war. Three mercenary companies, one Sudanese, one Turkish, one Berber, at war with one another and hostile to the state. If that's the best representation of the thing that happened.

2) No Shi'a provinces. They never made an effort to convert any of Egypt; only the Nobility was Isma'ili.

3) War with Seljuks, severely bad relations with Sunnis.

 

[unmerged(569711)]

I hate the Fatimids theyve always been ridiculously overpowered. They had it at one point where Crusades would actually work.

UGH I HATE THE FATIMIDS