I've played and enjoyed this mod for a great many years, basically since it came out. To me, Fall of the Eagles has made Attila an actually playable game, both in terms of historicity and game design. This is especially true for all the improvements in terms of unit design - away with drab colours, away with the usual TW faction monocolours, hello to the world of Late Antiquity, where warriors show their station through colourful shields, cloaks etc. This is all to say that the following is not a criticism of colour in general - I know that Antiquity was far more colourful, sometimes garishly so, than it is often depicted in movies. I think FotE did a fantastic job of depicting that:
https://i.imgur.com/i5WWwl0l.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/DGXnUBGl.jpg
Then I took a break for some months and a few updates happened. And now the shields and clothes of the same Frankish warriors look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/DHOBxN8l.jpghttps://i.imgur.com/dJ9HDERl.jpg
Frank-ly, I think this looks
awful. The mod had excellent unit design, colourful yet never overboard. Now ~60% of shields have these weird combinations of bright Neon colours that hurt the eye and utterly break historical immersion (colours like Teal smack of 60s interior design, not something you could get organically in 400s Europe). The same goes for many of the shirts which suddenly have the same hideous patterns.
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One more screenshot which, to me, illustrates the difference between colours/designs that work and those that don't. I'm sure you'll see right away which of these shields look appropriate and which just don't:
https://i.imgur.com/U4V2Whpl.jpg
So, what's the point of this post? I hope it's clear that I'm not just mindlessly hating on another's work, I wouldn't care about this if I didn't want to keep playing and loving this mod, and I don't believe my criticism is unfair. My goal is three-fold:
1. To ask whoever is in charge right now (I believe the team basically handed the mod over to Cgma to do as he pleases) to reconsider these design choices and, if possible, revert to the old colours.
2. To point out a very common thing with long-running mods, where at some point the creators just cannot leave well enough alone and constantly have to change things for the sake of change, almost always to the detriment of the final product. Sometimes it's good to ask yourself: "Does this actually need to be changed?". This includes the new unit cards, which to me do not at all improve on the old ones, many factions now have very little variation between different units, making it unnecessarily hard to distinguish them at a glance, a problem the old ones didn't have.
3. In case nobody agrees with me and I'm the only one who dislikes the new designs, to kindly ask if there is a way to revert these changes myself, maybe by copy-pasting textures from an older version or something like that?
If you've made it to here, thanks for reading, and all the best to everyone who takes the time to improve games through modding. Again, I wouldn't have taken the time to write all this if I wasn't so deeply invested in the only mod that does Late Antiquity justice!
