Kursk mod

[Philippe]

I've modded upwards of eighty per cent of what you see on the screen. But it's not immediately obvious because the terrain is done in the style of Jison's MapMod, and the unit images are modified Volcano Man. I'm more interested in perfecting the form than in creating my own style.

So what do you get besides repainted counters?

Parchment-textured clear terrain for normal, soft, mud, and snow, both zoomed in and zoomed out (different versions for Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North Africa). Don't try this at home, the color selection will make you go blind, the multiple layering will burn out your Photoshop skills, and when you finally get around to assembling the darned thing it's bound to give you Karpel Tunnel.

(Translation: I love Jison's MapMod but I hate staring at a hexgrid all the time. I couldn't strip the hex outlines out of his mod, so I made my own textures. While I was at it I made a set for zoomed-out 2D as well).

Repaint of almost all of the terrain features (zoomed in and zoomed out). Repaint varies according to game and theater.

Various roads and trails repainted (mostly zoomed out but I'm starting to lose track).

Hexsides have been pretty much left alone. There may be a few touch-ups in the future.

Redesign of the symbols on the images in the unit boxes. No symbol (engineer, assault, bicycle, etc.) will ever overlap any other symbol.

Vehicles have been shifted as much as possible without making things look awkward to avoid overlapping either the spotted binoculars or the nationality symbol.

Vehicles with seasonally inappropriate camouflage have been replaced by seasonally correct ones (i.e. no leafy foliage in winter).

Every now and again I replace a figure or a vehicle if I think I can come up with a better one without disrupting the process. If you've installed one of my mods you'll notice that textures that I have worked on are the ones with dark green backgrounds. Sometimes that can mean a new figure, sometimes that can mean a repainted old figure, and sometimes that means I had to make the bitmap bigger and reposition the image to avoid collisions with the national symbols or the spotting binoculars.

The other thing I'm doing, wherever it makes sense and works visually, is to put nationality symbols directly on the unit image. This can range from adding a nationality symbol to an HQ with an officer's image (this just makes it look like the other units of its nationality), to adding naval flags to warships, to adding specific unit or nationality symbols to units that don't get their own separate nationality from the program. This happens a lot in the North African games: if you pay attention you'll notice units sporting flags from New Zealand, Australia, India, and Palestine.

To the extent that the program allows, units will not appear in summer wearing winter camouflage.

Dunkelgelb has been banished from scenarios prior to February 1943. This required quite a bit of repainting of units. Poke around in Stalingrad and you'll see what I mean. It's easier to go from gelb to grau and grey artillery late in the war doesn't bother me that much (even though it's wrong). At some point I'll sit down with Kursk and start repainting all the artillery, and then let it flow through the other mods. It's on my list of things to do, just not at the top of it.

Winter whitewash camo has been added to vehicles where appropriate. In the case of Stalingrad this meant two extra duplicate sets of alternate units.

Map symbols have been partially reworked. It's more apparent in France:1914 where there are several new graphic icons that never appeared before. The main event in the symbols bitmap is that fortification items like mines, barbed wire, and trenches no longer have their own counters: they're printed directly on the map. Apart from that, a few symbols got reworked (e.g. the targeting symbol), a few had extra lines added to the Nato symbols to make them more legible.

Not many people use them, but I did some extensive repair work on the graphic unit icons. My take on what happened is that about ten years ago, when they were first done, someone was either trying to show off newly acquired Photoshop skills or looking for a quick and easy was to look different from Talonsoft (or their successors and/or assigns). Anyway, the graphic icons were run through the directional lighting filter, which isn't really a good idea when you're dealing with stick figures on a small flat surface. Apart from the HQ flag (which I developed for France: 1914 based on my approach for HQ symbols in my Napoleonics mods) not much is different except for some extensive recoloring. Not many people use this feature, but I thought of it because I used to use it in the V for Victory series. If you've never tried it, it isn't as crisp looking as the Nato symbols (which pre-date Nato, by the way), but it does convey a little more information once you learn how to read it.

The 3D units have been recolored to more appropriate colors. German infantry is always grey, except in North Africa. German vehicles follow the dunkelgrau/dunkelgelb convention, and stop being grey in the winter of '42/'43. Russians are Russian uniform color, and everyone is in desert colors in North Africa.

The 3D counters have been repainted, and the bases of the 3D units have been repainted, but the most apparent change is the 3D victory location symbol, which is now a national flag, except for a white cut-out area in the center which makes room for the point value. I may eventually redo the 3D terrain (aka grass) but I intend to finish the 2D terrain in all the games first.

I toss in cover art from time to time, and if you poke around in the info boxes you'll start to see blankbox art that isn't quite what you thought you'd seen elsewhere. But I'm going easy on that because this isn't an artmod (like my Napoleonics). But one thing that you won't find anywhere else (though you may have seen things like it before), is my one-size-fits-all unitbox, made from a detail of an actual military map from 1941.

I'm sure there are lots of other things I've made small changes to, but the main thing is to realize that every single change has been made very slowly and in an attempt to coordinate with everything else that is going on in the mod. I've spent an absurd amount of time working on getting the colors of everything exactly right in relation to everything else (much to the amusement of my painter/photographer girlfriend -- we actually walk down the street and discuss what colors things are). The main thing I've done is try to balance the colors against each other -- and that shows up most in the North Africa mods. The other thing I've tried to do is to do everything in a way that promotes the illusion that you aren't looking at anything different from what you've seen before. It's an illusion. I positioned, repositioned, and recolored most of the trees several times.