
Originally Posted by
Mike B from a thread on totalwar.com
As someone who got started in the games biz many, many moons ago thanks (partly) to the ability to paint model soldiers, I know what you mean about being able to 'paint' your miniatures in games - it would be great if you could do this! Dawn of War, for example, achieves this by not using skins for its models, but generating the colours 'on the fly'. Some detail is sacrificed to achieve the ability to pick and choose overall colour schemes.
RTW and BI work slightly differently. At the moment the game takes a skin (a piece of hand-crafted artwork) and wraps it around a polygonal model. Creating skins is actually a highly skilled job, as it's very easy to make them look horrible.
But this is how modders create new 'paint jobs' for their troops (in addition to tweaking unit values, of course). It may be that, in a future TW title we will be able to include a uniform designer kit so that you can 'paint' your miniatures, but at the moment the game doesn't work in a way that makes that very easy to achieve. You can still directly manipulate the files used for unit skins, of course, but you'll need more artistic
This concept of 'painting toy soldiers' may be something that we can come back to in future games. I'd like to see it happen, but it has to be an appropriate feature of the game to be included.
And in answer to the original question: I bet some artist thought the black design on the shield looked cool and more menacing than the original yellow! After all, although we know much about the Roman army, we don't know everything and there's a good chance that shield colours and designs varied between - and possibly within - legions, in much the same way as regiments in Napoleonic period armies wore uniforms that included different facing colours, cap badges and epaulette details while remaining the 'same' uniform.
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