If I remember correctly, this version only improves the variation in models so that not everyone looks the same, while v2 is the more realistic version of this mod, because in addition to improving variety it also makes it so that all the units don't use a uniform colour scheme. IE, if you play as Circenn, not everyone will be wearing blue.

So you'll want to use one mod or the other, not both. It's down to personal preference whether you want a more readable battlefield, or realistic one.

what is the differences with v2?
is v2 the latest version? or do i need to use both?

buns

I'm interested in featuring some kind of mesh/variation mod in the new TOB overhaul. Is this work available to credit?

I know you're probably not working on the mod anymore, but I just wanted to report that Sudreyar's Great Axes unit misses bodies and they're just flying bald heads and hands :D

Cleiton instalaçoes elétricas, Agreed, even the ancient British tribes could field tens of thousands of men against the Romans in a simple rebellion after they were already conquered, yet independent organised Saxon kingdoms couldn't field an army of thousands? Two thousand men wasn't enough to bring the well established Saxons to their knees.

in fact, the estimate of the great heathen army being small was used by minimalist historians and was completely destroyed after an archaeological expedition by Julian D Richards and Dawn Hadley on one of the Nordic army's winter camps that was an average of 55 hectares in length therefore, not hundreds, but thousands of Nordics arrived in England. The army may have had between 4,000 to 8,000, as each drakkar could carry an average of 32 warriors, and as soon as they reached the coast, 250 ships were described, assuming 8,000 men.
The force that over-wintered at Torksey in 872–73 numbered in the thousands, 
not hundreds, and was larger than the population of most Anglo-Saxon towns.

nice.

some of the hemlets for the saxons have a funny nose bend. I think it's a full on Iron Coppergate helmet

800 to 2K men for the GHA is a very small number that really underestimates the size of forces. Figures like that were vogue from around the very late 19th century through the 1970s, but are contradicted by the evidence, especially the archaeological finds of the past 50 years. See the most recent excavations of the GHA camps.

k, thanks for the help, ive finished the mod

lol, i've noticed some vanilla hair models themselves are floating off of faces. CA is so lazy.

i notice the hair variants have a digit then a letter after its name. you can't change the letter variant to "a" without knowing the proper number with it, and some i don't even know if they have a "a" variant. i've tried 2a, 3a, for example on 1b variants of hair and it the file wont recongnise it in game. do you have a way of knowing all these variants?

It does sit a little far forward with some of the faces, but it's not noticeable in-game.

yeah, ive been having to add the hairstyles to each variant within the units, then loading up the game to see if it fits. how does the A version work? would it not cause some hair to float off of some faces if its big enough to not clip with any faces? thanks for the replys.

But using the above method, what you can do is create multiple varientmeshes with all your chosen hairstyles, name them whatever you like, copy/paste them into the correct hair beards file path in the assembly kit working data so they appear in the list to the right; then combine all those varientmeshes into one super varientmesh which you can rename after a vanilla one which the units are already using.
Voila. It's slow and somewhat tedious, more so when you need to actually modify the specific units themselves, but it's quite satisfying when you see your warriors on the battlefield.
Some people don't like using the Assembly Kit, but I think it's much simpler to use and allows you to preview your units before they appear in game.

And I find that you can just use the "a" version of each facial hair option as it will fit all the head models without clipping.

Yeah so if you open whatever hairstyle or beard you want in the Pack File Manager and at the bottom left there's a little table called Properties. At the end of that, there's an option for "Tint Colours" with a plus button. Click that and it'll create a white box. Click the white box and you've got a colour palette where you can create various colour variations.
And yeah, it's a ballache to modify all the units in the game regardless of how you go about it, although you can cheat a bit by modifying the existing varientmesh definitions then saving them.
Then create your own pack file and it'll overwrite the default ones.
So you can use this to look at what models use which varientmeshes then swap those varientmeshes for your own modified ones which will save you having to overwrite each one manually.

okay, i've figured out in pack file manager how to add hairstyles to units, but i've run into some tedious problems. you have to go into every single file for units and copy/paste the hairstyle code into the file which will seemingly take quite awhile considering there's like 100 unit files. also some hairstyles clip on the faces because some faces are built for certain hairstyles so you have to take extra time to edit correctly the clipping faces. aside from that, i havn't figured out how to change the color of the hair, do you know how to do this? do you have to create a whole new template to do that?

yes, ive searched it but it doesn't contain the hair and beard tables that i've seen within the pack file manager tables. do you think it's easier to do with the pfm?

