This screenshot in the latest gallery from Ancient Wars: Sparta has a sheep gushing a lot of blood while the peasant chops its head off. That wool will never come clean.
Having never killed a sheep, I can’t say that sheep don’t spurt blood like that. However, I am fairly certain that you are supposed to slash their throats or brain them with a heavy mallet and not decapitate them like you’re Old McDonald’s executioner.
Unless the farmer in this shot is enacting some sort of death penalty.
I’m no vegetarian. And I’ve happily killed my share of sheep and cows in Age of Empires, either to feed my people or to make sure my enemy couldn’t feed his. But there’s really no need to make animal slaughter a messy enterprise. RTS games, despite their inherent violence, have mostly been free of the blood for blood’s sake stuff that started in shooters and can now be found in many RPGs. From the other Sparta screens, the man-to-man battles look as sanitized as those you’d find anywhere else in the industry, so I’m not clear why we need to see sheep’s blood at all.
Sheep bleed a ~lot~. The way I was show to slaughter a sheep was to cut the throat and let them bleed out.
Interesting contrast between the sheep and the battles though.
The Myth series was incredibly brutal and bloody. I remember lining up a bunch of guys on a hill and lobbing grenades (or the flaming bags, can’t remember what they were called) at them and watching the ensuing carnage and bodyparts roll down the hill.