A quick question regarding Unit art...

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CommanderBoreal
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Joined: October 16th, 2020, 9:38 pm

A quick question regarding Unit art...

Post by CommanderBoreal »

Question is in BOLD letters so you can skip the chatter.

Hi, I've been playing Wesnoth on and off for years now without delving deep into multiplayer or the community in general.

Now I am planning on working on my own little era for me and some friends to play around with. While researching the sites and asking around a bit in lobbies I unexpectedly found a bit of negative feedback regarding the way I planned to make Units look in the game.
I am personally quite fond of the "multiple soldiers per Unit" look as can be seen in the "War of the Rings"-add on and planned to do something similar (as my pixel art skills are let's say not fit for the big picture).

The era is just for me and some friends but I still planned on trying to get it onto the server (if everything works out of course). So I am just asking to make sure I am not breaking a big taboo or anything:

Is making "multiple soldiers per Unit"-art despised by the community members?

I haven't really started yet, so an honest answer wont hurt whatever it may be.
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Pentarctagon
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Re: A quick question regarding Unit art...

Post by Pentarctagon »

More just different that despised or anything like that. Generally units are shown as a single character on a hex rather than multiple, but there's no sort of taboo against doing that.
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Pilauli
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Re: A quick question regarding Unit art...

Post by Pilauli »

If you do that, your add-on won't match the rest of the Wesnoth style very well. It will, however, be more consistent with any other add-on that goes for multiple soldiers per unit.

I don't have strong opinions either way, but I lean in the direction of consistency and often like to pretend that individual units have individual personalities. Therefore, I would probably never make multiple soldiers per unit myself, and "oh, hey, this add-on has multiple soldiers per unit" would probably not help motivate me to play with it. However, I don't care what other people want to make.

I'm pretty sure there was, at some point, actually a project to squeeze multiple mainline Wesnoth soldiers onto each hex (just by drawing 4 spearmen next to each other when the unit says "spearman", and so on), but I'm not sure where it is now (in terms of progress or location).

Let's see... I was probably thinking of this thread. Mildly interesting read, and it looks like the "Squad Scale Units Modpack" is on the 1.14 add-ons server if you wanted to check it out. (Yes, that's the thing that's mentioned in the post at the very end of the thread, after it had already mostly died.)
https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=44659

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There are probably at least a couple of people out there with strong opinions; I don't know who those people are, but if they care what you draw for your add-on, I guess this is their opportunity to weigh in.
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Helmet
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Re: A quick question regarding Unit art...

Post by Helmet »

Sir, what you suggest is heresy. How dare you! You expect me to believe that multiple soldiers can occupy a single hex? Such a thing is impossible. Believe me, I have tried. Every time I attempted to move a unit into a hex that already had a unit, the computer wouldn't let me. Do you also pile all your chess pieces onto e4? Do you stack all your hotels onto Park Place?

Just kidding. Your idea sound nifty. Go for it.

I once made a Smurf in pixil art for Wesnoth. The Smurf was to-scale with a typical unit, so it was pretty small. Actually, it was only a white pixel on top of a blue pixil. After I was done working on the Smurf artwork, I copy-pasted him about thirty times into a single hex and made a Smurf army. It was pretty awesome. I never used it in a scenario, though. Wherever it moved, it looked like it was raining.
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