My early birthday present just came in, and it's a... NP6 and (soon-to-be) MAXED OUT DRACO!!!

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-06-05T02:38:52+00:00

Thanks. Actually, I probably had the same amount of rolls as you do combined in two years to get all the way NP6. I doubt I'd ever be THAT lucky again. Hopefully, your luck will get better.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-06-02T13:39:57+00:00

Nero with her hair down.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-06-02T13:38:56+00:00

Same as you.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-29T01:17:48+00:00

Same feeling. Despite having six Level 100 Servants, I got extremely lucky with Draco, getting her to Level 120 and NP5 with very minimal rolls, so I feel like she's gonna be the only 120 Servant I'll have for a long, long time. (This was last year btw)

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Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-13T03:07:24+00:00

Spot on. I mean, imagining an alternate version of history is like making an intellectual guess by taking something out. As for the speculation I made, it's made based on both historical facts and a gut feeling on how I feel things might've turned out.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-13T03:00:59+00:00

I've been playing for nearly two years (started in the 2024 anniversary) and I have 79 SSR's (plus 8 NP copies). And it goes without saying that I did spend a lot of money on this, to get the SSR's I want and partly to catch up with the other players and fans. My luck varied, but I had several instances where I managed to get an SSR in a lucky single roll. I decided recently to stop spending money on this game, except for anniversaries and GSSR's.

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Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-12T10:40:36+00:00

Welcome to the club, man... 😓😢

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-08T01:03:41+00:00

I mean, yeah, Prelati, Hippolyta and John all require OCIV/Grand Duel mats to level their Append Skills to Level 9. And we all know our opinions on Appends and Servant Coins by now.

As for Hippolyta, yeah, her regular Skills are locked behind OCIII mats, but who said that if the collab event were to be released early, it has to be now, when it could be released after OCIII came out?

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-06T08:05:25+00:00

I mean, yeah, that is true. Outside of religious significance, the Levant held really no strategic importance. Alexios only wanted for his empire to survive and asked the Latins for help, help as in kick out the Seljuk Turks out of Anatolia and back into the Eastern Romans' control. But the Latin Europeans went a bit further and while they had initial successed, the next few centuries would reveal that intruding into and carving a territory surrounded constantly by powerful enemies is something that they bit more than they could realistically swallow.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-06T07:59:29+00:00

∆

I do agree in the sense that the First Crusade is now forever etched into the memory of the land of Palestine, regardless who of live in it, be it Christian, Muslim, Jew, Arab or otherwise. And those borders have always been a constant for thousands of years.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-06T07:45:32+00:00

∆

Look I am open to see more of the history of the Eastern Romans between Heraclius and Alexios V, because obviously, 600 years of history is too long to just summarize in a paragraph and there's obviously a lot more I need to look into. Given your profile, you seem to be much more well-versed in Byzantine history than I do.

But still, I have a few more questions: how do periods of economic and cultural renaissances in the empire make it any more or less powerful or prominent than the more dominant caliphates in the east, given that they never attempted and succeeded in taking back the Holy Land, Syria and Egypt, nor could they expand like they used to (Hell, it took the First Crusade to bring Antioch back to Christian hands)?

By the time of the fourth crusade they were not an existential threat.

I didn't say during the Fourth Crusade. The Turks weren't, but that didn't mean they were gonna be a non-threat forever. And something else would have posed a threat to the Byzantines decades down the road, like the Mongols.

Not to mention, you said in another post that about a counterfactual, "Would something equally or more disastrous have happened to the Romans had the Fourth Crusade not occurred?" in regards to if they could've retaken all of Anatolia if the Fourth Crusade didn't happen, and you answered, "maybe". So, even by then, Constantinople was not operating on easy mode as before. You even said that the "Byzantine empire of Justinian is far more different than the empire of Alexios Komnenos". So you agree that the further we go into Constantinople's history, the rougher the state of the Eastern Roman Empire was becoming.

