AGE of the CRUSADES!

[fairline]

Here's the Byzantine foot, Varangian Guard, Byz. cavalry and feudal host.

This shouldn't need saying, but I'd prefer it if these weren't used or modified for other scenarios; they are exclusively for Exile. We thought it would be nice if the correspondence we normally conduct in private was posted here....

[Exile]

The Host units are great, well-done and match the other bebro units nicely. You included national shields on all the host units except the Italian. Did you intend to do that? Just checking. lol. The Byz foot units are good. Are they modified from the basic ones that I used?

The Golden Horn; right now, I'm using a unit that looks vaguely like a typical map shoreline. It "hides" the terrain underneath and just sits there with a very high defense value and hit points. Blending it in with the environment is fine, but if you can think of any other way to graphically represent it, Gareth, go for it.

If you wanna create another Peasant, go ahead. The reason I picked that graphic (and the reason I usually do, btw,) is that it presents a guy carrying this huge load, which is essentially the medieval peasant's lot. All I want is that the graphic be similiar in theme.

[fairline]

Oops - I forgot the Italian and I'll rectify that..

The Byzantine foot are retouched and resized; the cavalry is obviously new.

I'll have a think about the Golden Horn... it would help if I saw your terrain to get a feel for it.

Thanks for the pointer about the peasant - I'm planning to give them all a go this weekend. If I don't finish, I'll post what I've got and you can release this baby. I think you've waited long enough for me

Couple of questions:

Are the Cuman and Turk supposed to have the same graphic?

Is the cataphract Byzantine-only or generic? If it's generic, does it matter if some of the nomadic and Muslim cavalry graphics have horse armour?

[AnvilFall]

What about a suburb-unit as the Golden Horn? A nice, easy and fast way to solve the problem, until you come up with something better.

[Exile]

Yes, the Cuman and Seljuk Host use the same graphic, but I've retouched the color of the shirt in the final version of units gif so that the two tribes can be indentified. Both groups were offshoots of the Ghuzz turk supertribe, so this isn't as lame as it sounds.

The Byzantine Horse unit that I'm using is your 10th-11th century Cataphract, and it is civ-specific. Only Byzantines can build them. It's a great graphic, it's yours, let's use it.

My Golden Horn unit is only a patch-up effort to avoid a disembodied shield sitting there on the map. It's faaaaaar too bad to post. Just Take a shot. Do you have a copy of the map?

[fairline]

Originally posted by Exile
Yes, the Cuman and Seljuk Host use the same graphic, but I've retouched the color of the shirt in the final version of units gif so that the two tribes can be indentified. Both groups were offshoots of the Ghuzz turk supertribe, so this isn't as lame as it sounds

Yes they were, but the graphic you've used is from the 8th Century, and one of my earlier (and poorer ) efforts. Cuman mercenaries in later Byzantine service are invariably illustrated and described as light horse archers so I was planning to copy a pic from an Osprey illustration - I have a new Seljuk Turk on the cards as well; he can be either armoured / non-armoured, whichever you prefer.

The Byzantine Horse unit that I'm using is your 10th-11th century Cataphract, and it is civ-specific. Only Byzantines can build them. It's a great graphic, it's yours, let's use it.

I already made a new one based on 11th-13th Century Byzantine heavy cavalry....

My Golden Horn unit is only a patch-up effort to avoid a disembodied shield sitting there on the map. It's faaaaaar too bad to post. Just Take a shot. Do you have a copy of the map?

Nope - any chance you could send with the terrain please?

Couple more: Georgian, Khazar, cataphract, Pecheneg (these again are always illustrated as light horse archers), rehashed-Hungarian and an Omayyad Emir. I'm posting them just so you can decide on any changes - I'll post a completed units file when I've finished them all.

EDIT: Forgot to ask - The rebellion unit is a horse-archer, right? Can he be anything else (ie peasant etc)?

Also, should the barb units have a Western or Middle-Eastern appearance?

[Heresson]

Use my Muslim city style from malmuks scenario!

[Heresson]

In general, not for Barbarians.

[AnvilFall]

May we take a look at the cities.gif?

[Heresson]

Yup. Show it!

[fairline]

BeBro's cities for this period take some beating

[Heresson]

WHAT? MINE CITIES ARE THE BEST! USE THEM OR DIE!!!!

[Exile]

No problem, I'll use your latest efforts and these look better too (if that's possible.)

The barb units are going to prove difficult to label. The reason is that barbarians appear both by sea and land at odd intervals throughout the game. If they are foot units, I decided to use viking-like graphics. If they are horse units, I decided to go with a horse archer/memluk type graphic. The thing is, both type appear on ships and disembark to attack. I have seen attacks in Brittany on the far northwest edge of this map, and I've seen attacks on Crete & Cyprus. I've had to monkey with the labels and game files in places to make the announcements come out right. But I never can predict what barbarians will appear where, or whether they'll be horse or foot troops on the ships. I have changed all the barb ship types to the Bebro longships however. So I suppose the best answer is to make the two slots I've used for foot barbarians to look viking-like and the other slots should be horsed and eastern. When the horse units disembark, the game announces "Saracens." When the horsed barbs appear on land, they are "Turkoman Raiders." I've used Tanelorn's graphics to fill some of these slots because they are relatively generic-Islamic, with a touch of Turk, and that's not a bad approximation of what I'm going for. BUT, lol, there are a number of these horsed barbarian slots, and they do all appear as the scenario continues, so by all means, throw anything you want at me and I'll find a place for it.

Let's make the Seljuk graphic armored. They are very strong units, so make them appear stronger.

This is my current golden horn unit. You can see, in very rough form, what I'm going for here. The thing is, it shouldn't be a military unit, but after that, anything goes. All I did was try to extend a terrain-graphic unit from another scen to cover up both the square and the unit's shield. You can also clearly see where the original artist began and my awful touchup work. But don't allow this graphic to constrict your thinking on this--let the creative stuff flow! The idea is to create an iron barrier that is simply too powerful for any unit or combination of units to defeat. It represents the continuing ability of the Byzantine navy to control its own home waters, so that any friendly force can pass right through, but any attacker is stopped completely. The unit is homecity-ed on Constantinople, and if the city falls from the other side, the unit will disappear forever. That's the idea, so go for any wild idea you have, the more spectacular the better.

[Exile]

Ok, I'm nut sure which unit you referred to when you said "rebellion." If it's the unit-of-fire graphic, don't bother with it, it doesn't appear now. This was the unexpected appearance of the partisan unit in the game when I created an event which gave the Byzantines [gunpowder] to make all their barracks disappear. The unexpected result was that partisans now appeared whenever a Byzantine city was taken. This was because the Byzantines have communism as a tech & government. The combination of communism and gunpowder create partisans. The elimination of that part of the event eliminated the partisans. BUT I was going to make them air units with no movement and with a "range" of 2. The idea was that they would be created, all fire and destruction, for 2 turns nothing could touch them (except maybe a diplo, if one was handy), they would sit there preventing movement and taking up valuable land, and then they would peacefully disappear as the fires and unrest died down. No such luck. Civ has a bad habit of ignoring the "range" factor, and some of these byzantine "fires" raged on for centuries. The only thing that could get rid of these particular "fires" was diplomatic arrangement that pulls back troops.

I'm probably going to use the slot for something else. Haven't thought of what yet. I have to go back and memorize that Barbarian Paper in the scen league archives to figure out which barbarian slots to use and which ones to make strictly barbarian.

[fairline]

On the unit list you sent me the slot after the Hungarians and before the unused last slot on the first row is described as 'rebellion'. It has a horse archer graphic. Should this be something else?