How accurate is this depiction of semi-professional Frankish soldiers in the year 773? Were striped shirts used at all?

Frankish Warrior 5th century

Frankish Warrior 6th century

Frankish Warrior 8-9th century

Frankish Warrior (unspecified time)

I'm that person. Funny seeing the stuff on Veeky Forums. I'd freely admit that I tended to follow the model of historical inspiration and influence, but not imitation. So I tried to aim for some level of authenticity and realism but also not entirely enthralled to it given the nature of gameplay severely limits that. For example the abstract division of men into sword and spear units is woefully unrealistic a lot of the time with exceptions for say the late republican/early imperial romans. The way recruitment should work is that you should have access to your elites from the get go rather than have them be something you unlock later in the game. That would require startpos editing which would in turn minimize how compatible the mod is with other mods that edit startposes. Plus I don't know how to do that. Most consider that armor would also be comparatively rarer than games depict, and some periods or cultures have gaps in material that obligate me looking centuries before or centuries after, such as with Aksum/Black Africa having padded equipment back in the 2nd century BC. So odds are they would still have it circa 5th century AD.

It ends up being a compromise also with an eye towards gameplay or aesthetics.

With the striped clothing, I came across secondary literature talking about the striped tunics worn by the Franks. I should have thrown in plaids among the continentals and not reserved it for the celts (who will be released with norse soon) but I elected to keep it to them for visual distinction.

I'm not sure how that polearm snuck in since that's weird looking. If I recall right that was CA's given to franks based on an osprey pic and I threw it in there for some reason.

CA had mounted frankish infantry who had campaign map speeds of cavalry but served entirely on foot in battle.

Love that Armour

>elites should be recruitable from the start.
So make them recruitable from the start. Hell use them as retinues by making their upkeep free when they are garrisoned.
Alternately give upkeep reduction bonuses to them down the line but make them recruitable from the start. You don't need to edit the startpos for that.

Since you nigros are making a massive overhaul mod might as well go the distance and make a startpos edit for your mods.

Saxon bodyguards are OP pls nerf

I love how basically every description of Franks we have includes mass use of archery, yet the stereotype still prevails and not a single art depiction of a Frank along a bow to be seen anywhere.

It's alright. I wish the soldiers fought as well as they did in historical accounts. One Saxon general unit can wipe out 700 men on its own and take maybe 60 loses out of 160 men. It's crazy

There's an issue of manpower/resources for working on it. It's basically just Dresden and myself at this point and he has the primary task of DEI. I might experiment with those kinds of creative approaches to it in the future but ultimately it's running on fumes with minimal manpower compared to DEI or other mods. If recruitment and units hadn't been so weird in Attila vanilla I'd have just stuck with doing a pure reskin, maybe a few new units added, which is what I prefer doing. But it's worth trying to tackle in the future, perhaps as a final touch in the release after this norse/celt one which'll prob be the last. That release doing slavs, naval units and possibly a light auxilia.

All bodyguards are pretty OP and that should be dealt with in the next release, but the Saxons suffer more so because their and norse (and celt) stuff was given placeholder stats. I'm aiming to drastically scale back the # of bodyguard units. I think right now it's like infantry bodyguards are almost as big as regular infantry? The goal would be to make them tiny, 60-80 men on huge (vs 220-240 men in a single infantry unit).

>All bodyguards are pretty OP and that should be dealt with in the next release
Alright. When do you plan for that to be uploaded?

Why is there no mod that makes the Saxons look like the memey saxons with the Jutish armor and large shields and the full mail helmet?

I've got finals until the 12th so I am not working on anything in the mean while, outside of a brief break working on stuff for an ED reskin. I will try to force myself to finish up the celt/norse stuff (it's 75% done or more, just tedious boring shit left) instead of going full on the ED stuff.

