Desert Elves

[quartex]

I believe miyo said something like: "Our resouces are few, lets use them wisely". In that vein, I prefer to concentrate new artwork on where it makes the biggest difference. I think changing the colors of the elves is a great way to make new and yet familiar. Re-doing the 4 mounted units is an option, but would take a lot more work. I have lots of new terrain tiles and new units I'd love to include, so if unit current ain't broke, I don't want to spend a lot of time fixing it. Of course if art is volunteered, I certainly am glad to use it.

I realize that horses are a bit odd for a desert, but I don't see camels having the speed or manuverability of horses. Do people attack and charge on camels? And for new users, I like keeping the unit stats pretty similar to what we're used to.

To justify how horses could survive in a desert environment, I see this desert to be more like the American Southwest, rather than the African Sahara. Native Americans did use horses across the american west, where it was hot and dry. So while as a rule I don't limit myself too much by "realism", I think horses are possible.

[Jetrel]

Horses are not out of place at_all in a desert. You do need to keep them nearer to water than camels, and camels make better long-range travelers and haulers in the desert, but a horse is what the arabs have ridden to war since time immemorial.

Camels, though you can ride them, often get used a lot like mules.

It might be nice to have pack animals - a single camel unit that can't level - which the elves would have to protect.

[emdot]

Jetryl: Colors look nice but fur boots on desert make little sense.

Viliam: I couldn't get so nice colors as Jetryl's but as I was experimenting with various colors I think that would be good addition to game. Creation of full set of units has sense for custom campaign which can became mainstream in future. But color manipulation would be great for differentiation of units of the same race in one scenario - eg. Elves Besieged.

[quartex]

It might be nice to have pack animals - a single camel unit that can't level - which the elves would have to protect.

I thought of that Jetryl, having a camel or wagon unit to represent all the elves you are transporting. But the question I have to ask is, does requiring the player to haul X units across the map, making the scenario more fun? Already I require that you keep the campaign heroes alive. It's an interesting idea. Warcraft 3 has an orc scenario much like this, escorting caravans across the waste.

[Jetrel]

It might be nice to have pack animals - a single camel unit that can't level - which the elves would have to protect.

I thought of that Jetryl, having a camel or wagon unit to represent all the elves you are transporting. But the question I have to ask is, does requiring the player to haul X units across the map, making the scenario more fun? Already I require that you keep the campaign heroes alive. It's an interesting idea. Warcraft 3 has an orc scenario much like this, escorting caravans across the waste.

Actually they have another such level in the expansion, which is a lot more amusing - the night elves help escort a beaten-up group of blood elves. It's fun, simply because their abilities complement each other so nicely - the night elves get their desperately-needed "fine-grained" healing, and you even get to witness the monstrosity that is a Mountain Giant buffed with Inner Fire.

What I would suggest would be flagging the caravan units, which would actually be rather durable, with an extremely high target priority for the AI. If they don't die too easily, and the ai prefers attacking them to the campaign heroes, then it could be fun.

[MadMax]

There's a caravan unit image (made by Antwerp) in FtF that you can use.

[emdot]

This is as close to Jetryl colors as I can get.
Note: IMO nice effect of dusty healing.

This is small bash script called conv:
------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
convert $1 -channel Alpha -fx "(r>g)a*5" -matte qmask.png;
convert $1 \
-channel Red -fx "g+20/255" \
-channel Green -fx "g-5/255" \
-channel Blue -fx "g-25/255" desert-$1;
composite -compose Atop qmask.png desert-$1 desert-$1;
------------------------------------
call it eg:
conv elvish-arche.png
or in loop:
for i in elvish-*; do conv $i; done


Attached files:
des-a-h.jpg - archer line and shyde healing.
des-line.png - base units.
ingame.jpg - few units in game.