WildWeazel
Carthago Creanda Est
Surely I can't be the first to think of this - I've seen palette editing to change skin tones but not in conjunction with civ-colors. But, given that this hack requires coordination of not just civ-color palettes but every unit palette in the scenario, it's no surprise that I've never seen it done.
Civ-colors are just an arbitrary set of colors to replace the other arbitrary set of colors in a certain range of the unit palette. By default and convention these colors are all used to "paint" clothing, armor, and/or insignia to a uniform color range. If these traditional colors were reduced by say 3-5, those freed indices could then be used to map skin tones. The civ-color palette could then assign any skin color, be it white, black, or Simpsons yellow.
Now the catch is that if you only change the civ-color palettes, you'll get splotches of skin color everywhere. You would also have to hand-edit every unit palette to combine civ-colors and reassign skin tones to the corresponding indices. Vehicles and other non-human units would just have to forego those indices.
After all that you could have the same units with the default eurocentric skin for Norse, black for Zulu, bronze for Persia, gray-green for zombies, and so on. Of course, you'd want to lock down a single civ-color for each civ, and would still be limited to a single "race" of units per each.
... maybe it's better to just stick with flavor units.
Civ-colors are just an arbitrary set of colors to replace the other arbitrary set of colors in a certain range of the unit palette. By default and convention these colors are all used to "paint" clothing, armor, and/or insignia to a uniform color range. If these traditional colors were reduced by say 3-5, those freed indices could then be used to map skin tones. The civ-color palette could then assign any skin color, be it white, black, or Simpsons yellow.
Now the catch is that if you only change the civ-color palettes, you'll get splotches of skin color everywhere. You would also have to hand-edit every unit palette to combine civ-colors and reassign skin tones to the corresponding indices. Vehicles and other non-human units would just have to forego those indices.
After all that you could have the same units with the default eurocentric skin for Norse, black for Zulu, bronze for Persia, gray-green for zombies, and so on. Of course, you'd want to lock down a single civ-color for each civ, and would still be limited to a single "race" of units per each.
... maybe it's better to just stick with flavor units.
