Have you used Krita before? it's free and open source, I use it for drawing and I highly recommend it
For animating, especially strange features like making big armies with random placement and different clothing, I use a 2D game engine that spits out the frames then I stitch them together using other software to make a gif. Godot is a free and open source 2D engine for very fast development. Although standard animation software would probably work better, I'm using the game engine as sort of an unintended tool for this just because I know it much better.
Have you used Krita before? it's free and open source, I use it for drawing and I highly recommend it
For animating, especially strange features like making big armies with random placement and different clothing, I use a 2D game engine that spits out the frames then I stitch them together using other software to make a gif. Godot is a free and open source 2D engine for very fast development. Although standard animation software would probably work better, I'm using the game engine as sort of an unintended tool for this just because I know it much better.