With the latest DLC unveiling, I couldn’t help but notice that since the Sicilians (totally not Normans) with the Lords of the West DLC, the new trend has been to adorn new units and buildings alike with specifically national or factional heraldry/emblems.
It’s the case with the Serjeant for instance (with the Hauteville family coat of arms on their shields), the Leitis (with the Lithuanian symbol), but others as well, and now with the Georgian Monaspa and their Castle, both sporting the Georgian flag on them.
Don’t get me wrong: it looks absolutely cool. But I’d want to raise my point here: although it’s probably easy to go for this approach (one could dare a bit lazy, as it takes time to design cool fitting but generic emblems…), it also hurts the reuse of those models, units and buildings in other situations in custom or official scenarios and settings. My point is, because the Georgian castle has a Georgian flag on it, it won’t most of time be used for anything else than specifically a Georgian castle. Whereas a more generic looking, but no less flavourfull, building like the Polish Castle - for instance - can be used as architecture in a very varied set of situations for any scenario, even outside Poland.
To me, it would be best to avoid national/factional emblems that are overly specific on units/buildings. For exemple: the small lion on Longbowmen’s surcoat: it looks kind of English, but it remains a bit generic as well, not like an actual English flag with the St George’s cross on it, so you can use this unit for a wide range of historical settings without having it looking out of place.
This is a very minor complaint, and one could brush it aside, but I think it’s a too easy design choice that in the long run hurts the usability of those cool units/buildings models for other instances of what they are specifically designed to represent at first.
Just my thought, cheers!
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Only scenario designers will understand this lol.
I made vandals fight with serjeants and Eastern Romans using longbows in my campaigns. In those cases the symbol mostly goes unnoticed but if I had to give the Georgian castle to a barbarian faction the ensign would look too evident and a bit immersion breaking yeah…
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Haha, you might be right, but I’d say not only scenario designers, but players as well!
And yeah, some of these are more or less deal breaking. What made me write this post is actually the Georgian castle with the HUGE flags on it. But generally speaking I think it’s more a units issue.
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I agree more generic looking units buildings are the way to go but on the other side the uu having the civis coat of arms is historically accurate.
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Yeah, on faction emblems it’s totally fine, not a problem. The issue to me is about the buildings and even more the units.
I also forgot to mention the Coustilier: burgundian cross on the livery. They automatically look out of place if you place them in any other faction than 15th century Burgundy, althogh this type of unit was fairly common in all of Western Europe and could be used in a lot of ways in scenarios.
Didn’t notice. Good thing I made burgundii tribes in the gothic wars train them lol
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I agree. I prefer non-specific but still flavoured aesthetics as well.
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I agree with this. The Georgian castle is particularly weird, since the flags only look like Georgian flags if your player colour is red. I suppose something similar is true for the other cases too.
I think the Serjeant looks cool, but it’s probably the worst case. It’s as unreasonably specific as if, say, all Samurai wore the insignia of the Tokugawa clan. (And that’s ignoring the fact that Serjeants weren’t even Sicilian.)
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Oh yes, it totally looks cool, it’s just like you said overly specific. A more generic emblem would have been so much better. A cool Norse dragon pattern like that one:
It would have been a far better choice for exemple. It looks kind of Norman, but broad enough so to not look out of place in any Western European faction really, be it Britons, French, Hell even Vikings or Teutons had pretty much this style of equipment (kite shield, Phrygian face helm…) around 11-12th century.
Your exemple of the Japanese is spot on as well. Makes me think Samurai with sashimono would look so cool as well.
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On the plus side, the Composite Bowman looks quite neutral, and I think would work well in a lot of contexts. (I initially thought the same of the Warrior Priest, but apparently he’s carrying an Armenian cross.)
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He’s also wearing the traditional attire of the Khevsur people of Georgia.
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