Character Designs - The World

Countries can often be represented well through a character of sorts. This can be seen in the Japanese anime Hetalia which is about the dynamics between different countries but with them personified and drawn as anime characters - however this is obviously too detailed. One other example is the infamous CountryBalls that are frequently seen across the internet on message boards such as 4chan or Imgur, with them being used in comics exploring similar personified interactions between countries; the CountryBalls even feature in AlternateHistoryHub and KnowledgeHub so there is a direct link to this example of representing countries through characters to creators I've studied. By including a character to represent specific countries, it might arguably be easier to display interactions between countries or even how they would appear on a map.

However, I would like to avoid such a representation of countries as singular characters, I would instead like to just focus on particular historical figures and some battles - the map aspects could simply feature colours and arrows to signify territories. It is more important to focus on the nationalities or the houses/leaders of the crusaders. On that note, I could just differentiate between soldiers by attributing them a palette matching that of each character/historical figure. I believe ExtraHistory did this particularly well in their character designs for their series on the Crusades. They also include little initials on characters to differentiate them from one another even more explicitly.