Knights Of The Crusades is a busy, bloody, villainous grand strategy RTS
Now available in Templarly access
I've been meaning to research the Crusades for a while. A series of vicious medieval religious wars for control of the Holy Land, initiated by the Latin Christian Church following the conquest of Jerusalem by the Rashidun Caliphate, they've become a collection of memes bandied around by today's armchair fascists. See also, "deus vult". I've explored them indirectly in articles about the cultural inheritance of Warhammer 40,000, but never really dipped into any history books or crusader fiction save for ailing 2004 action game Knights Of The Temple: Infernal Crusade, in which Sir Spamalot Go Bonk against a majestic sunset.
One place to start the R&D rollout might be Knights Of The Crusades, a grand strategy 4X game in which players re-enact the period from the perspective of Christian and Muslim factions.
Knights Of The Crusades launched into early access this week, and "takes you on a grand journey through the First Crusade and beyond--across the Holy Land, Spain, North Africa, and Eastern Europe." It's from the developers of the Kingdom Wars games, which we have enjoyed in the past, and strikes me as basically Age Of Empires but Paradox-scale.
The main campaign sees you first tooling up to contest Jerusalem and then, growing your holdings as you "shape a world that reacts to your choices across a massive dynamic map filled with cities, pilgrim routes, shifting alliances, and relentless holy wars". There is much talk in the Steam page overview video of raiding hamlets and putting innocents to the sword. Glamorising it may be, but it doesn't seem sanitised. There's the endgame prospect of, essentially, becoming the bad guys from Assassin's Creed.
The above describes the initial Eastern European Christian or Templar campaigns, anyway: as regards the early access update schedule, the developers are promising "a lot of focus on making every culture feel unique, with new units, building sets, and mechanics for Pagan, Orthodox, Muslim, and Western Christian factions."
Will it turn out to be a careful study of two hundred years of zealotry and pillage, or will it be another excuse for the scurvy alt-righteous to cosplay as Richard the Lionheart, or will it be some secret third thing? Only you, a hypothetical Crusades historian and/or time-traveller who has played the 1.0 version, can decide. Right now, I'll settle for saying that I'm abstractly interested in the idea of a campaign that begins with a Zerg rush towards a specific location, then phases into a more open-ended and murky 4X structure.
The obvious place to start any video game-skewed Crusades research would be Crusader Kings, but I fear I am too daft and fickle to play Crusader Kings. Or too time-strapped, anyway. Still, I welcome any advice you have about either the Paradox series or other video games that investigate this terrible period and its legacy. It can't be all strategy sims, surely.