Your options become even more limited if you use the 1066 start, as there’s only one count somewhere in the Crimea that starts off Jewish. In the Old God’s start, there’s a bunch of Turkic Steppe Tribes that, inexplicably, converted to Judaism. Options are limited, as the Jews were historically a pretty scattered people by the time Crusader Kings II starts. The other headline feature is of course the inclusion of Judaism as a playable Faith. But it’s also a good thing because if a family member goes on to become a Grand-Master, like the Pope, he’d have good relations with you and give everyone in your dynasty prestige and piety bonuses.” This can also be handy because it disinherits them, if they join an order. But you can donate money to them, give them castles, you can borrow money from some of them, and your family members will tend to go off and join these orders, especially if they are fairly martial-types.
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You still can’t PLAY as a Holy Order I still think that would be difficult to shoehorn that into the feudal dynastic system that we have. “We’ve also visited the Holy Orders again – you can interact with them a lot more now. All Non-Heretic religions have Holy Orders now as well. Any Holy Orders existing in the catholic faith automatically switch as well, they kind of go where the Orthodox is. You can play as a Cathar, and then if you manage to reduce the Catholic provinces enough, Catharism will become the new mainline. The fun thing is that the Heresy can actually take over and become the new’ Orthodox’ if it has more provinces than the mother religion. For example, the Cathar’s can have female priests, which is historically accurate, and many of the heresies have a religious head where appropriate. Heresies have also been revised, mainly so that they are more interesting and different from the mainline of the religion. It’s all events based, and it plays more to the RPG part of the game. You can choose where you want to go and then stuff will happen, you might make some friends. Your character can go on an adventure to one of the holy places of Europe – Canterbury, Santiago, Rome, Jerusalem and Constantinople. Pilgrimages also provide a new adventure for your character to go on – similar to the Haj that Islamic characters get to go on, which was introduced in Sword of Islam. There are some other things associated with this bit as well – if you control a Cardinal, and someone wants to excommunicate you and they control no Cardinals, then you’re basically immune to that.” That means you can call in favours from the Pope, but that costs opinion – he’ll like you a little bit less each time you make a request, so you can’t endlessly exploit it. Basically he’ll have plus 200 opinion of you. If you do that, he’s going to be grateful to you, and he’ll have a special bond with you. “There are many advantages to having a Pope from your realm, to have one of your bishops elected Pope. Nine Cardinals appointed by the Pope elect who becomes the new Pope, and this is all done through a new interface, and you can influence this process by spending money in campaign funds, and getting one of your own Clergy into the College.
![crusader kings 2 plus roman provinces crusader kings 2 plus roman provinces](http://www.mdd-marketing.co.uk/files/CK2/ck2_93.jpg)
There’s quite a few major additions or changes to Crusader Kings 2, most notably the inclusion of the ‘College of Cardinals’, which changes and governs how a new Pope is elected. They are going to pertain to things like relics being found, Monks discussing theology, Sainthood, there’s a Joan of Arc type thing.”
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it’s probably going to be more events than we’ve added in any other expansion, I think. “The whole focus is of course on the three Abrahamic faiths, and we’ve added a whole lot of flavour events, Easter egg events, events of all kinds. Henrik himself actually see this expansion more like the fifth expansion of Phase One, rather than the first of Phase Two. In Part Two, let’s look at Sons of Abraham itself in more detail, what it brings to the table, and what that could mean going forward. In Part One of our Two-part feature on Crusader Kings II ‘Phase Two’, we talked to Henrik about their DLC plan for the future, past and present, and what their thinking is behind it.