Is there any way to anchor a piece’s location with respect to the map window rather than a board? I see that you can do this with a deck, but don’t see any obvious way to do the same thing with a piece.
Sorry if I’m not understanding the question exactly (not sure what a wrt window is), but won’t a regular At-Start stack piece, with a Does Not Stack trait, work?
vassalengine.org/wiki/SetupStack
vassalengine.org/wiki/NonStacking
Hope that helps.
Sorry for not being clear. WRT just meant “with respect to.”
I want to create a piece that remains in the same spot on the screen regardless of what the user does with the underlying map. It looks like the At-start-stack will put a piece at a fixed location on the screen in that way, but I don’t see any way to use send to location (or any other method) to add pieces to an at-start-stack during gameplay.
I guess what I need is an at-start-stack with a send-to-stack command that works similar to a deck’s send-to-deck. Is there any workaround that will achieve a similar effect?
Well, at-start stacks allow you to place a piece or stack of pieces (visible or invisible, depending on image or no) at a certain spot at the start. That’s all they do imo (“wrt” added to my lexicon btw) and after that I don’t even think of them anymore… and if an at-start stack piece was anchored by Does Not Stack trait (Move piece: never) then it wouldn’t be stackable to anyway.
The Send to Location trait allows sending a piece to any X,Y position on a map (I think you can leave the board line blank, to allow for multiple boards, but don’t quote me). You could also however use a grid location, zone, or region on that map. You can also send to another piece. So if you had an anchored (at-start stack) piece (we’ll name it: Area1), you could send any other pieces to its location (although again they won’t actually stack with it) using (send to location trait) Destination: Another counter select by properties; property match: BasicName=Area1.
But if you want otherwise movable, selectable pieces to actually visibly stack together somewhere while not being movable or retrievable anymore, then I think you’d need a workaround involving a map’s Game Piece Layers. You’d basically be stacking those otherwise movable, selectable pieces underneath a larger (unmovable, unselectable) piece that has a clear image. Kind of like throwing counters under plexiglass. There’s probably a better way to achieve that, but that’s what comes to mind right now. I can elaborate on this.
Hope that helped!