To be honest, I'd prefer if those knights kept using American artwork and models, but new ones, built by Edo Japanese, should use Asian assets. And then maybe give us a button akin to one with City Centers that allows unification of army's looks (bonus points if you could do this on per army basis, using any culture the individual units come from, so you could have Edo Japanese with a single army utilizing European assets, because they were Celtic Gaesati all those centuries ago).

I'm just not sure how resource intensive would be keeping track of culture of every individual unit, though. But it would help with the HK's culture idea, they were aiming at culture mixing and yet the way everything just snaps to right place at the start of an era makes it more like culture swapping, which is a bit less exciting. I think it would be really worth it to have more visual cues that tell you the Edo Japanese you are playing as now aren't the same Edo Japanese you played as last time.

DNLH wrote:

I'm just not sure how resource intensive would be keeping track of culture of every individual unit, though. But it would help with the HK's culture idea, they were aiming at culture mixing and yet the way everything just snaps to right place at the start of an era makes it more like culture swapping, which is a bit less exciting. I think it would be really worth it to have more visual cues that tell you the Edo Japanese you are playing as now aren't the same Edo Japanese you played as last time.

Toning down the visual culture pivot would do a lot for immersion, but any solution would be a) difficult to convey, and b) have some edge cases that are culturally insensitive. Suppose unit art was procedurally modified, so that aesthetically each unit will individually piecewise transition to the new culture based on some location criteria (stability, culture influence, etc). That would be a good way to add some religious paraphernalia to the units, too.

That's the aesthetic side, regarding physical appearance the game could assign an initial appearance to each player in Neolithic (based on avatars or start location), and then use this instead of massively pivoting each era. The game would simulate (under the hood) each city's composition, which depends on several conditions (relations with neighbors, original and current owner of city, location since New World cities are made up "of local stock") and can change/converge organically. Spawned units will randomly be given traits based on this (and other artwork can adapt it as well).

They'll never do this of course, because some really specific combination will look like blackface or whitewashing or something. Which is probably fair. The game's not "alternate history" enough to pull that off. It's also a crapton of work to make modular procedural art look good.