Oceanic Pack - 7 Aquatic factions [input requested]

[ete]

Sounds good to me. For bases.. how about third from bottom on the right of Bases 16? Looks like it could plausibly float, and I like that it becomes gold at max size. On Diplomacy4, third one down, far left looks pretty good. And the King card logo is fairly fitting. Color.. either Gold, or some royal blue?

[Buster's Uncle]

Okydoke - I have the portrait dropped in, but I'll get those in before I post.  Won't take long.

[Buster's Uncle]

Placing shields is nobody's favorite part of making a faction graphic.

A simple crown might work better for the faction's theme.

I haven't signed this yet -not sure the faction name's completely decided, for one thing- but this should prove serviceable, at least for now.

[ete]

Played a quick all AI game with it, looks good! One thing that should be changed is the color though, it's exactly the same as Morgan's. Is there a color between his and Miriam's?

A crown logo has potential, yea.

Edit: Attached a testing version of the faction, if anyone wants to try some AI only games or have a play. Everything but basenames and some parts of dialogue should work.

[Buster's Uncle]

Not gonna have a lot of luck with that - out of 255 colors in the SMACX palette, about 3/4 are invisible against the minimap and/or too dark to read the population numbers on the base flags, and most of the rest are taken and/or too close to readily distinguish.  Believe me; I spent a lot of time trying for unique faction colors when I was starting out, and I don't think it's doable.  Caretaker green is sorta too close to Gaian green already, y'know?  -And that was from the professionals.

Actually, I put in a rather orange-yellow to begin with, and that's what the palette did with it.

I'll see what I can do with a crown logo.

[ete]

Right. I guess we'll just have to look forward to being able to load a modern graphics format.

[ete]

Functional, but artless and missing all the cosmetic text, versions of the Covenant and Seasteaders for AI game testing.

My first test was pretty interesting. The Covenant AI committed so many atrocities they hit the everyone declares war on you point, but did significant damage to the monarchs.

[Yitzi]

Right. I guess we'll just have to look forward to being able to load a modern graphics format.

Even that probably won't help that much; the real problem is that there are only so many easily distinguishable colors, and the need to be visible against the minimap limits your options even more.

[ete]

Right. I guess we'll just have to look forward to being able to load a modern graphics format.

Even that probably won't help that much; the real problem is that there are only so many easily distinguishable colors, and the need to be visible against the minimap limits your options even more.

Not easily distinguishable is annoying, but vastly less of an issue than having two which have literally exactly the same color. With only a handful of colors to choose from, there's forced absolute conflict.

[Sigma]

Functional, but artless and missing all the cosmetic text, versions of the Covenant and Seasteaders for AI game testing.

My first test was pretty interesting. The Covenant AI committed so many atrocities they hit the everyone declares war on you point, but did significant damage to the monarchs.

Would you mind me taking a pass at the flavor text in the .txt? I've got some ideas I think should work.

[ete]

Go for it. I was feeling a bit stuck creatively on that one.

Also, my test game is getting crazy. The Neo-reactionaries nuked the Covenant, which started a war with sparta which they're winning with fleets of missiles. Imperium is also hanging out and being a monster as usual, while Covenant death squads are a constant threat to everyone. All looks not very balanced, but it'll improve.

Monarchs look really clunky on SE, they're basically forced FM until they get Green, maybe longer. But awesome values. Maybe replacing -effic is a good idea.

[Yitzi]

Right. I guess we'll just have to look forward to being able to load a modern graphics format.

Even that probably won't help that much; the real problem is that there are only so many easily distinguishable colors, and the need to be visible against the minimap limits your options even more.

Not easily distinguishable is annoying, but vastly less of an issue than having two which have literally exactly the same color. With only a handful of colors to choose from, there's forced absolute conflict.

256 is still fairly large; even if 3/4 don't show up well against the background, that's still 64 possibilities, which should be enough to avoid conflict.

[ete]

256 is still fairly large; even if 3/4 don't show up well against the background, that's still 64 possibilities, which should be enough to avoid conflict.

Within a single game of 7 or factionpack, sure. But I have over 160 factions, which means even distributed perfectly with 64 colors each possible color is going to be used at least twice, some three times. I would prefer a color which did not conflict with one of the original seven, but being able to avoid color conflicts in general will be a notable improvement.

[Yitzi]

256 is still fairly large; even if 3/4 don't show up well against the background, that's still 64 possibilities, which should be enough to avoid conflict.

Within a single game of 7 or factionpack, sure. But I have over 160 factions, which means even distributed perfectly with 64 colors each possible color is going to be used at least twice, some three times. I would prefer a color which did not conflict with one of the original seven, but being able to avoid color conflicts in general will be a notable improvement.

However, after a point, it's probably better to simply change the faction color anyway to avoid near-matches with others in that particular game.

[ete]

Do you mean change colors for an individual game? That's probably worthwhile for AARs by people who know basic graphics stuff, but if with the factionpack being available to the public, it'd be handy to avoid collisions by default rather than requiring messing with files.