Have you got the Assembly Kit downloaded?

do you know which table houses the data on the hair? can't seem to find the like.

Nah not really. Download the Thrones of Britannia Assembly Kit on Steam in the Tools part of your library and have a fiddle around with the models - there's a number of tutorials available online if you get stuck.

is it very hard to mod hair skins across factions? i'm looking to change that myself.

Alfred pioneered the idea of select Fyrdsmen, a smaller core element with equipment provided for by a whole village or town to ensure they all had good quality weapons and equipment - but in times of crisis, there would most certainly be a mass levy of all available fighting age men who probably would've marched to war with hand-me-down shields, spears and the shirts on their backs.
I think, if you imagine that an army you create is "The Fyrd" and think of your Thegns and Housecarls as the core, well equipped element of the Fyrd and the in-game named "Fyrd" as the poorer, mass levied men; it kinda makes sense to leave things as they are.

I both agree and disagree.
So where ToB gets it very, very wrong is with having units named as "Fyrd". With the exception of the Housecarls, who were the permanent armed retainers of the King, there were no "Fyrd" or "Thegn" or "Seax" specific formations - the Fyrd was the Fyrd. For total historical accuracy, only one unit type of spearmen would be able to be recruited for the entire game named "Fyrd" and they'd have a mix of wealthier, heavily armed men and poorer, more lightly armed men. They'd also double up as your javelinmen and all cavalry units.

The reason the huscarls were in the centre and front at Hastings was because, simply put, that was where the king was. They were, after all, his personal guard. More than that, they were probably his most experienced troops - many of them would have fought with him in Wales and against the Vikings. In a shieldwall, you want your best men in the place where they'll have the most effect - which is on the frontline and in the centre.

Nice!
Unfortunately, the bit about the fyrd being poorly armed is just not true. Anglo-Saxon military institutions changed radically over the time period the game covers - in 978 for example, the fyrd was essentially a levy of all able bodied freemen, amongst whom helmets and armour would have been a rarity.

1066 however was nearly 200 years later, and by then armour appears from contemporary sources to have been much more common. In fact, by law each five "hides" of land was required to provide the equipment for a fyrdsman, which consisted of a helmet, mail armour, a sword, several spears and shields and two horses. The fyrd of 1066 was really much more like a medieval army than a dark ages one, in that it was made up largely of nobles and their retainers along with wealthy merchants. It wasn't a professional force perhaps, but it was still pretty well armed. More information can be found here:
https://regia.org/research/warfare/fyrd2.htm

In the graphics options, buddy.

sorry, where can i "set your unit size to "medium" ? I don't find it.
Thank you very much

Excellent work

Got it in one, Appraiser. So if you prefer the assets in ToB, use this mod.

@Karajor Nope, this mod doesn't require anything and can be used as is. V2 is essentially just a different version of this mod that uses a lot of assets from other modders.

I fixed the Great Axes invisibility bug, if anyone still wants to use this mod and really needs it fixed to be playable just message me and I'll send you the file.

@Robbstark I just noticed this small bug with the 'Great Axes' unit for the Dyflin faction link [i.imgur.com] and link [i.imgur.com], both with other mods and only this mod running. I see you have other projects in progress at the moment, so just a heads up if you come back to this one. Thanks for this nice armor/unit skin variation mod again.

@Robbstark maybe? I mean theres lots of factors to take into account, regardless of prowess casualties would have been repeatedly sustained along the way especially when attacking the larger towns and such, theyd get wittled down relatively quickly

When you consider, prior to Alfred's reforms, there would've been a relatively small number of experienced, well equipped fighting men in the Saxon kingdoms - 1,000+ warriors from warlike Scandinavian cultures could likely wipe the floor with whatever force they came up against. In fact, apparently they did.

