I don't think I can join the crusade as I'm not a Catholic nation... but I may use the crusade to attack them and gain some lands. It all depends on the Mongols.
Hello friend. nice campaign, and nice battle too. just a few hints and tips if I may: I don't know if you are aware of this or not, but you can assign your king as a governor for a city aside the fact that you can put the king in the command of an army(but assigning the king as a governor especially in a secure city will be more safer for the king than to put the king in the head of an army), you can also recruit levy units from your vassals: all you have to do is to place your army in the land of your vassal and you can start recruiting levy units at the rate of 1 levy unit per turn, also you can annex your vassals without a fight: the button that permits the annexation of a vassal state is in the diplomatic menu: but not in the list of diplomatic actions, but you can find this button near the button where you can made a war target request button. also it is just a suggestion, but when you conquer a city: the first building to convert is the main building so you can get a garrison and move your armies elsewhere: other types of buildings can wait for later, or you can simply build that small garrison building wich will give you a small garrison until you can gather enough money to convert the rest of the city(long story short: having a garrison in a city is more important than to convert the food building or to convert the religious building, but that is just my opinion). and about where you should expand next: I believe you don't have to worry for the Mongols right now(at least not until they declare war at you), so I suggest you declare war at the Ayyubids and capture as much as you can of their cities: by attacking the Ayyubids you can improve your diplomatic relation with the crusaders states and even maybe have some military or defensive alliances with them. one last suggestion: I suggest you assemble your two armies: put your best units in one of the two armies and make this army a full stack army so this army will be your elite army for the conquests, and the other army will be a support army that can can also keep the public order in the newly captured lands. and finally, good luck.
For your next campaign I would suggest trying turning on Lucky Nations as well as enabling the Judgement Day Challenge. The JDC really makes the AI spiteful and actively come after you instead of just sitting in their settlements defending. You'll get more field battles and in general it makes diplomacy harder and more important to manage, as you can't just buddy up with everybody. Good luck with this one and thanks for covering 1212, it's a real gamechanger of a mod.
I would attack the Ayyubids cause if you have one army in the north of the Kingdom so that could handle the Mongols and while the other 2 armies that you have can attack the Ayyubids
Yeah I would like to capitalize on the crusade... I only two 1.5 stacks between my two armies. If I build up my economy a bit more then I should be able to push south against them... just depends on what the Mongols do.
In this campaign you ask yourself about Eastern Christianity... Yep ,Eastern Christianity exist,but they are different,like Assyrian(around 5.-6.st. that was biggest Ch. in world),Armenian Ch.(1. world state who adopt Ch. religion as state religion) and probably more other/s ;)