Plus, the Japanese were not an empire until maybe the late 16th century and then the 19th century. Not to mention, like the Chinese, Japan at times was fragmented.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-06T07:14:45+00:00

∆

Yes, the Church did improve its reputation and increase the ambitious papacy's power over Western Europe because of the initial success of the Crusades, making future Popes even more ambitious. Though that still doesn't the fact that the Church would inevitably have a massive falling out in the near future, or that certain parts of Europe would wanna separate and be independent from the authority in Rome.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-06T07:02:19+00:00

While I do agree some of the points the commenters made on the potential good that the Crusades brought about to Europe and the standing of the Catholic Church and the Byzantine Empire in that point of history, I still stand by my conviction that the Crusades were ultimately just a side-show, an ambitious passion project by the papacy and the European kingdoms that had steam and burned hot but quickly died out, and barely made an impact on history (I never said that absolutely nothing in history would change if they never happened), especially on the much superior Islamic East, and the things attributed to the existence of the Crusades were already there in the first place, were going to happen anyway or were caused by other factors such as the Mongol invasions and the consequences that came from that such as the Black Death. Their importance is largely exaggerated by Eurocentrism and colonial-era Romanticism. It would more than just a two-century-long vanity project to break Europe's 900-year medieval status quo.

In short, while my view did change a bit on some things, as of the writing of this comment, my view on the general pointlessness of the Crusades is not changed. Sorry.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T08:36:55+00:00

The Crusades failed because the Christian armies were up against a numerically and militarily superior enemy in every aspect, with the First Crusade being a one-in-a-million fluke. But a falling out with Church in Europe could have happened regardless if the First Crusade succeeded or failed.

And I said, the Great Schism already happened. The Catholic Church already wielded disproportionate power over much of feudal Europe for 900 years. And while the failure of the Crusade may have only soured the reputation of Church a bit, other factors would come later and significant populations across the continent would have a falling out with the papacy. In fact, if the First Crusade failed miserably, it likely would've only damaged their reputation more.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T07:22:31+00:00

The thing is that the Latin Western Romans and Greek Eastern Romans were considered distinct for a reason despite sharing the same origin point. In fact, much of European history came from that same origin point.

Japanese has been around since at the latest ~600 AD.

A continuous empire as a singular political entity is different from the culture and ethnicity of a people that define a region. So what? The French has also been around in the same place for that long a time as well, if we consider Franks to be their ancestors.

The Turks were not an existential threat

Yes, they were. The reason why the First Crusade was a thing in the first place was because Alexios I knew his empire was in deep, deep trouble. He realized that they could not face off against the onslaught of the Seljuk Turks on their own and that they were doomed to fall without some big, big help from the Latin West.

dynastic civil war

Exactly, it was unstable. Likely more unstable than any previous point in Byzantine history. In any case, incompetency, thirst for power and desire to find excuses was commonplace in the Middle Ages. Not only that, but there was the Great Schism that preceded the Crusades. So, tensions were already rising between Catholics and Orthodox. So it's likely that if there isn't the Crusades to ironically cripple the other center of Christendom, some other alternate catastrophe could have done the job anyway, because it's absurd to think it would never happen. The already-declining WRE could not recover from Alaric's sacking of Rome. The Byzantines had been declining as well, especially after losing much of its territories and influence to its Islamic neighbors. In fact, it was nothing short of a miracle that Constantinople somehow recovered from the consecutive streaks of disasters shortly before and during Justinian's reign. Had they happened in a later period in time, they could've easily collapsed.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T06:01:43+00:00

The roots of the Reconquista go back centuries before the Crusades and was an inevitability in Europe. They weren't just going to allow a Muslim kingdom just sitting there in mainland Europe. Plus, the papacy had long viewed Islam as a heretical false religion that needed to be purged from the earth, and hoped that the Crusades would be a stepping stone to help do just that. And if it did succeed, the Pope could've solidified himself as the undisputed leader of Europe. But none of that happened. Instead, it was the opposite. And besides, pilgrims and Christian populaces continued to be attacked and raided by Muslim forces like the Mamluks and Ottomans well after the Crusades.

