Making Cradle 3+ fully compatible with the Apolyton Edition

[Kull]

AI Aggression in Cradle v5.1 (con):

And it's not just the AI civs either. When the Barbarians acquire a city, they build vessels and use them to transport raiders across the ocean to neighboring countries:

[Kull]

AI Aggression in Cradle v5.1 (con)

For the most part I haven't talked about "game strategy" because all players have a different approach, and mine is no more correct than any other. However, the Apolyton Edition has a nice feature which allows the player to gift a conquered city to the Barbarians, and I find it to be a useful way to harm opponents, especially when my civ is at the government "Max City Cap". Another factor was to quickly conquer a nearby civ, gifting the less valuable cities to the Barbarians. If you simply raze them, AI civs will soon move in, build new ones, and you're stuck with neighbors that are even more powerful than those you eliminated. In Cradle 5.0, this strategy was cheap and extremely successful because the AI could not recapture Barbarian cities and the Barbarians themselves weren't very active. Not any more.

In the example below, the Shang occupied the western end of a peninsula (circled area) which was not part of the overall Minoan expansion strategy, and would preferably be pacified and kept from the hands of other AI civs. In the short campaign which followed, the Shang were destroyed and 5 of their cities were given to the Barbarians. In the past, one cheap guard unit was enough to fend off the occasional singleton attackers, but now the Barbarians take their time and build up powerful attacking stacks (see attached) that can easily overwhelm a simple defense system. So now the border requires more units, forts, and even a road network for shuttling defenders from place to place. All told, a much greater degree of difficulty.

[Kull]

Larger Berzerker Sprite (with Idle Shadows):

The new Berzerker unit sprite was only about 80% the size of the other Land units, which detracted from what should be a menacing appearance, so I ran it through the same process used to re-size Immortal Wombat's Crossbowman (in this case altering 142 files and 4 animations). The sprite did not have any shadow files, so I crafted 4 shadow images for the Idle animation, and the Berzerker's on-map appearance is greatly improved (see attached comparison)

- Files changed: GU204.spr

[Kull]

CtP2 Unit variety:

One of the realities of CtP2 Mod creation is that there's a limited number of unit Sprites to draw upon, and the number is even smaller if you want sprites with full on-map motion. The pool of sprites essentially involves re-use of CtP1 & CtP2 sprites, those created by Tom Davies (mostly for the Medieval period), a handful of decent sprites created for the CtP1 "Forever Future" mod, and a few others from a variety of sources, such as the AOM mod. As I've discussed to varying degrees throughout this thread, even with that group, many of them had to be deconstructed and rebuilt in order to add the missing "Idle" animation which enables full on-map motion in CtP2.

The Cradle mod has far more units than there are available sprites, even with my various machinations, but for the most part sprite sharing has now been reduced to those units which come in Regular, Militia, and Elite varieties (such as the Spearman) and the many Wonder Units and Great Leaders. Even so, I've been playing around with some ideas, and the results so far have been quite interesting. Consider for a moment the different CtP1 and CtP2 sprites. In most cases each game features the same unit names, but the sprites have been altered in subtle ways, mostly involving different colors. As an example, consider the two "Mounted Archers". Cradle uses the CtP2 version as the "Horse Archer" while the CtP1 sprite serves as the "Horseman". Different sprites from different games, but in fact the primary contrast comes down to colors (see attached). Which is fine, because they still look quite different and are easy to tell apart on the map.

[Kull]

New Sprite Colors:

Changing sprite colors is not a new idea, as Maquiladora created 3 colored variants of the North American Indian Warrior (one of which is now part of Cradle 5.1, see Post# 370). Cradle also includes a new US Grant sprite in which the uniform has been altered from Red to Blue (see Post# 367). That particular change was extremely difficult, and involved a huge amount of cutting and pasting (in 126 separate images), and even then it only worked because most of the sprite motion involved the horse, while the rider's uniform was essentially motionless. Even the attack animation involved raising a pistol with one white-clad arm, which had little effect on the colored section of the uniform. In other words, this particular method wouldn't work for the vast majority of sprites, even if I was inclined to pursue it.

