Human height

[SDM]

Just wondering, how tall are the humans in this game, and how tall are they (on average) in real life at this time frame? I am under the impression you've taken this into account, but I want to hear it from official sources.

[sanderd17]

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ArtDesignDocument#ScaleandProportions

For the gameplay, humans are about 2 meters high. Which is far too big, but it's done that way to make sure that units are still easy enough to select, or to see in combat, while you don't need very big maps to place all your buildings.

[historic_bruno]

There was an idea (Michael's?) to redesign the human models, to have better looking models and animations, and also to have different sizes. Heros could be larger for example. Obviously that hasn't happened because of the amount of work involved, but this question reminded me of that

Edit: found the suggestion: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15552&st=140#entry237155

[SDM]

That's good to know. I knew you guys had reasons for choosing whatever you chose. Since the humans are two meters high, are the animals depicted proportionally? A 1.6 m human would perceive a wolf as being larger than a 2 m human. A bear would look a lot bigger to a child than to a grown person, for example.

Not that this is at all useful. I just thought that elephants and ancient horses being bigger would look a lot better than if they were average sized while humans are scaled up.

Speaking of which, are the horses scaled to their respective civilizations and time periods? I heard that horses in the past were considerably smaller than they are now.

[sanderd17]

It's all a bit scaled to be viewable. Big things (like buildings) are scaled down, small things (humans and small animals) are scaled up. So I think big animals like elephants are somewhere in between.

And about the horses, it's true that there were smaller horses in central Europe, but I think those weren't used for combat. Bigger (imported) horses were preferred. Small horses would be nice for wild animals though (huntables), but due to a general lack of wild animals, they're not made yet.

[greenknight32]

The Mongol horses were (and still are) small, but they came later - they're not in this game's time-frame.

[SDM]

I'm not looking for a particular answer, so anything that's been decided is good as long as there is some thought to it, even when the reason is related to UI rather than proportions. Expect a donation from me soon.