New Ancillary Icons

[Squid]

In the new version of the traits/ancillaries for RS2 you'll notice that both the armenian and parthian noble house stuff has been added in. Through a lot of hard work back when I did the armenian version I created a bunch of banners for the various armenian noble houses. My work was mediocre at best. When the parthian noble houses were done no banners were created. So I'd like to request that banners be created for the parthian noble houses, we need a total of 7 banners. If you grab the download you can take a look at the tga files for the armenian banners to know size, shape, etc.

If someone would willingly take this on it would be greatly appreciated as my talent most certainly does not lie in anything graphically oriented.

Thanks,

Squid

[tone]

Great stuff.

Maybe something Argent Usher or Tzar would fancy doing?
How many Parthian noble houses are there?

[Argent Usher]

Great stuff.

Maybe something Argent Usher or Tzar would fancy doing?
How many Parthian noble houses are there?

If the researcher makes his job and provides enough workable stuff it isn't a big problem.

[dvk901]

If the researcher makes his job and provides enough workable stuff it isn't a big problem.

Perhaps you could just improvise? It becomes necessary a lot where there is no information to be found.

[cherryfunk]

Squid, if we do this -- and I personally love the idea -- we'll need banners for all the factions to get the system to feel complete...

Also, have you figured out how to make these hereditary? Can you tie them to traits? If we're going to use an Ethnic traits system, it needs to be part of this, no?

[Calvin]

Yes, you can tie them to traits. I'm pretty sure that's how it works anyway. And yes they are hereditary.

[cherryfunk]

Well if they're hereditary, then I'd suggest using the ancillary and not a trait; no point in doubling up. But that would mean we need banners for all the faction houses/tribes, not just Armenia and Parthia...

[Squid]

It's hereditary, the traits gets passed from father to son, while the ancillary is there for two purposes one to signify that the particular noble family exists and to give recognition that the head of noble family was a person of influence. There are 7 parthian noble houses in game, hence the need for 7 banners for them. If/when other factions get a noble house system banners will of course be needed for them, but currently only armenia and parthia have such a system.

I envision this system as serparate but connected with the ethnic trait system. I suppose this could be the armenian/parthian ethnic system though that wasn't the original intent.

[cherryfunk]

Here's a potential problem though, Squid, with 2 systems: you already have the Armenian houses, which are actual Armenian houses -- what do we do with Armenian ethnic traits? Would the Armenian ethnicities be the same as the Houses, or different?

I'm guessing, now that I think on it, that Houses (i.e. families) and Ethnicities (i.e. ethnic groups/tribes/regional areas) are actually two different things. Though a House would be of a specific Ethnic group, not everyone in that Ethnic group would be of that house. So you could have several houses from the same ethnicity.

What we'd need to do, then, is research ethnic groups for Armenia and Parthia, on top of the Houses. I think Suppanut may have already done this for Armenia actually.

So we'd have a two-tier system:

-- All family members are given an Ethnicity, which confers certain appropriate bonuses (i.e. trade for the Greeks, looting for the Sarmatians etc.)

-- Some family members would be members of Noble Houses, which might confer bonuses if appropriate.

A recruited General or Man of the Hour would not be a member of a Noble House, unless he married into one, but he would belong to an ethnicity.

The next question is: other than Armenia and Parthia, would any other factions get Noble Houses? Do we expand the Noble House concept to, for example, the Roman system? The Successors? The Celts?

[Calvin]

As far as I can see the Romans need some kind of Noble House system to make the Caesar trait properly hereditary - for example if the Emperor dies with no children, then someone else in the 'House of Caesars' or whatever can become it. Stops it from disappearing.

[Squid]

That's always been part of the problem, finding that the houses exist is easy finding what they may have used as a house banner not so easy. Some of the Armenian ones are based on historical banners, others, where I had no historical data, I just found patterns that I liked and made banners from those.

[cherryfunk]

That's always been part of the problem, finding that the houses exist is easy finding what they may have used as a house banner not so easy. Some of the Armenian ones are based on historical banners, others, where I had no historical data, I just found patterns that I liked and made banners from those.

I like what you did, and the colorful patterns work well. I think the important thing is that they add a splash of color and look good, frankly I'm not that concerned about their historical accuracy...

[tone]

Interesting info on this page from coins. You'll see some monograms are shown by each coin and in the table about half way down - these could be an idea:

http://www.grifterrec.com/coins/parthia/parthian3.html

Try these coins too: http://www.grifterrec.com/coins/par_rel/par_rel.html and http://www.parthia.com/parthia_coins_parthia.htm (select any of the kings from the drop down menu)
great ideas from there - horse walking right, horse's head, pegasus flying right, Nike walking right, elephant, dioscuri galloping right (whatver that is), griffin (on the end of one of the torcs), bow and gorytos (quiver), cornucopia, some of the kings' diadems show what appear to be ibexes or stags along the crest:



Eagle with wings spread on head of bull facing:





Other ideas:

1) Drafsh-e Kavian



2) Other symbols carried by standard bearers:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I think I like the coin ideas most:

horse
eagle on bull's head
pegasus
griffin

etc

[Squid]

But if they can look cool and be historically accurate, then we're going really well.