xenoargh said:
Shouldn't those Egyptians be a bit darker? IIRC, Egypt was more African than Arab in terms of mix at the time, and if you go look at photos of Egyptian fellahin who are in the sun all day, they're quite dark-skinned. Beware of photos of people who aren't actually outside much. Just a nit-pick, mind ye- that, and the lack of screens with normalmaps / specular on.
The trickiness in M&B is that you have to tailor the skin tones of armors to match faces, hands, and lower legs. So a unit has to be all of a specific race or you'll get light faces with dark bodies, or dark faces with light bodies. We might go and make the Egyptians use the darker faces set (Retextured vanilla one and Iyiort's mulatto faces) once all is said and done, we'll see.
As to history vs. gameplay... meh, if you stick closely to history, what's a player going to do in this period, where being a feudal warlord is fairly ahistorical?
One idea that might be interesting is to make the core gameplay about trading various stuff along the historical routes of the Med coast and northern Africa- instead of building an ahistorical empire, the player's goal is to make money, which would then allow the player to participate in some of the set-piece events of the era by buying into the armies of the various empires. Just a thought- it would be more work, but it'd be more interesting than just-another-Warband-mod, and you're more than welcome to port the economy re-write I did for Blood and Steel to your project, to make building static trade routes easier.
Good point, though interestingly a feudal style of system was established by the Hurri-Mitanni around the middle of the 2nd Millennium BC, with the chariot-nobility known as Maryannu/Maryanna/Marya, being Indo-European for "Youth" or "Hero" but meant defacto to be charioteer. We've appropriated the term in the folks most influenced by the Mitanni organization (Phoenicians/Aramaeans) for the top tier unit, but you're right that elsewhere feudalism wasn't the case normally. Or it was, but not in the M&B, medieval style.
And we might be interested in doing that, though I think after 1.0 since there's too much stuff on my plate to worry about economics at the moment. I'd need to look into (and do want to, just not right now) how to effect that, and appreciate the offer to be able to port your work - pretty sure we'll take you up on it soon enough!
Spongly: Appreciate the interest and support! I agree, and am starting to try and think of a narrative or a 'destabilizing condition' to justify the sense of a heroic epic war engulfing the known world (Since usually you need some sort of event to shake things up for these "Quasi world wars" to occur.). Won't worry about that until much later, though.
Sea People are right now vassals of the Israelites (Philistines), probably will be mercenaries and may be bandits, although right now I've charted out the planned approach to banditry per vanilla faction's replacement. Desert Raiders become Nubians (with some bedouin), Steppe bandits become the Shasu that gave the Levantines so much trouble, Forest bandits (Assyria replacing Swadia) are Aramo-Chaldean rebels that were a frequent headache for Assyria, ect.
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If you guys want to help me out, what I could really use are some naming lists (first names and last names, or an explanation of how naming works) for:
Assyrians
Israelites
Phoenicians
Arameans (Syrians)
Philistines
Egyptians (I have a source http://kememou.com/names.html but it'd save me the trouble of having to decide them myself)
Scythians
Persians (I can find a source, but again, save me trouble of having to decide them myself. This is a low priority since I already have a ton of names from Shahnameh)
