As I gather that the "custom battle groups" facility is likely to be made available in "Field of Glory" in the near future, I thought this would be a good time to open up a discussion about how it's use might contribute to taking "Field of Glory" foreword and broadening the appeal of the game.To begin with, simply being able to mix existing unit images of say Huns or hoplites within the same battle group in a random fashion will greatly enhance the visual appeal of the game, and could broaden its appeal to more figure wargamers, many of whom have gone to a great deal of trouble when painting their figures to produce this effect. One of the strong points of the initial release of "Field of Glory" is the way in which different figure images are mixed within battle groups for nations such as Gaul’s and Ancient Britons to produce this effect.
There are however other cases where there are 1, 2 or 3 unit images available for a particular troop type where the troops in question did not have any sort of uniform and where the visual impact of their battle groups would be greatly enhanced if “partial over paint jobs” could be done on the figure in a package such as Photoshop to produce a range of figures with differing tunic, trouser and or shield colours / blazons. For example the sets of single figures that go to make up the current battle groups in the “frank”, “saxon” and “celts” folders in “Legions Triumphant” and those in the “Viking” folder in “Eternal empire”.
Over in the "Field of Glory" Matrix forum “SmickeyMcgee” has posted some images and details showing how straightforward it is to modify existing unit images. I also understand that others have experimented with doing this and have produced good results. However the problem currently is that in order to use these images for battles in multiplayer, both players have to have the same set of modified images installed in their copy of the game.
I think that there is scope here to use the same approach as has been taken with the way player designed scenarios, have been taken up and adopted by “hexwar” as "Historical Scenarios".
Having created their customised variation of say “Frank-Cav-heavy-cavalry-a” with a white shield ground, black shield strap and dark brown boots, the player would then submit it to keith@hexwar.com along with the same sort of form that is completed when a scenario is submitted for inclusion in a future module. If this was up to standard with the next update of the game a battle group using the image would be added to the relevant nation folder for the modules that incorporated the original image and / or the single image figure image placed in the nation sub folder in the “unit-images” folder so that it could be combined with others to make up further custom battle groups,
There might also sometimes be a case for giving modified figure images a new identity for example if unit-mp109-persian-chariot-crew-a,b,c in the “persian-ancient” folder were tweaked to make crew’s to man Persian bold shooters and if variations of “unit-mp01a-thracian-javelinman2-blue” in the “Thracian” folder and all 3 infantry figures in the “italian-city-states-ancient” folders were given tunics with vertical stripes and rebranded as North Illyrian Warriors, as illustrated on page 129 of Duncan Head’s “Armies of the Macedonian and Punic Wars”.
As a final thought once a way had been found to release all 13 modules Slitherine could either carry on publishing reinforcement packs of player images or look at a subscription model to sell batches of these in a virtual quarterly magazine. As with the current setup, anybody with the latest update would be able to download and play “custom scenarios” using the new figures but would only get access to them in the editor or in the “DAG builder” (if one is added) if they had purchased the product in question.
Any thoughts guys ?
Regards
Ian
