Each race needs its own distinctive armor skin...

from Elemental Forums

Something cool like Roman themed armor for the Magnar, maybe Samurai themed armor for the Urxen, etc etc.

If it comes out as DLC I'd buy it.

I wanna be able to take a glance at the unit and realize right away which race that unit belongs to.

Also, if the Ironeers looked a little dwarfier (shorter and stockier) and Tarth/Wraiths looked a little elfier, that would be great as well.

Yeah, I'd buy that too. 

Same old uninspired armor on trained units armor is boring.

15,801 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Seconded, more skins for modders would be awesome. Get those artist devs working ;)

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

k6 000

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree.  They really dropped the ball on aesthetics.  The graphics are horrible but what makes it worse is the uninspired and generic look of everything.  It puzzles me because GalCiv2 was not a bad looking game.

I'd rather FE/LH only had four factions if they all played and looked completely differently using different systems.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Oh, and one more thing: please, no slippers or any other fluffy crap. Just cool armor skins.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

i ve suggested something similar before and totaly agree.

imho it would go a long way if every different race had at least a few unique armor pieces ... not every leather/chain/plate gloves/greaves/helm has to be unique but if at least the more visible pieces (chest armor, helmets mostly ) were different that d be a great start !

and imagine all the possibilities you d have for customizing your own factions/troops by being able to chose from all different armor types !

what i disagree with is turning tarth into elves and gilden into dwarves ... not every fantasy game has to have those stereotypes imho. i think the complaints about faction diversity would be a lot less loud if -as we are hereby asking for- stardock put more effort into differenciating them not just gameplay but also visual-wise.

for gilden for example i think it d be really cool if their armor looked sort of "golem-ish", lots of runes etc. very polished and "artistic" - every single piece of armor being a work of love.

tarth on the other could be all about the ragged , functional look. or maybe give them kilts instead of greaves :P

kraxis i could imagine to be "roman-inspired" in their armor.

ythril could have lots of spikes and perhaps helmets that look like animal skulls (different animal depending on whethers its a leather, chain or plate helmet etc.)

soooo many options.... and i do realize none of my ideas above are truly original and i m all for replacing them with better ones, just wanted to give a couple of examples of how to differenciate the factions better from each other.

aside from that i really wish they made more options available for faction/unit design. its a single player only game, so if someone wants to make pink midgets of doom its his thing. i d really love the option to create troops in different poses, different heights & sizes etc. etc. - all things that are ingame but not accesible in faction/unit design outside of modding.

i d buy such a piece of "cosmetic" DLC in a heartbeat but it would probably be more fitting in a third (hopefully comming!) expansion.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

There are actually quite a few differences, but they are subtle (mostly recolourings) and I totally get why people miss them. Anyway, the factions all have their own leather armor, and the other armor used by normal units come in around 5 variations not including the faction's colouring on them.

So the reason we have this somewhat lackluster visual representation of the faction differences is that we have customizable units. In a game with only pre-designed units, like Might and Magic 6, each model is more or less 1 graphical model. And they are also greatly limited in how many are on screen - in a tactical combat you'll never see more than 30. In this game, a single model can consist of up to 30 different graphical models, each customizable. And on top of that, the game supports 150+ models at the same time in tactical battles. Quite simply, because of the scale of the fights, and the customization of the models in those fights, it is not possible to have too many different graphical models. Keep in mind they all have to be loaded into memory all the time - strategic map also shows all armor, unlike Might and Magic 6, and the Elemental games have no loading time for tactical battles.

 

Let's say we wanted to do a game with total graphical differentiation. Let's ignore the manhours needed to do that. There are 20 different body types in the game - 10 races, male, female. Now let's say you want to add a plate breastplate. A plate breastplate currently consists of ~5 individual models. That's ~100 graphical models that would need to be kept in memory constantly, just for this plate breastpiece.

Each armor set consists of 5 pieces, most have fewer graphical models though. Let's say a complete set consists of 15 graphical models. We want 6 different sets, and we still have our 20 different types. That's 1800 different graphical models. We can't combine them, because we want them to be customizable.

And if you think I'm overstating things... when I modded in the shadows faction for the Stormworld / Children of Storm mods, I ended up with 88 new graphical files, and I ignored another 12, and this was just to get ONE set of unique armor into the game (no male/female differentiation, no shields, no weapons).

So.. customization is the problem. And customization is also this game's greatest strength. They faced a choice, and went down this path.