I'd rather have little red triangular flags, pennants, than the golden baubles.

like this?

there still need to be place for racial animated flag

snowy dwarven hamlet and not grey frostling flags

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so i did replace yellow dots with the different tower types

in practice, you still cannot easily tell what level city has

I will try with Southern idea

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i came to conlcusion that city upgrade should be deterimned by flasy symbol above the flag.

I'm thinking about cross[2], half moon[3] and star[4]

Oh nice, yuo managed to implement the dwarf hamlet? Please upload the ILB!

its uploaded, link in first post

happy someone will use it

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so here are the city upgrade symbols

still not that.

I think it should be simple symbol, with color differentiation as level goes up.

You're definitely on the right track - those emblems are at least noticeable.

I honestly don't think there's any point in painting new upgrade indicators since the graphics aren't correctly updated by the game anyway. I believe updates only happen when loading a savegame? So even if you upgrade a city twice it will still display the unupgraded graphic until you reload the game, or something like that.

If you do change the graphics, here would be my suggestions:
- Don't add any architecture and don't change the flagpole itself in any way.
- Don't use different symbols, pick one symbol and have the quantity indicate upgrade level.
- Remove one symbol each so that a fully upgraded L4 city has three symbols since 0 and 1 are identical.
- Don't make the symbols too large.

Personally, I would simply remove upgrade indicators altogether since otherwise they will just display false information most of the time. Also, those Frostling flags are definitely too saturated now. Have you considered simply removing the grey independent flags instead? They're not really needed since the absence of a flag can indicate autonomy just as well.

And could you explain how you managed to edit the ILB? I'll probably be looking for that info at some point in the future.

Easy to distinguish yes, easy to remember no. Now you have three arbitrary symbols with arbitrary colours.

With quantity indicating level there's no possibility of misinterpretation, and on top of that the better upgraded a city is the more apparent this becomes.

But perhaps there are also some out-of-the-box alternatives that could be explored, like applying a subtle glow to the city that gets stronger with more upgrades? Or a city gate of varying fanciness that neatly fits into any city walls? Not sure if those are technically feasible.

This is the step that was missing. Brilliant, with this I now know I can edit any ILB to my heart's content.

Thank you, I am quite proud of my laziness myself.

i spend 3h making flag symbols

so lvl2 = romb (diamond shape) with hole in center (on above shape it doesnt look so neat because of the snow, and i dont want to add more black contour to keep it under radar)

lvl 3 - full romb

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flag posts graphic are display behind the city and animated flag.
so its not possible, to do some feature like with walls.
and looking for hex edit for that is waste of time.

I made LIBs from my graphics (check first post).

download and replace. Salamander and FirstBorn looks head and shoulders better than monocolor vanilla versions.

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Southern: Do you have death frames for Werewolf from Warlock mod?

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In editor for unit grp, there is option for Dead (burned) corpse. How to use it?

I don't know, where are death ILBs usually stored? I'm not even sure where I got the werewolf ILB, I thought it was from the base game and only suggested it might be from warlock's when you said you didn't have it already. It does look like original dev work....

I've been making a snowy map with dwarf Hamlets in which is why I noticed they aren't snowy; SO much better to look at now!

Most death frames are in DeadUnit.ILB but theoretically they can be in any ILB.

I believe the Werewolf was an unused unit in the demo but I may be mistaken.

I thought the black stripes of the Salamander were a little too harsh so I made some changes based on the Salamander with the green stripes. The stripes are technically brown now but in the game they actually look quite dark. There are two different versions; LIZSM-50 is the one that IMO looks better in-game, even though the stripes are really only light brown.

Download

50
https://imgur.com/8oF1B6S

75
https://imgur.com/cV0V2N7

full black
https://imgur.com/4gIP1dn

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i think full black lizard is best.

i also playing with my azul frostling flags (with no flag for rebels), and I find them, good. I immediately know the city belong to frosting.

in my custom mod i use hydra, and im getting incline to your statement that she need better neck. I see also the lack of left right head now, but it dont annoy me. I even think it good that the head is pointing in the hex line direction.