Friday Update: Week 40/2015, Introducing the Germans

This is the first Friday Update in a new and updated format that we'd like to use from now on. Quote of the Week and K&B Salutes-K&B Refutes are gone, and in their place are the new One Thousand Words and Fan of the Week segments, which are both more relevant and tie in more closely with K&B's presence on Facebook. The One Thousand Words segment will contain a picture with a subscript, and will correspond to the picture used in the Friday Update post on Facebook. The Fan of the Week segment is fairly self-explanatory, really.

On the last Friday of each month, however, we'd like to do a Friday Update Monthly Report, in which aforementioned deleted segments are making a return (although Quote of the Week has obviously been renamed Quote of the Month), as well as a new segment called Progress Bar, which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.

---

Having rounded off the Slavs, it's time to shine our light on the next Quintessence civ, and given the choice between the English and Germans, it became clear that the majority of you prefers to hear about the latter.


The Germans in K&B primarily represent the Holy Roman Empire, with a secondary focus on the Terra Mariana and other German states established on the Baltic coast. It's these German adventures in the Baltic, commonly known as the Baltic Crusades, is one of the defining characteristics of the Germans in K&B, as it means that they are a Crusading civ like the Crusaders and Spanish. This obviously means that they use the Officer age-up system and they have the Headquarters, but most importantly it means they have the Chapter House, and with it they can access four Knightly Orders. For the Germans, these four orders are the Templar and Teutonic Orders that they share with the Crusaders, as well as the Livonian Order and Order of the Red Cross and Star, which only the Germans have access to. The Templar Order and Teutonic Order benefit, as you'll know if you played the Crusaders in the Prologue, coin gathering and unit hitpoints respectively, while the Livonian Order benefits ranged combat and the Order of the Red Cross and Star benefits religious units.

Outside of their classification as a Crusading civ, the Germans also have some very interesting bonuses of their own, which centre on three important matters relating to the Holy Roman Empire; its large population, its indirect government and its penchant for both producing and using mercenaries in war. Exactly how all these things affect the Germans, however, is something that we'll go over in more detail in upcoming Friday Updates.


This week we'd like to give a shoutout to Victor Hurtado, who managed to decrypt our cryptic clues and correctly guess that the Portuguese will be one of the new civs in the Reprise, alongside the Chinese and another not-yet revealed civ.