Which animations are needed?
A monster character is fairly well covered in the Siege Univ. instructions, but they do not make it clear what is required for a playable character.
If you look into heroes.gas, you find the templates for the two SP characters. They share a lot of the basic details, and you will notice two levels of specialization. The first derives male and female humans from the basic "hero" and then the playable characters are further derived from those. This is because many of the NPCs in the game are also human, and derive from the "base_farmboy" and "base_farmgirl" templates. A number of the animations listed in the base templates are used by a single NPC (e.g. farmgirl has one named "ulor", and farmboy has "mrik" and "andi"). Some of the others are used by a number of NPCs and are harder to determine, but if both heroes do not have the same animation, you can be sure it's for NPC use.
If you look at the MP-only characters, you find a lot less animations are listed in the "base_dwarf" and "base_skeleton_good" templates. If you are making a character to play only in MP, you can provide only those and the character will be usable. In particular, a hero runs everywhere, and does not need a walk animation!
Since I wanted Lara Mk2 and Naja to be SP-capable, I needed to determine which extras are needed for SP. This really boils down to the ones in the initial NIS at the beginning of the story. The character starts in "hoe1", which uses a staff-like hoe and is therefore an FS5 animation, and needs "knee" and "lstn" (with the initial knife in hand, so FS1) to interact with Norick. From then on, the same set as MP will suffice.
If you are making a full siegelet with its own map and NISs, then you may have requirements for extra animations to support those. Again, you might have NPC characters and hirables that are based on your player character, such as the dancer in Lands of Hyperborea 3. The NIS requirements in the rest of KoE after the introduction are just for the character to run in and stand listening, so they use animations that are already included.
You will also notice that the attack animations are chosen from a set of 4 depending on the target's position. If the type of attack does not "aim" at the target, you can get away with less than 4 choices, but a single type of attack will look monotonous (e.g. fs5_mg but what else can a mage with a staff do? See below.) The ones you must point at a target are the bows and guns (FS6 and FS7).
It should also be noted that some spells specify a choice of animation. There are three animations in FS0 and FS5 to account for these selections, but in practise only two are needed, the second being the "calling down" one.