Something else being worked on is new portraits and VMDs (models/visuals) for generals. I did that for the Huns and Sassanids before by cutting corners (no visual upgrades for them), but went full upgrade with the Germans. German generals had new VMDs before but CA has it where they use 2d portraits as well as 3d portraits. So their 2d portrats looked like the vanilla ass ones, but their 3d models were up to date. Which might lead to clean shaven guy suddenly having a red beard, or a different face. Since you are always staring at the 2d portrait in the army stack, and if you set portholes to 2d it makes their portraits always (diplomacy, family tree, their little box lower left corner) 2d, it felt necessary to do the full monty for them.

Now CA had it set up to a dizzying number of portraits or possible generals appearances. It varied by culture but for the germanics/celts for example (next post)

pimp posing

Neat

It was about 17 generals, I think I upped it to 20. Each of those had at a minimum:

Politician (Non general)
Faction Ruler (Generic)
General level 0
General level 1
General level 2

Each of these requires 1 VMD, 2 portraits where I screencap them in the editor, magic wand out the background, crop it accordingly. I only have to do that for one portrait the other is scripted in photoshop to trim and resize it (it's just a narrower shrunk portrait of the same type).

So from the get go that's 5 versions for each general, 5x20 so 100 different VMDs and portraits. CA gave every single playable barbarians a unique FL version of each of those generals. So if I wanted to imitate CA I'd have to do approximately 15 or so additional VMD/portrait sets for each of those 20 generals. 15x20 so I'd have to do 300 portraits.

No fucking chance of that. So instead I did western and eastern FL variants as well as a generic FL variant. So only 3 more variations on top of the 5 listed before. I got the math wrong somewhere because the portraits in this pic are 140 not 160, but you get the idea of the tedium.

Such reskinned and new portrait generals will be in the next release for the barbars (germanics and celts), will work on it for Romans, Norse and others in the next.

You truely are a god among modders. CA was so lazy where ED was concerned, it put me off getting it. Your work may actually make me reconsider, they should be paying you for the work they aren't arsed to do.

I wondered about being a cheap fuck and trying to get someone to get me ED, but the price is less of an issue than the quality of the product. That and I got a bad taste from when I asked another modder for his unique pteruges model and helmet. He said he'd give them to me...if I bought him Empire Divided. 16 bucks for leather strips and a helmet. Weew lad. And here I was telling anyone who asked to feel free to use my stuff. It might be an age thing, I think years back I might have been more jealous of my material while now I'm happy seeing people use my stuff. About the only thing I'd ask of someone using my stuff is to try and be authentic and not armor-porn or silly - 300 immortals or roman cataphract infantry levies.

Goes without saying I just ignored him. The funny thing is shortly afterwards I finally found an almost perfect kitbash model in pic related. One that honestly looks even better than what the guy had to boot. What I needed was a model to kitbash for pteruges with the lorica segmentata. It needed to be a tunic which would fit underneath the LS, have an alpha channel (so I can make it transparent),and yet also be wide enough at the thigh/knee to have minimal clipping when moving.

I almost gave up hope then I found it with the steppe parthian tunic 2. All I had to do was slap pteruge textures from hellenic cuirasses, position it, and boom. The best thing is the upper sleeves also worked on that segmentata too, so I alpha channeled the upper sleeves and made them either pteruges or in this pic short sleeve mail.

>Were striped shirts used at all?
It is written in the Vita Karoli that the Franks' traditional costum was in leather, and that the Franks of Charlemagne's time had adopted the garbs of the Gauls because it was more fitting for war

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Then for the manica I found a suitable CA model that was thin enough of a tunic to fit underneath the manica but also thin enough to fit within the short sleeve. I sadly couldn't find a tunic model that did it all (long enough to fit into the segmentata but also narrow enough to fit in the manica) but it's no big deal. I do have non-manica sleeves able to do that.

Greaves were CA's from attila put on the leather greave model because CA's metal greaves had some really terrible janky rigging (made them bend and warp). Pants also from attila, helmet is CA's just colored all brass and not brass-iron, segmentata is their segmentata tinted a darker weathered hue.