@Robbstark thats fair enough! Though even with your lower end of the scale id still figure to work with the higher end of 2500-3000 I feel a small army of 1'000 would have trouble running amok as they did for so long.

The article appears to corroborate the earlier estimations of the size of the Great Heathen Army. I'm inclined to sit in the lower end of the estimation range - 1,000 to 3,000 warriors seems reasonable given the population size of Northern Europe at the time.

"Without doubt, given the size of the camp, the Great Army and its followers, probably including women and children as well as traders and craftworkers, comprised thousands of people. We can never know exact numbers, but if a fleet comprised 50–100 longships, and each ship had a crew of thirty to fifty warriors, then an army within the range 1,500–5,000 is not implausible, and could easily have been accommodated on the island at Torksey. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle references to fleets of several hundred ships may not have been exaggerations after all."

@RobbStark
heres more from the actual source
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/winter-camp-of-the-viking-great-army-ad-8723-torksey-lincolnshire/C54BB610EA9E0E567DC2C0622BA753EB

However I think it should be noted that obviously this army would have been considered extremely exceptional and not at all common of course.

@RobbStark
https://www.realmofhistory.com/2017/05/20/massive-viking-military-camp-england/

Oh really? Got any sources for that?

Hi there love your mod just wanted to let you know the work is great. However I would like to point out that recent archaeological findings definitely put the Great Heathen Army at a decent chunk larger than 2'000 probably somewhere in the 5-7k Range as attested to many new findings which also explains why they were able to run almost rampant across the island for about a decade. Not important to your mod for any reason just thought you'd like to know.

Thank you for your response.

I checked again, and I am now unsure as to why I said the Mailed Horsemen had no mail. Perhaps it was a bug?

As to the fyrd, I did recently realize that one of the levy units indeed did have mail, it being the select militia spearmen. I had glossed over that.

I will not bother you any longer. Thank you for the excellent work you've already put into this mod. I plan on using it in several historical battle scenarios.

I likely shan't be updating this pack anymore though. I've been fiddling about with the excellent 1066 and Medieval Kingdom mods for Attila and if I can get permission to port some of their assets over to ToB, I've potentially got something in the pipeline that'll blow this pack away.

Watch this space.

- I did indeed change Alfred - the mail coif and crown combination does not fit the period. Anglo Saxon kings of the time were crowned with a helmet. Purple was the most expensive dye colour known at the time and since Alfred was a keen student of history, I imagined him wearing a purple cape in the style of a Roman Emperor.

- The only difference between Thegns and Earl's Thegns are the helmets - Earl's Thegns wear more nasal helmets but the armour variation is exactly the same (they're supposed to be later period Thegns as opposed to their own unique unit as technically all Thegns would've been commanded by an Earl).
- You're probably right on that part, although they are the heaviest equipped of all the units in game. I'll consider increasing the amount of mail to reflect their status. Blue and Green would've been common colours for capes back then though, so I shan't change that ("faction colours" did not exist in the Middle Ages).

- Possibly the Select Fyrd should wear more mail, possibly not. The Fyrd at that time was not a class per se, but essentially conscripted freemen. They'd have owned their own farms and paid rent to the local lord, but the vast majority were unlikely to be wealthy men. I cannot stress enough how expensive it would have been during this period to purchase mail armour and a good quality helmet - England was a wealthy country, but as was the norm during this period, the wealth was concentrated in the pockets of a relatively small number of noblemen, merchants and the Church. Most Fyrdmen would have owned a some type of helmet, a spear, an axe or seax and a shield. That's it.

Thanks, man. As to your points;

- The Saxons and Danes didn't employ any form of heavy battlefield cavalry - the richest in their society would ride to battle, but always dismount and fight on foot in the Germanic warrior tradition. The first recorded instance of cavalry being used en mass in England during the period was the Battle of Hastings, so honestly any faction other than the Normans using cavalry is an abomination anyway. That said, the mailed horsemen do wear mail, it's just ubiquitous (in line with everyone else).