The idea was still intriguing however, and while playing around with the Swordsman sprite, I hit upon a much easier solution. Although I've largely avoided dragging this thread down into the weeds, lets make an exception and look at the mechanism whereby the tunic on Tom Davies' Swordsman sprite was changed from blue to a brownish orange. This particular sprite was previously disassembled in order to add the "Idle" animation, so all 100 of the individual image files had already been converted from tga to tif, and the magenta background removed in the process. After loading one of those images in the GIMP graphics program (freeware, in this case v2.8.18), selecting Colors > Hue-Saturation brings up the "Adjust Hue/Lightness/Saturation" window. Next you check the "Blue" color box & drag the "Hue" slider all the way to the right (number becomes 180) and then do the same with the "Cyan" color box and it's "Hue" slider (also 180 after being dragged all the way to the right). You can see this inside the red circles in the bottom image of the attachment.

Notice in particular that the nice thing about changing colors by altering specific hues is there's no effect on the other portions of the image. Helmet still bronze in both images? Check. Skin colors unaltered? Check. Red belt is still red? Check!

Now I won't say this is "easy" since you have to do the same thing for all 100 individual images, but the process is identical in each case, so ultimately it's just repeating a set of keystrokes. There's also another 100 shadow files, but those don't have to be altered and can be ignored. And once all this is done, it's just a matter of rebuilding the sprite, using the same "text file commands" that were already developed for the original "blue tunic" unit. In this case however, I took the opportunity to create a new Idle using some different "Attack" animation images, so when the two units are at rest on the map they'll assume different positions (thus further enhancing the visual differentiation)

[Kull]

New "Hired Thug" sprite:

What started all this was a long-standing desire to make better use of the spear-wielding unit which served as the Hired Thug. It's a nicely constructed sprite, the CtP1 counterpart of the CtP2 Hoplite. What was needed was a somewhat less advanced military unit, and that's what we have now (see attached - previous Hired Thug on the left)

[Kull]

New "Spartacus" sprite:

Spartacus is the Gladiator Unit which is gifted to the civ which builds the Colosseum Wonder. The original sprite was the "Red Legion" (from the Alexander scenario) which is also used by the Pezhetairoi unit and the Marius Wonder unit. However, the reality is that most historical gladiators were poorly armed, and certainly none of them looked anything like a Roman Legionary. Once again, the Swordsman sprite serves as a nice alternative, this time with a tunic color of light green (see attached). It will only be used by Spartacus, so this Wonder unit now has a unique sprite.

[Kull]

New "Leonidas" sprite:

So what about the previous Hired Thug sprite? Well, the builder of the "Spartan Philosophy" Wonder also receives the Leonidas unit. As any devotee of "300" well knows, Leonidas was the Spartan King famous for defying the Persian Army at Thermopylae, but the important thing from a game perspective is that his weapon was the short thrusting spear and he wore the red tunic shared by all Spartan warriors. The previous sprite was the CtP2 Hoplite, which is employed in Cradle as the Hypaspist. The weaponry of that sprite is correct, but the color is more orange than red. The bigger issue is the sprite was shared with Leonidas, but no more!

[Kull]

New "Hero" sprite:

One of the cool features in Cradle is that following a successful battle, it's possible that certain unit types can be promoted to Elite Units (as described in this "Concept" entry). Taking that one step further, until the advent of the Dark Ages it's also possible for these Elite Units to be promoted to Hero (and even for those to become Great Generals). All very neat, but Heroes, Great Generals and Praetorian units all share the same sprite. However, since the new Leonidas sprite had previously been disassembled (the usual "no Idle" problem afflicting most CtP1 units), it was fairly straightforward to run those 93 images through the Hue-shifting process, resulting in a sprite with Bronze armor. And thus the Hero unit now has it's own unique sprite (see attached).