The shield was also just me literally copying i.pinimg.com/736x/9a/37/8f/9a378f0dce4a607fd80f16c6e4c43e18--roman-shield-roman-armor.jpg and editing out the noticable wooden seams. The fun thing with the 3rd century is the lack of 100% certain designs outside of a early 4th century mosaic and that dura europos one. So it means I can do a bit of creative stuff and imitations of re-enactors. I'm going to try and bullshit a dura europos rectangular shield design since CA did one but it's really low rez.

>But the habits of man change; and when the Franks, in their wars with the Gauls, saw the latter proudly wearing little striped cloaks, they dropped their national customs and began to imitate the Gauls. At first the strictest of emperors did not forbid the new habit, because it seemed more suitable for war: but, when he found that the Frisians were abusing [104] his permission, and were selling these little cloaks at the same price as the old large ones, he gave orders that no one should buy from the, at the usual price, anything but the old cloaks, broad, wide and long: and he added: "What is the good of those little napkins? I cannot cover myself with them in bed and when I am on horseback I cannot shield myself with them against wind and rain."

>Now the day was cold and rainy and Charles was wearing a sheepskin, not much more costly than the cloak which Saint Martin wore when with bare arms he offered to God a sacrifice that received divine approval.
> Then Charles, full of guile, said to his chamberlain: "Give my sheepskin a rub and bring it to me." It came quite white and perfectly sound and Charles took it and showed it to all those who were there and spoke as follows: -- "Most foolish of mortal men! which of these dresses is the most valuable and the most useful, this one of mine which was bought for a piece of silver, or those of yours which you bought for pounds, nay for many talents?" Their eyes sank to the ground for they could not bear his most terrible censure.

When it comes to CA designs and laziness I am of two minds. I dont' want to get arrogant and toot my own horn versus them because what I do is frankenstein texturing, using a lot of existing assets from other people with manipulation and adjustments. The mail I used in FOTE is largely either CA's made seamless or narf's from mountain blade. The scale patterns are almost all mine, I manipulated the late roman tunic decorum from photos and such, the fur lined or leathery vests are all mine but most stuff is cumulative. If I had to be in CA's shoes and make shit from scratch I couldn't.

Plus I look back and honestly CA has always been a bit poor in visuals. Always garishly color-coded units, always a general minimum of visual variety. The quality of their textures and models can vary from exceptional and great to almost rome 1 tier in a single game. Shogun 2 had some good stuff but I think it was a lot less visual variety than they could have gone with. But in general I think it's always been mods that deliver the good stuff. My fond memories of Rome:BI is from Invasio Barbarorum, not from vanilla.

Also thank you for the art and historical accounts franksposter. It's real neat to see that stuff in the original form. I find those weird Frankish 'cycling helmets' to be real curious looking.

>32. The mention of the trailing garment that the emperor wore at night has diverted us from his military array. Now the dress and equipment of the old Franks was as follows: -- Their boots were gilt on the outside and decorated with laces three cubits long. The thongs round the legs were red, and under them they wore upon their legs and thighs [103] linen of the same colour, artistically embroidered. The laces stretched above these linen garments and above the crossed thongs, sometimes under them and sometimes over them, now in front of the leg and now behind. Then came a rich linen shirt and then a buckled sword-belt. The great sword was surround first with a sheath, then with a covering of leather, and lastly with a linen wrap hardened with shining wax.

>The last part of their dress was a white or blue cloak in the shape of a double square; so that when it was placed upon the shoulders it touched the feet in front and behind, but at the side hardly came down to the knees. In the right hand was carried a stick of apple-wood, with regular knots, strong and terrible; a handle of gold or silver decorated with figures was fastened to it. I myself am lazy and slower than a tortoise, and so never got into Frankland; but I saw the King of the Franks19 in the monastery of Saint Gall, glittering in the dress that I have described.

>gauntlet

nuFranks btfo

>Celts and Norse units
>all those generals
Modder-user, I think I'm falling in love
Are elite units/generals with Roman ridge helmets gonna have the possibility of having those really aesthetic long-feather crests? Seeing a lot of new headgear in those portraits.

Clovis era Franks best Franks

Paladin

Frankish Cabalarii