Prettying up the game little by little

Great!
Here are the comparisons of what I’ve done last night and today:

I like how all infantrymen hold their weapons diagonally, it brings some appreciated consistency and uniformity.

And here’s how it looks in the game:


Will upload later when I fix the other versions too.

 

There we go! I really need to remake the OP to have it advertise and everything, and put downloads there.

 

Having the diagonal weapon gives elegance to the pose but uniformity is what I don't like, I prefer variety in the poses.
The human military units are incredible.

What version do you modify civ.exe hexadecimal?

 

I’m not sure I understand the question, I’m afraid.

 

I have seen that you have modified Sail, what version of civ.exe have you used with that modification?, better said, can you upload the civ.exe that you are using with your mods? (also the txt of the units)

 

Mine is .01. Replacing “Sail” with “Crvl” was easy because it uses the same bytes anyway.

 

I have tried to do something with caravel but there are too many letters. Sorry.

 

That’s why I didn’t do “caravel” but the mangled “crvl” as a temporary workaround.

 

I had this idea to touch up the catapult and redraw the wheels to make them more wheely. Here are six variants that I came up with:


Are any of these any good at all? Maybe the original wheels actually worked perfectly fine to begin with?

 

Redrew modern boats from (basically) scratch, using Hearts of Iron II icons as references:

(the battleship was already redrawn before and I wasn’t absolutely satisfied with it, and I gave the old battleship icon to the cruiser)

This is how it looks in game (featuring Nuremberg about to get taken by my Phoenician tanks that I tweaked slightly):


Not 100% sold on the crane/cords/mast thing on the transport but it makes it stand out at least. Or maybe I can turn it into an actual crane, I dunno.

EDIT about 3 hours later: gave the ships and the tanks another touch-up or dozen:

 

Upload the file please, so I can see it in a real game.

 

Sure, here you go.

 

Frankly, you have an important challenge.
Personally, I'm not convinced by the "heavy"/machine units, I prefer the original ones, but the human units are impressive.

 

Latest version of the complete comparison compilation (with counters):


Redrew the frigate and the catapult (again).

 

I love these latest changes. I personally really like the mechanised units, but I guess it's personal taste. The new boats look great too!

I've been thinking about the terrains lately too, and wondering if it's feasible to add random details to the (for example) west-connected desert (cactus or animal skull for example) to add some variation to the appearance? I imagine, in practice, it'd be obvious and might not appear as random as it looks in my head. I might have a play as time allows, but art is not my forte so asking in case it's also interesting to you!

 

This may sound as a non-answer (and it might as well be one) but I want to polish the units first before potentially moving on to the terrain because I’m still very much in doubt of my artistic capabilities. Also the tileset doesn’t provide that much diversity to begin with:

Every terrain type has 16 tile variants corresponding to it which are used depending on how the tiles connect to each other; even if I placed some object in one tile, it would get repetitive very soon probably. That and it also would be confusing because bonus resources also appear as objects on top of the tiles.

This might be me being too cautious to try, though.

 

Got to convert to the other two versions, so there we have it, the latest iterations of all three versions:

 

Everything looks amazing! It's really well designed.
You've even changed the terrains!
One question, I never understood the "mine" graphic, if that's like a 2 colored flag above a hole in the ground...

I also really liked the versions where the units get different colored clothing depending on Civ they are on, but it could be that the sprites are too small to become effective like that.

 

Thanks for the appreciation! I didn’t do the terrain, however, credit is where credit is due.
Yeah, I was trying to redraw the mine graphic but couldn’t make it “convincing” enough; I’ll keep on trying, I guess.