Greetings everyone
,
Today I want to bring to you two suggestions that me and LordDainIronfoot have been thinking about for quite some time. These suggestion will be centered around the units of Dale, or rather, the heavy armor upgrade and the banner carrier (captain) of Dale.
DISCLAIMER
We are not asking the team to do this in the next version! We know there are other priorities at the moment, and that are more urgent matters to attend to; we just offer the team an idea that they could use for in the future, if they ever want to use it at all
!
Suggestion 1: Heavy armorNow onto the first suggestion. I must say that the design of the Dale units look beautifull, though there is one aspect about the Heavy Armor upgrade that disturbs us. If you look closely at the Non-Heavy Armor version of the Dale soldier, you can see that there is a part of mail showing on the bottom of the skirt:
This image shows us that the Dale soldier wears a mail shirt beneath his regular leather armor. However if we look at the Heavy Armored version of the Dale soldier, we can see that he has cast off his leather armor, and solely wears the mail shirt:
The leather armor has been removed when the Heavy Armor upgrade is purchased, which means that the Men of Dale are even less armored after the Heavy Amor upgrade is purchased
! Dain and me have thought about some possibilities to give the heavy armored versions of the Dale units a nice and fitting design. What we found was a concept for the Dale warriors made by WETA, which will (in our opinion) fit perfectly:
Note that we are not proposing to use the helmet, but just the plate armor as shown in the concept art. This design will give the units of Dale an actual heavier armored version that fit in well with the regular armor, without sacrificing the leather armour they already wear
. On the internet there are multiple artists who have drawn or modeled this version of the Dale armour, here are some more example pictures:
This ends the first suggestion.
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Suggestion 2: Dale captainThe next suggestion is about the Captain of Dale, who, next to a regular warrior of Dale, looks like this:
Both me and Dain thought it would be very awesome if the captain would have a look that distinguishes him from the regular soldiers. He is a captain after all, and officers usually wear better and more expensive armor than the common footmen, just so that it is visible that they are from a higher rank in the military branch. Not to mention the fact that the captain of the Men of Lake-town clearly shows the difference between the regular soldier and the officer, while Dale does not. After discussing it a little while, me and Dain came up to a design that would give the captain a more “expensive” look. The captain would wear the heavy armor as was shown in the suggestion before, but combined with the helmet that is worn in this concept:
This helmet really appealed to us, and we saw it as a great solution to the captains helmet. The helmet, combined with the heavy armor (and a cape which is missing), looks like this, as made by the team of the Rise of Mordor mod:
This image, however, gives us another variant of the officers helmet, which is based on the Roman centurion helmet, and has a bigger brass than the helmet we proposed. Both helmets look great, and we like both equally.
This is where our proposals end. The reason that we wanted to do this proposals was that, first of all, the current heavy armor upgrade makes the Dale units look lighter armored than they used to before the upgrade. It would be like the Gondor soldiers starting with heavy armor, and after purchasing the heavy armor upgrade they would lose the plate and shoulder armor. This is ofcourse not very nice if you think about it
.
The reason we wanted to change the captains design is so that his status compared to the regular footman is better reflected on his armor. Right now he looks exactly like the regular soldiers, save for being larger and having a bigger beard, which is funny because that was trait of chieftains of some barbarian tribes in the antiquity
. Also the captain of the Men of Lake-town has plenty of differences with the common footman. Dale should have this too in our opinion
.
I hope you guys agree with our proposal, please state here if you are
in favor or
against this suggestion, and please explain your motives
. Ofcourse if you have any other ideas please share them
.
With kind regards,
Fredius and LordDainIronfoot