Prettying up the game little by little

Of the new mosaics the one I like the most is the 2nd (top right), I see the dome-shaped turret as old and that is why I like the rectangular turret better, perhaps something should be included on top of the turret, an antenna , machine gun or something so that it is not so bland, it gives me the feeling that something is missing above.

I do not like the artillery, it is too similar to the tank, I would go for a design more similar to the original.
 


Looks distinct enough for me: the gun is pointed upwards 45 degrees to indicate artillery performing indirect fire as opposed to tanks shooting at targets in direct line of sight.
 
It is clear that I am not going to make a living as a graphic artist XD

I was referring to something like this, with the turret with more accessories and that the caterpillar and the shape of the tank is not so square, that it has certain curves so that it does not look like a shoe box.


 
Something like this?


~~the sixth tank died while trying to kill the barbarian rifleman, the shame~~
 
For my taste it is improving, it would be playing with the accessories of the turret and the shape of the tank until you find one that you really like.
For example, they still haven't convinced me, but you know that tastes are very personal.

Edit: the rounded shape of the chassis I would rule it out, it's old.
 
Sadly, I can’t get into finer details with this one because I literally cannot have things smaller than a single pixel, and I must fit everything into 15×15 pixels.
I guess this will have to be it—at least for the time being until I figure something out:
 
The important thing is that you like it and are happy.

I prefer the original, since psychologically speaking, having the mosaic with frontal view seems more threatening and imposing, it is as if it were going to come out of the monitor to attack you, while giving a feeling that the graphic is wider compared to other units infantry
 
Okay, here’s the final unit for today: the new mechanised infantry, based on the composite design of the Canadian LAV series of APCs. I specifically decided for a wheeled vehicle to make it more distinct from both the tank and the self-propelled howitzer that are both tracked vehicles. I also had a soldier’s head poke out from the turret to show that it is indeed an infantry unit and not an armour.

Also I changed the colour of the settler’s clothes because the grey was very hard to see in various terrains.

EDIT: also the battleship looks a lot better with clouds of smoke coming out of its smokestacks:
 
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I think these are great too. I love the subtle add of the infantryman in the APC.

If I were to be deliberately critical to provide feedback, the extra black line in between both sets of wheels took me a second to place, but don't change it on just my say!

The stacking of units with the transparency took me a second to parse too, but I think any changes to that would be game changes... (Like, having the units underneath having a sentry style overlay for example)

Really loving seeing these.

As an aside, what will the copyright state of these new images be from your point of view (I know the tileset isn't all your own work), but would you be willing to have these licensed with an open license for future clones?
 
The battleship is a modern warship, putting a chimney does not make any sense, another serious thing for the ironclad
For this ship, the nose would be rounded and perhaps the black color would not help much.
 
@dom111 The stacking annoys me as well, and I don’t think I have a solution for it. It was designed for the counter-like icons, and I agree that making the underlying unit sentry-greyed out would have looked much better instead, but it’s not something I can do with my set of abilities.

With regards to the tileset, I’m absolutely open to others doing whatever they want with it because, as you noted, my version is already a clone and a fork and if would have been hypocritical of me to not allow that. That and it doesn’t make sense to me to try and keep anyone from editing things.

@rhaul Sure, I’m absolutely open to revisiting the battleship. Right now it’s representing a composite design of kinda WWI-era dreadnought-style battleship (hence the smokestacks) but I’m going to try a WWII-era battleship as well, something taking cues from the Yamato, the Bismarck, the Missouri, and the Iowa. I was never absolutely satisfied with what I had there.

Then again, remember that I’m very limited with what I can actually do, as again, you can put only so many details into a 15×15 canvas, and I still want to keep the icon facing to the right instead of turning it towards the viewer like this.

As for the ironclad, the original icon seems to be depicting the HMS Warrior or a similar ship, so the smoke and the brown masts make perfect sense for that. I’m not sure I want to change the ironclad much, if at all.
 
Sure, there you go, it’s attached. Again, ter257.pic is the terrain, unchanged by me from tomekum’s marvelous work, and spr257.pic is the units and map objects.

I haven’t done much drawing on the sprites yesterday (because I did some drawing IRL instead), I did have another attempt at the battleship but I’m still not satisfied, will have a go at it again.
I’m also bobbling back and forth on which way I want the planes to face. I’m not a fan of planes facing down ↓ because planes are supposed to fly up. I simply flipped the planes to face up ↑ for now, but in the future I’m thinking of having the fighter face top right ↗ (because it can only fight air) and the bomber face bottom right ↘ (because it can only fight ground). This would also make them look more dynamic maybe? I have some ideas but I’ll have to see how bad I am at implementing them.

In any case, there are only a few units left until I’m finished with the set.
 

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Seeing CivDOS so heavily modified in appearance has me pondering again about an old conversation about importing the SNES Civ1 graphics (which Riderr3 extracted) into one of the PC versions.



Although from the posts in this thread it sounds like CivDOS's palette is super sensitive and limited to allow such drastic changes. I wonder if CivWin also allows for these awesome transparent units and has a better or worse palette options. Honza was able to change all of CivWin's graphics to look like CivDOS without too much trouble (other than animation issues) despite CivDOS using quite different colours to CivWin so presumably it's colour palette range is not too bad.

 
Just sharing a side by side comparison of my current game, original vs modded:

upload_2022-4-12_12-0-35.png
upload_2022-4-12_12-0-55.png


For me the modded desert terrain is really better !

However there is a problem with modded plains: CIV draws them "over" the terrain improvements (irrigation), and since the modded plains have more paint, irrigation can barely be seen at all.

Regarding units/cities, I probably have bias towards original, so far I find original much more "readable" on screen (also I was not prepared to see the settler pic replace by a person ! :) )

I would be curious to see a version of your modded artwork, but keeping full colored background for contrast/readability...

Or maybe outline all the artwork in black, including the colored flags on cities...

Anyways, keep up the good work !
 
I would be curious to see a version of your modded artwork, but keeping full colored background for contrast/readability...

There we go. I hate to admit it but the coloured counters do look nice and add to the perception of Civ as an overgrown boardgame. I’ll still keep the sprite version in addition to the counters version nonetheless because moving around soldiers and tanks is just as engaging as sliding around pieces of cardboard—just appeals to different kinds of players, I guess.

I can also put the city houses on a counter too, I dunno.

…I’m now curious to see how the counters look for the grey player because I use so many greys in my units.

EDIT from about 90 minutes later: @darkpanda, when you next look into some disassembling, would it be possible to try and find the routine that draws the irrigation graphic and maybe kinda sorta have it go over the plains effect rather than under it?
 

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EDIT from about 90 minutes later: @darkpanda, when you next look into some disassembling, would it be possible to try and find the routine that draws the irrigation graphic and maybe kinda sorta have it go over the plains effect rather than under it?

Noted for later.

The units are of course more visible... Now maybe there's some inbetween that could be both less "in your face full colored background", but still keep more of the civ color than just the thin line at the bottom.

You could also use the Civ color as part of the unit colors, what would that do ?

For instance, the soldiers shirt arms could use the civ colors, the tanks plating or wheels, etc.
 
I am a classist, but I prefer the mosaic filled with the color of civilization.

 
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