Ancillary Portrait Mini-Preview, by Forgus

[Malrubius]

Greetings Europa Barbarorum fans!

You might think that now that the Open Beta is released we settled down for a little--though well earned - rest. Nothing can be further from the truth! With the contribution of our long time and new members we continue to work in earnest for what we think is the greatest mod created.

And now to the point. Creating a mod is not only making models and textures. There are a lot of little things that must be created. Ancillary portraits are amongst them.

As always, historical accuracy is our main concern. We feel obliged to find the most accurate portrait of the ancillary.

Sometimes we are lucky like in the case of my personal favourite, Karneades The Academic:



Or Marcus Porcius Cato Censorius (Cato the Elder):


Or Krysipphos.


But sometimes I have difficulties. Often the bust I use is broken. This is Kleanthes of Assos:


Sometimes we have no bust at all, but a better quality drawing helps me a bit like in the case of Eratosthenes of Cyrene:


...and there are times when the best quality image looks like this, like of the Gracchi:


Sill there are nightmares. He is Kallimachos of Cyrene:


I hope all of you fans understand now, how very important it is to have pictures for these renowned scholars, artists and soldiers of antiquity in order to make our mod more living, but still, historically accurate. So please help us, and contribute on the following link, where I eagerly wait for your help on the matter.
http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=60271
Should you feel that a great man of our timeframe (272BC-14AD) is carelessly ignored, and preferably you are in possession of an image of him, please do not hesitate to post it to us, and we promise we will listen. Oh yes, barbarian named ancillaries -also Eastern, or Carthaginian ones- are warmly welcomed!

But only a small minority of our ancillaries are named... there are hundreds of ancillaries in our Ancillary Portrait Catalogue like these:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s update!

Please note that unless stated otherwise, ALL pictures shown in our previews are of works in progress. We continue to improve on all parts of EB, and we will continue to do so long after our initial release.

Since some areas where these news items are posted cannot handle wide images, we appreciate your restraint from quoting full-size images.

As always, if you have questions or comments, the best place to post them is here, where the EB team is most active:

Europa Barbarorum ORG forum

Europa Barbarorum TWC forum

We give special thanks to Imageshack that provides us with a simple, foolproof, and free way to show you all these pictures each week.


Have a great day!


Sincerely,

The Europa Barbarorum team.

[MithradatesVI]

WOW.

I am severely impressed. If I had any firstborn male children, I'd be sacrificing them to you folks right now.

[mike^_^]

simply fantastic! nice work

are any of them going to be in the next patch?

[Zenith Darksea]

You're giving the ancillaries individual portraits. That is astonishingly good work. What can we expect next? Well-endowed slave girls (or male slaves, for gamers who aren't the same gender as myself) to serve us with wine and figs as we play? This is fantastic stuff!

[M.R.Maiornikov]

Wow these portraits are simply amazing guy. Great work Considering all the innovasions of EB, it even might become the all-time best mod for RTW. Keep up the good work.

[Forgus]

I'm glad you like these portraits. :original: Feels good.

[Fabolous]

You're giving the ancillaries individual portraits. That is astonishingly good work.

Or astonishingly insane. Not that I don't love it. But wow, this is... wow. The ones you you have shown are beautiful. I will really love playing the game with them.

What can we expect next? Well-endowed slave girls (or male slaves, for gamers who aren't the same gender as myself) to serve us with wine and figs as we play?

Hmm... I could get behind a movement for that.

[Cheexsta]

Those are excellent! Congratulations Forgus and anyone else involved in making them

Can't wait for them to be in the patch.

[Marcus Scaurus]

Excellent work Malrubius. How realistic will these ancillaries be? For example, will Cato the Elder disappear as ancillary in 149 BC when he historically died? I always give valuable ancillaries to younger family members if my general becomes about sixty, so some traits are in my family for over a hundred years. Not even Cato lived that long :wink:

[Krystoforos]

Realy amazing! Beautiful thing

[The White Knight]

Wow! These are beautiful!

You are gods.

[Sparton Matticus]

I like that.. is there any chance you can create generals or captains portraits like that? from historical sources.. and replace the current in-game portraits? or is that too much work?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Too much work really. You have to have young and old versions, then do versions with the background alpha'd out, and save them in different sizes too. Just a lot of hassle for adding even one single new general portrait. We had a member (Bouchois) take out the blue face paint on our barbs though, and even that took a while.

[Forgus]

Perhaps, in the fulness of time... But there is a lot that we can do before that. Actually I think caracter portraits in vanilla are not that bad. Some helmets though imho badly need some fixing, but this is not something that happens soon.

[Sparton Matticus]

or in the least would it be possible just to use historical charicters in the game? would this be done by scripts perhaps? just using their names and not doing new portraits. Like ceaser or cleopatra or pompey and other historical leaders.

Oh and is it possible to trigger civial wars? via scripts

[rayzzz]

Those look great, Lovin' it Forgus and also malrubius for bringing it to us!

[Malrubius]

Those look great, Lovin' it Malrubius!

Thank Forgus, he's the one who's done all the work here! I just posted this preview for him. Great job!

Excellent work Malrubius. How realistic will these ancillaries be? For example, will Cato the Elder disappear as ancillary in 149 BC when he historically died? I always give valuable ancillaries to younger family members if my general becomes about sixty, so some traits are in my family for over a hundred years. Not even Cato lived that long :wink:

There's not a lot we can do with making portraits disappear once they've been acquired. However, any traits that the ancillary can influence are of limited duration. We'd prefer you to not transfer ancillaries, but there's not a lot we can do to prevent it. There are a few special cases:

1. The Spear of Achilles shouldn't leave Side
2. dumping the Hetaira Hyperkalles will make your general's wife happier than she was, and affect some other traits

These are sort of tests for what we plan to do eventually, making the relationship with ancillaries more dynamic.

[SigniferOne]

So, Forgus, are you still looking for portraits? Do you have the more common ones, like Cato Younger, Marius, Brutus, etc? What's the current list of names that you still need.

Also, make sure you visit the following thread and be motivated to keep the high-res originals!!
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=43260

[Forgus]

Sorry, I'm not very frequent here.

Dear Fans,

We are in very bad need on good quality images on the following gentlemen.
The nature of this current research is not yet to be revealed, but hopefully you'll see them in the next build. Ideally the perfect image is a contemporary bust without nose missing :-), next to this are modern statues busts etc, drawings are the last resort, they are horrible to work on. Be warned, internet image search may not be enough for this.

So the list:

Agatarchides of Cnidus
Archesilaus of Pitane
Ariston of Chios
Ariston of Cyrene
Ctesibius
Erasistratus of Ceos
Gnaeus Naevius
Herodas
Hieronymus of Cardia
Iunius Pennus
Klearchos
Lucilius
Publius Clodius
Quintius Lutatius Catulus
Strato of Lampsacus
Tiberius sempronius Gracchus the ELDER
Timaeus of Tauromenium
Panaetius
Fabius Pictor

Remember, dedication in tasks like these may mean the the first step for joining the crew unless you are modeller/skinner/scripter or any such exotic kind of animal.

PS: the names are not in classical Greek/Latin, but ingame they are.

[Dantheman102100]

I have to be honest, I've never even heard about most of those people.