Appearance of Sov

Probably expanded by the modding community.

Theoretically, I don't mind if you can custom make Armor-designs to fit your version of "Pretty" ... however it should still be clearly identifiable as X level of Armor (light, medium, or heavy)

Yeah. I can see you point when considering multiplayer for tactical reasons. In single player mode I don't see it apart from the pleasure in finding a good item which also looks good. When reconsidering my idea/post/request I think that you should only be able to modify the appearance of the Sov (not champions) as he is of course the locus of the RPG part. 

I thnk this is an excellent idea and needs to go into the "ideas" section so the dev's will see it. In order to stay comepetitve, I want to be able to upgrade the armor/weapons of my sov/children/champions, however I dont necessarily want all my guys walking around in uber armor. A hide/disable option for each item slot would be nice.

Guess I can put my question in here since I haven´t found a thread covering this and it seems a bit awkward to me to start a new one just for my question.
So, I thought about the same thing as the thread-starter here and came to wonder if it would be possible to integrate 2D-imagery into the info-cards?

It would be great if a devoted player would have the possibility to draw a picture of his/her sovereign (or, for the modders, of new items, monsters, etc.), or to have several pictures at his/her disposal, and to even share those pictures with other players for further visualisation.

Because a 2D-picture can look much more distinguished, compared to a 3D-depiction, while being much easier to create, compared to designing an entire 3D-model.

I´m no beta-tester and I haven´t come to know much about how those info-cards will work and be presented in the game, and perhaps this has already been cleared.
I only read about a possibility for beta-testers to send in their sovereigns for to be included in the game, implying that there is no mechanism to include new sovereigns/items/monsters/graphics/whatsoever appart from later modding.
But perhaps I´m mistaken - is something like this planned or even already implemented?
Or could something like this be implemented through an "official mod-pack" that would bring new player-made images into the game?

Well, in Civ IV you were able to have 2-D leaderheads even though it was designed for 3-D cartoony things. Hopefully Elemental will have that same 2-D icon functionality.

Yeah, could seriously be cool, mainly because it would allow for more independence in visualisation, available to a much broader range of people.
And could be especially interesting for modders who want to put new and distinguished sovereigns and such into the game but don´t want to do a complete 3D-remodelling for each and every.
With 2D-image-compatibilty you could pretty much just take the concept-sketch that you would need for the 3D-model and leave the rest of the modelling-process that you would have done otherwise.

Well in the current Beta the equipment you choose in setting up your soverign does appear on the pewter model, which is also in the pose you choose. No reason they can't have the equipment show in game when you change it. In fact that is how it works at the moment though the full graphics engine is not in of course just cloth map and pewter figures.

Well, in reply 5 I was more talking about the Info Card vs the actual model. Having a wildly different info card to place a specific Leader Portrait (while having the 3-D model something slightly less accurate/interesting) could allow for a much more varied appearance of leader ... specifically paintings, works of art, and leaders from other genres (for mods).

For instance, a portrait of an Imperial General from Warhammer 40k, done in watercolor or something.