Excellence in Wargaming Graphics

[bayonetbrant]

New stuff from an Italian company

http://www.aciesedizioni.it/caricat-eng.htm



http://www.aciesedizioni.it/ascari-eng.htm

[GJK]

Nice, clean graphics.  They have games covering ancients up to Napoleonic battles and some titles that cover conflicts that haven't been widely covered.  It's always great to see another game company start up and start to put out some quality looking stuff. 

[bayonetbrant]

to me, the gold standard of the past 10 years or so is still Liberty Roads

[Bison]

What are the criteria that people look at to determine the best counter appearance?   I didn't really like the look of asl counters until I sat down to cut the out and play.  They have a simplicity that works very well for relaying game information.

[GJK]

Good question.  I may be a bit "old school", but I prefer NATO symbols as opposed to silhouette's on all but tactical level gaming.  Thus while "Liberty Roads" is obviously a very attractive game, I would prefer NATO symobls on the armored units of whatever size that they are.  Well, throw that in here as well then, having the unit size along with the NATO symbol would make that game function better IMO.  Having a single tank depiction on a counter to represent a division full of various armor assets doesn't work for me.  Go NATO. 

I like the ASL counters but that may be because I've played using them for all of these years.  I've seen "colorized" versions (Critical Hit colors theirs) and I don't care for them.  The "wire frame" silhouette just works for these.  Conversely, I don't think that wire-frame silhouettes would work on those counters from the Italian company.  Go figure.

I'm not a big fan of the old SPI artwork.  That is sac-religious in the wargaming community but I didn't really care for Redmond Simonsen's work.  It was very functional but also very bland to me.  I thought that Charlie Kibler always blew his work away while also being very functional (re: ASL). 

I don't care for non-standard/funky fonts that are hard to read.

I'm not sure that I like the "cartoon" characters that are appearing on a lot of tactical games these days.  I DO like the counters for Combat Commander, they are not "cartoonish" to me at all and are in the realm of the ASL counters, I think.

[Bison]

I DO like the counters for Combat Commander, they are not "cartoonish" to me at all and are in the realm of the ASL counters, I think.

Gah!  This reminds me I've got Europe and Pacific counters to still deal with in the next few weeks and months.

[bayonetbrant]

here's what the CC counters look like blown up



from the artist

I don't use strokes on vector art except for vehicle and aircraft plan or elevation views. You'll notice my figures are built up from blocks of filled shapes. For this I often use layers, with my layer for blacks being highest.

Bear in mind that reduction really loses a lot of detail. So it's good to think of the figures in terms of bold shapes, separated by space so the the black doesn't bleed too much into the colour. If you looked at one of my figures blown up big (see below) you'd realise the art looks fairly blocky and ugly. But reduced it looks just fine.

Some artists like to spend a lot of time on their figures, but I reckon there's a law of diminishing returns that applies to the effort, particularly when so much information just disappears when you reduce it to 0.35 inches high.

[bayonetbrant]

What are the criteria that people look at to determine the best counter appearance?

Personal taste.  I like the way they used the patches to distinguish the units that makes them feel like specific units instead of just generic waves of NATO symbols.

Some games it works; others it doesn't.

I generally don't like silhouettes above PLT level, but I think these work well for imparting the flavor of the units to the player

[GJK]

I didn't realize the level of detail that Kibler put in to the ASL counters.  I'll have to ask him how it did this - remember, this is before they did the graphics with computers:

[Bison]

I think some of the detail you see there GJK is lost with the size of the actual counters.

[GJK]

Oh yeah, for sure.  So why did he put *that* much detail on them in the first place I wonder.

[bayonetbrant]

Probably just had big, detailed drawings and didn't realize what would happen when they shrunk that far down.  Remember that there were virtually no infantry-silhouette games on the mass market before SL, as PB/PL had silhouettes for vehicles, but not crunchies.

[besilarius]

For an offset press, like Monarch Avalon, very probably, they took high-resolution photographs of his counter designs.  The reduced them to the size desired, before cutting a plate.
The plates would usually keep the detail, even if you could not recognize it.  Come to think of it, wonder whatever happened to the plates for all the AH and SPI games?  Probably melted down and re-used.  That's what the Washington Post did with all their daily plates.