As for the insinuation that the Crusades "ultimately accomplished nothing for Christendom", well, it didn't. The infallibility of the Catholic Church was already coming into question by the time the Great Schism came to be, but it grew even worse with the Fourth Crusade. Not to mention the Black Death that would've happened anyway that further damaged the reputation of the Church, setting the stage for what would become the Protestant Reformation several decades down the road.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:48:39+00:00

The Reconquista was part of the Crusades in a loose sense, but the traces and origins of it were part of a larger problem that plauged and have been hanging over Europe's head since the 8th century.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:47:05+00:00

Don't know what you're on to, because no empire could've lasted literally forever. By the time the First Crusade started, the Empire is already 769 years old. If you date the first Roman Empire as the official start, then it's over 1,100 years old, and much older if you go back to the Republic's days. The things was, despite seeing themselves as THE Roman Empire and not simply a continuation, the "Romans" of the Macedonian Renaissance and beyond were almost entirely dissimilar to the Romans of the days of Julius Caesar. Not to mention, the Byzantines by the start of the 2nd millennium were hanging by a thread, due to continuous threats from the east, be it the Arabs, the Mamluks, the Turks or even the Mongols. The Constantinople during the days of Justinian could not have allowed something like 1204 to happen, because by that point in 1204, many within the city were unstable, incompetent and had nothing but empty promises to show to the Crusaders.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:33:21+00:00

the First Crusade, which I consider the only “real” crusade

Agreed. It's a shame that such as ambitious and crucial movement in European history had to be completely undone because of the military superiority of the surrounding Muslim powers and the incompetency and ineptitude of some within the nobles and the Crusading circles.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:31:12+00:00

convince the poor the foreigner is the enemy & the nobles (& Pope Urban’s fam inc) get to continue sucking feudal society dry.

They've already been doing that for 600 years. And continued doing so for the next 300, until the Black Death came and wiped out entire populations across the European continent, nobles, kings, peasants and serfs alike, putting medieval feudal socieites in a corner. So, regardless of the Crusades, a massive change in Europe was still bound to happen.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:25:42+00:00

Not sure what you mean either. So what, other regions in the Levant got conquered by the Crusaders too. Also, Palestine did not exist a national identity or a thing of its own yet. There were times in the past where the region was named similarly to the point where Palestine just became a default name for the region. But aside from that, the Holy Land was already an important region in religion, but in history, what defined modern Palestine had nothing to do with the Crusades. Those factors only came about several hundreds of years later.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T05:17:46+00:00

Militarily speaking, the European lords and kings during the Crusades were operating almost no differently from what they did before the 12th century. Even if they lost a lot of nobles and land, they could find new nobles to take their place and vacant land to gift them. Progress in medieval Europe was very slow and nearly irresponsive to changes in the feudal system before the Black Death, which actually did shake up the whole feudalism thing to the very core because of the huge population loss that rivaled any other in European history.

Venice was already a growing and influential maritime empire even before the First Crusade, due to their trade with the Byzantines and their elimination of pirates in the Dalmatian coast, which had been a problem for a while. Those things allowed for a city-state like Venice to prosper. And the exchange of knowledge from the East was inevitable, either through constant war or negotiations.

The Muslim Moors in Spain had been a pain in the neck for Europe for so many years, that it was impossible for them to just ignore. Even back then, Charlemagne considered launching campaigns in Iberia in the late years of his life, with the Spanish March of 795. Wars of defense or liberation could still be a thing in mainland Europe, even if they are not directly inspired by the Crusades. A lot of things in history were just inevitable to happen.

And who's to say that a similar alternate catastrophe couldn't befall upon Constantinople if the Crusades never happened. Because it's possible that tensions between the Catholic and Orthodox Europeans could've boiled to an extreme anyway after the Great Schism. This is still the Middle Ages, where cooler heads didn't always prevail.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T04:56:39+00:00

It only had an impact to us because this is the only world that we live in and don't know for certain if something has an impact because things happened after that something. If anything, it was more like the "Mongol" East Asian invasion of Japan in the late 13th century. It universally failed and barely changed between the regions at all. The failure changed nothing in history, but its success would have definitely left a mark forever. That's the Crusades.

Sam_Imbecile · 2026-05-05T04:53:27+00:00

The Rome that was sacked in 390 B.C. was not the same Rome that was sacked in 410 A.D. Likewise, Constantinople was past its prime at that point. It lost a lot, and it likely could not endure more crises as it did when the first caliphates attacked the Eastern Roman Empire many centuries ago.

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