I am surprised to see that combat units do not have ethnicity.

I agree...
I think it wouldn't be too terrible to add to the pallette some "skin color" similarly to national colors.
This may not add complete ethnicity, but at least the Zulu won't be using caucasian units... And it's not like this would make you have less colors available for normal use on the pallette... You would have just as many shades as you have with manually colored skin...
I've had to convince myself of one concept many times when choosing flavour units for my mod:
Chinese units fit in with Japanese units better than Germanic units do.
This applies to ethnicity too... It's better to have Germanic units with dark skin in the Zulu Army, than Germanic units with caucasian skin in the Zulu Army. Even if they don't look completely like African units. :rolleyes:

Grey Fox started a modpack like this. But, if you think about it, there's 5 culture groups. That would be 5 times the graphics. The "Art\" folder is 487 megs. 5 times that would be 2.435 gigs. Would you want to download that? (not with a modem you wouldn't... :p) Had Firaxis done that, they would have needed 4-5 CDs, or one DVD, and hope everyone has a DVD drive.

Couldn't they change skin color with the same routine that controls the unique colors of thier outfit? Would save a few bytes.

But how would've they do that?

CT, the units portion of the art directories is only ~150 Megs in size (including the standard PTW units). 5 times that would be very large, but it could be done on 2 CDs.

Like ShadowFlame said a relatively easy option (too late for this one in Civ3, I'm guessing), would have been to have a skin tone color in the units like the team color. Your art work wouldn't be quite as 'ethnic' but at least the colors would be more appropriate.

Edit:

Probably a good compromise is the flavor units concept. Pick and choose just enough units to get the flavor right. Some teams wouldn't need many units, others would need more.

Here is a thread about Grandraem's Zulu Worker (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54596).
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads4/zworkerpedia.jpg

But workers all have the same ethnicity! (the have those babylonian beards)

Originally posted by warpstorm
CT, the units portion of the art directories is only ~150 Megs in size (including the standard PTW units). 5 times that would be very large, but it could be done on 2 CDs.

Like ShadowFlame said a relatively easy option (too late for this one in Civ3, I'm guessing), would have been to have a skin tone color in the units like the team color. Your art work wouldn't be quite as 'ethnic' but at least the colors would be more appropriate.

Edit:

Probably a good compromise is the flavor units concept. Pick and choose just enough units to get the flavor right. Some teams wouldn't need many units, others would need more.

You can I tell I don't make graphics modpacks. :)

You can get my Graphics Flavor mod here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39220

It's a mod in where I've been replacing as many unit graphics as possible for as many cultures as possible, with what we have in graphics here at CFC. THere are probably several new units available too.