More cosmetic design choices?

Keep in mind you are playing a 4x TBS game. The game already has more customization than any other on the market.

Design is half of the fun in this game, as it was in GC2.

More variation would just add to the fun.

Cosmetic is nice. But it's more fun to design with functionality. Warzone 2100* where you designed units with different chassis/movement types/weapons. Was more fun than if you could build the same tank... Only with different decals (eg. Warhammer Video Games, IRL there would be some gratification to doing it yourself).

*Or Mechwarrior as a different example. Since MechLab lets you customize weapons/heat sinks/armour levels. Which can encourage different play styles on the same unit.

A lot of this limitation here is due to memory. Also, if you got some appropriate tools you can add lots of these things into the game and produce a lot of different units.

I can live with the '10' options, but I'd like to see more variety in the 10 options - and this wouldn't take up any more memory.

Another thing I'd like to see is the option to choose between male & female options for the minor heroes.

More choice options are always welcome. But I think there are some more important points now to work, like Diplomacy

What does my head in is that female Mancers have such a profoundly crap selection of clothes. They don't even have trousers. Or the fantastic female-only shoulder cloak.

agreed here. Pariden has the same restrictions.

It seems that the available selection of fabric meshes is restricted by race (or faction). Perhaps this is intended to promote some sort of visual similarity between untis of the same faction, but i thinkit is a poor design decision.

All factions should have equal access to all available cosmetic options.. I'd even go so far as to allow Kingdom races to wear dark empire-style armour if they choose to.

Halfway agree with you, at the very least each faction should have more choices where there are few, I have posted a similar thread some long time ago (long and long)...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Funny I made a pair of red pants and dark leather cuirass tonight just for fun -- the difficulty seems to depend on the opacity of the texture, and whether or not you can add hues to it.  Pants are fairly easy, as I imagine most of the clothing probably is.  It would take some work to come up with a good variety of colors, but I'll share if you want.

Also, someone just released a mod that opens up clothing options for all races.

BTW, does it bother anyone else that the light pants always seem dark, and the dark pants always seem light?  Or maybe it's just the colors I'm choosing.

Yeah, diplomacy in the game sucks.

Agreed.  This is kind of what I mean, if you're going to have ten capes, make them look like ten very different capes.  Think about all the different ship components in GC2.  Each race had their own style, you could make so many different combinations.  I'd love this kind of variety in FE.  

I'm not worried about clothing much because it's pointless once you get armor. Rather I would like races to get more distinct armor. I had some easy to implement ideas from another thread I will post here.

1. Like rlane48 mentioned said they should modify the skins on armour so they change more in relation to faction colours.  Right now all armour is the same colour, even leather. Giving unique colours to armies' armour would go a long way to making them look interesting. Think Warhammer, just painting units makes them stand out.  

2. Vary armor art among the races/modeltypes slightly. So maybe Kraxis keeps the leather skirt but the other fallen lose it, I think it makes the fallen look too much like kingdoms and too Hellenic anyway. Tarth and the other more primitive races could also loose the Hellenic skirting. Simply substituting 2 different types of leather skirting would make a lot of units look heavily distinct, without requiring basically any new art. You could also throw different shoulder pads on some races.

3. This one would require some real work. Add helmet decorations tied to race. These would be simple art assets that would be added to the basic helmets in the artdefs. Like feathers, horns, horsetails, wings, spikes, antlers, and Roman crests. So for example all Ironner helmets would gain viking horns.

I was all like "yeah!", and then I I was all like "man, I'm nerd".