Brainstorm: EA/MA/LA Arabian/Islamic themed nation

[Squirrelloid]

Lol, i figured out what I'm doing wrong. For whatever reason the program I am using to open them is opening the sprites with different sizes for the pixels. (Its a layout program, but its the strongest graphics program i have). It must be resizing your image to a smaller scale or something to fit on a 'page'. (But the pixels are most certainly a different size between them and the game's tgas when i open them... so weird).

To avoid any issues, could i get your folder of individual tgas - O'm thinking about playing with a couple of them.

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Lol, i figured out what I'm doing wrong. For whatever reason the program I am using to open them is opening the sprites with different sizes for the pixels. (Its a layout program, but its the strongest graphics program i have). It must be resizing your image to a smaller scale or something to fit on a 'page'. (But the pixels are most certainly a different size between them and the game's tgas when i open them... so weird).

To avoid any issues, could i get your folder of individual tgas - O'm thinking about playing with a couple of them.

There's everything I had done. All descriptions, stats and names are really just quick drafts, so don't mind them

[llamabeast]

Squirreloid, you should use GIMP. It's completely free (in the sense of being open source, rather than not being good enough to charge for), is quite easy to use and is ideal for doing sprites.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Squirreloid, you should use GIMP. It's completely free (in the sense of being open source, rather than not being good enough to charge for), is quite easy to use and is ideal for doing sprites.

So, of all the bizarre programs to use I was actually using Canvas - and enjoying the fact that its color tool allows you to *blend* colors by applying one on top of another. Made shading much more intuitive (to me at least).

The fact that it happened to be the best graphics program my computer currently had was also a plus. (I'll confess, most of the graphics stuff i've done in the last 10 years has been graph layouts for publication).

I'll look into GIMP at some point. I have some other things to accomplish this weekend...

[Wrana]

About eras. I should probably clarify why I choose them as I did. While Crusades era is somewhat more widely heard about, coming of Seljuks changed many practices in the Middle East. This included greater dominance of mounted archers also. However, we already have at least 2 nations of mounted archers in Dominions (LA Tien Chi & Bogarus). So I think that it would be better to have nation not so one-trick - and 10th century provides many opportunities.
As for Mohammed's era - I don't think that we actually need another hoplite nation - and earliest Islamic armies were quite close...

[Squirrelloid]

Still thinking about this, but i'm going to be quite busy until the middle of august - expect more ideas or progress sometime after then.

[Wrana]

David Nicolle states in his books on Saracenes (Osprey) that vaunted nomadic shoot-on the-run combat manner required up to 5 horses per each combatant. This was possible for truly nomadic tribes such as Turcomans or Mongols, but armies of Middle East Muslim states, while able to field more troopers, were not able to provide them with so much horses. On the other hand, they had horses of better lines. So: their ghulams shoot while standing drawn in disciplined ranks. This tires horses less, so they were able to protect their valuable horses with barding.
By the way, this may also explain why Crusaders didn't use barding initially: their way of combat involved more riding (ghulams charged only after opponent was into disarray from shooting), as well as why they often won straight-on confrontations: horsemen who stand and shoot almost always lost against a determined charge.