: You also have the pfhor empire favouring dark cold colors. The major ranks
: are blue,purple and dark green. The lesser ranks aren in warm colors, such
: as red, brown and light green.
I don't think I've seen any red Pfhor in Bungie canon units... and the only brown units I can think of (besides bugs) are Hunters.
I've always found it interesting that Pfhor rank colors roughly form a nice color tetrad. Orange, green, a particular hue of blue that I like to call Aqua, and magenta, together form a square on the color wheel, each 90 degrees apart from the previous (hues 30, 120, 210, and 300), thus having two pairs of complementary colors. Of course the sprites don't perfectly match up to those hues... if I recall my color tables right, the purple units are hue 270 (purple, not magenta) and the blue ones are hue 240 (true blue, not aqua). But I've fixed that in Eternal. It's a subtle change, but I like it :-)
In fact, all the color schemes in Eternal are based off this Pfhorish tetrad. Originally, the four hues used in each texture set were precisely those four (and all the same saturation). But now, to give each texture set a bit more of it's own characteristic feel, I've picked one of those four colors to be the primary color for each set (green for Marathon, magenta for Pfhor, orange for Lh'owon, blue for Forerunner, and green again for Jjaro), brought the two colors that were 90 degrees apart from that one closer in hue to it (to 60 degrees apart in Marathon and Pfhor, and now thanks to your feedback Goran, to 30 degrees apart in Lh'owon and Forerunner, so that Lh'owon colors are gold-orange-red now instead of green-orange-magenta); and the hues further away from the primary color are less saturated now. The exception to all this is the Jjaro set, which still uses the original tetrad with only saturation changes. So in the end, you get a nice red-orange-gold with a dash of dark aqua for the Lh'owon set; gold-green-cyan with a dash of dark magenta for the Marathon set; cyan-aqua-blue with a dash of dark orange for the Forerunner set; blue-magenta-red with a dash of dark green for the Pfhor set; and good old orange-green-aqua-magenta for the Jjaro set.
But as regards Bungie's use of color again, it once seemed to me that there was a pattern whereby higher-ranking units are either purple or blue, while lower-ranking units are either green or orange; green and purple being for melee units and orange and blue for ranged. But alas, the Troopers are purple and green instead of blue and orange; Hunters are green and orange (brown is just a dark greyish orange, and their green is dark and greyish itself); and Enforcers, IIRC, are purple and blue. And Compilers throw the whole thing off by being orange (low-ranking ranged) and purple (high-ranking melee). In Eternal I had attempted to remedy this situation some, by making Hunters orange and blue, and making Enforcers green and purple... but now that I think about it all, the patten that I thought was there really isn't, beyond the Fighters, so I think I'll go back and make minor Enforcers blue and major Hunters green again. But I'm keeping my black compilers, damnit. Carpe noctem!
