GRAPHICS: Civ3 Citizens Downgrade

Check this out, and tell me if it looks familiar...

And here is the file... Like many others I felt the citizens icons were a little cluttered and diffcult to tell apart, especially on the domestic advisor screen. So I made a "downgrade" to citizen icons that look like the ones of Civ1.

This makes it possible instantly to spot cities with unhappiness problems. And IMO it applies some of the timeless flavour and iconographic elegance of the original game.

please note, however, that this "downgrade" does not come without a cost. The citizens nationality colour is no longer displayed. This is a minor price to pay IMO for improved clarity. You'll still get the nationality of citizens by hovering the mouse over their icons. The different icons for each "age" has also been scrapped. I prefer iconographic clarity over this kind of fluff.

Installation : Simply unzip, and copy/move to the "Arts/Smallheads" directory. Remember to backup the original file somewhere safe, if you haven't done so already.

Attachment deleted after 188 downloads:

New download link:
http://www.civfanatics.net/downloads/civ3/modpack/civ1citizenicons.zip

Originally posted by Morten Blaabjerg
this "downgrade" does not come without a cost. The citizens nationality colour is no longer displayed. This is a minor price to pay IMO for improved clarity. You'll still get the nationality of citizens by hovering the mouse over their icons. The different icons for each "age" has also been scrapped. I prefer iconographic clarity over this kind of fluff.

Click to expand...

This looks good. However, if there were some way to address those costs above stated, this could be a really really great mod.

I tried to make a "nationality" platform for the icons, with the national colour, but it didn't work out, because the national colours tended to blur the clean look on the domestic advisor screen. Besides, you only really need to tell them apart, when you're dealing with unhappiness anyway on the city screen, and there it's no problem to see which citizens are causing the problems.

No problem in creating a different set of icons for each age -or even for each "cultural sphere" -but that's beyond me. I wanted precisely the universally simple and recognizable *timeless* icons of Civ1.

That's a good idea for the next civ3 patct from firaxis. Dividing the different citezens into different colors instead of "color shifting" like mentiong in another post. Then you could even have an alien mod that hade aliens completly different from humans. If someone doesn't mention this in the path suggestions topic then I will.

Awesome!

I done the same thing for CIV2! I retro-fitted the CIV1 citizens into the city display, You get all the info at a glance!

CIV3's citizens were a little samey. Hard to get the info...

The MOD rocks!!!

Originally posted by Morten Blaabjerg
I tried to make a "nationality" platform for the icons, with the national colour, but it didn't work out, because the national colours tended to blur the clean look on the domestic advisor screen. Besides, you only really need to tell them apart, when you're dealing with unhappiness anyway on the city screen, and there it's no problem to see which citizens are causing the problems.

No problem in creating a different set of icons for each age -or even for each "cultural sphere" -but that's beyond me. I wanted precisely the universally simple and recognizable *timeless* icons of Civ1.

Click to expand...

Morten,

I agree with you about not creating the icons for different ages. I just released a modpack similar to yours (similar in that it changes the people faces... but very different... )

Anyway, to solve your nationality problem, I have a suggestion (if you're interested enough to do it).

Download my modpack Smiley People (you'll find a link in my signature)

Load both images in whatever program you're using (I assume Photoshop).

look at the necks of my *people*, you should notice they're colored in 3 shades of green. Those are 3 of the 6-7 (I figured there are that many but didn't need all of them) colors that CivIII will automatically colorshift to identify nationality.

If you use those same color locations (by color locations I mean location in the palette map) you can paint some features on each of your people (for instance the farmer guy could have his blue outfit made green, the girls same etc. etc. maybe the unhappy guy with the flag you could do just the flag...) This will give you 3 shades that are plenty for the sizes we're talking about.

Your modpack uses a slightly different Palette than mine (mine uses the exact same palette that came with the original CivIII people heads file) so you should change the mapping in your color map to have the 3 greens identical to mine. The reason for this is that if you don't, then you'll probably find that what looked ok in green won't look as good in red, orange etc.

Shouldn't be too big a deal and you may find you like being able to know nationality of folks... after all we're talking slight change to a palette and adding a dab of color to 11 pictures.

Let me know if this helps in any way.

Alessandro

Originally posted by Morten Blaabjerg
this "downgrade" does not come without a cost. The citizens nationality colour is no longer displayed. This is a minor price to pay IMO for improved clarity. You'll still get the nationality of citizens by hovering the mouse over their icons. The different icons for each "age" has also been scrapped. I prefer iconographic clarity over this kind of fluff.

Click to expand...

You could recolour the clothes civ specific (green in paint program I think) - as for age - I don't know what you could do.

EDIT - sorry for the bump, didn't notice how old this thread was.

I really like these, I don't miss not seeing the nationality. Besides, if you really need to know the little screen tip popup tells the nationality. 2nd time I'm downloading it, my first computer broke.

Two thumbs Down, it look's awful. why would you downgrade?

Read post 2.

what about different eras...?

Morten Blaabjerg said:

The different icons for each "age" has also been scrapped. I prefer iconographic clarity over this kind of fluff.

Click to expand...

Heres your answer

Huh. I like the idea more than the graphix themselves. I may look into setting up a fantasy type version of this for the Mystara mod expansion. Instead of faces, there will be full iszed people.