[Kull]

New "Saladin" sprite:

The Saladin Great House Wonder delivers the eponymous Saladin unit, who shares the same sprite as the Janissary. This was another Tom Davies' sprite (the "Fyrdman") which had to be disassembled in order to add an Idle animation. Once again the Hue-shift was employed to alter the tunic colors of all 90 image files, in this case from Yellow to Orange. In addition, the shield had a blue component and that had to be shifted separately. And since I was at it, a different Idle was created as well.

[Kull]

Alternate "Horseman" sprite:

Four different units employ the Raider sprite, 3 of which are Wonder units (Attila, Genghis Khan & Khalid ibn al-Walid). The mostly-black Raider sprite comes from the Alexander scenario, and has a Horse Archer appearance similar to the two Mounted Archers in the attachment to Post# 424 The CtP1 version (blue tunic and horse trappings) was previously disassembled, so it was easy enough to employ the hue-shift and change those colors to Yellow (see attached). In fact any number of colors was possible, but the main issue is the sprite has bare legs & arms which is not appropriate for Wonder units that represent elite Desert and Steppe warriors. So while it's an interesting sprite, there's currently no place for it in Cradle 5.1 (although I'll include it with the download: GU218.spr). Anyway, a different solution was needed to address this problem.

[Kull]

Modified Raider Sprites:

The good news is the Raider is a nice looking sprite (GU086.spr), and there's an obvious differentiation solution. Although most of the sprite is black, the horse has a light blue saddle and various trappings of the same color. Which means that it should be fairly easy to "Hue-shift" them to green, yellow or red without affecting the rest of the sprite. HOWEVER. This particular sprite has an Idle and thus never had to be disassembled, so all of that would have to be done first. There are 4 animations using 172 images (including shadows), so.....ugh. Sparing you the details, eventually the task was complete and three new sprites were created: Khalid with Green trappings, Attila in Red and Genghis in Gold (see attached). All of which means that where once a single sprite was shared by 4 units, each is now unique.

[Kull]

New "Slinger" sprite:

There's only a single Slinger-type sprite (another Tom Davies' creation), and it is shared with the David Wonder Unit. This unit was previously disassembled in order to add the missing "Idle" animation, so it seemed like a logical choice for the next unit to receive the "Hue-shift" treatment. Unfortunately, it needs a Red and a Yellow shift (to change belt, boots, and shield), but those also change the skin colors of the face, arms, and legs. There was no way around that, so instead I shifted Blue (knife sheath) and Magenta (Tunic borders) to Orange and Green respectively, but the alteration was barely noticeable. Additional more intensive editing altered the Idle and changed the shield to brown and the tunic from bright white to more of a cream color, but the additional changes - although hugely time consuming to implement - were likewise hard to differentiate (see attached - original unit on the left).

Overall the unit looks better, so this will now become the new Slinger sprite. But something different was needed for David.

[Kull]

New "David" sprite:

The Temple of Solomon Wonder delivers the David unit, who - as noted above - shared the same sprite as the Slinger. The initial idea was to create a new Slinger and use the original sprite for David, since it had a Gold shield and purple trim on the Tunic, but it still wasn't "royal" enough. So instead of changing colors (difficult to do with this sprite, as described above), I added the bronze helmet worn by the Swordsman sprite (see attached with new Slinger on the left, David on the right). Both the Swordsman & Slinger sprites are quite similar and the head sizes and orientations match quite well, but it still took a while since the copy-paste exercise involved 134 images with different "facings". The trickiest part was the "Death" animation, since the Swordsman falls backwards while the Slinger goes facedown. Fortunately the Swordsman's helmet falls off early in that animation, so it wasn't too hard to replicate the effect for the David sprite.

[Kull]

New "Charlemagne" Sprite:

Charlemagne shares his sprite (GU114.spr) with the Teutonic Knight and Cortes. Options for changing colors using the "Hue-shift" are limited because the trappings and saddle are all Red, and that shift also changes the Horse color (and not in a good way). But it was possible to change the armor from silver to a light gold (see attached), and also to add a new Idle in which the horse paws at the ground. Working with this unit also revealed an error with the 2D artwork, since it previously displayed the CtP2 Knight, not the CtP1 (Teutonic) Knight. Now fixed.