I’m working on a module, and created the counters I need in the game piece palette. Now I’m starting to create At-Start Stacks, but I don’t see any way to add counters from the game piece palette to the At-Start Stacks…do I really need to recreate all of the units in the game piece palette in the At-Start Stacks?
Essentially, Yes. A piece is defined in a single location. That can be a palette, an At-start Stack, a Deck or a Place/Replace definition in a trait.
You can copy the entire piece from the palette and paste it into the At-Start Stack, but you will then have 2 unique pieces that need to be maintained independently. The amount of work this entails is minimized of all of traits in the piece are actually defined in a prototype, so both the Palette piece and the Stack piece are just just shells, with all the ‘interesting stuff’ maintained in the prototype.
If you don’t need the pieces in the At-start Stack to actually appear in the Game Piece Palette for use during the game, then you can just define them in the At-start Stack.
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OK, thanks. I can’t really use prototypes for entire counters but copy-and-paste should work.
Oh? Why not? They are designed to be used for entire counters.
The counters have a lot of text and numbers (with exponents) on them and I need to adjust the label positions and sometimes the even font size for various types of unit so that info is displayed correctly. The main problem is the exponents, which have to be moved, if for instance, the attack strength has two digits instead of one, or even a “3” vs a “1”…otherwise they are out of position. I considered prototypes but concluded that it would be too confusing to create prototypes based on, for instance, the type and number of digits in their various factors (attack, defense, movement, etc).
So I created a counter for each type of unit in the game piece palette which use prototypes for most of their features, but then copy that unit and adjust the label positions for similar units as necessary.
IIRC that’s the main reason, but I think there were other reasons connected with tailoring the generic units in the game palette vs the individual units that will be on the map. Moreover, since each unit is MOSTLY made up of various prototypes, I assume that counters that I copy into the At-Start stack will be update whenever those prototypes are updated…things that are not already included in prototypes will generally not need to be updated.
Hope that makes sense…I’m kind of learning this stuff as I go…
I should also say that when I was creating the units in the game piece palette I assumed that those units would be assigned to At-Start Stacks and so was unpleasantly surprised to find that was not the case.
Yes, that would have been a reasonable way to implement At-start stacks, but decisions where made many, many, many years ago that prevented that.
You should be right with just a copy and paste of the completed pieces into the at-start stacks.
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Sorry, one more question: I’m building this module for my own use, solo. I don’t anticipate that it will ever be used by anyone else.
In this case, is there really even a need for At-Start Stacks, or would it be easier to just finish the module other than unit placement, then drag the units from the game piece palette onto the map, save the game in that state, and go from there?
Sure, many modules don’t use at-start stacks, they are not needed for a functional module. You can just drag out and create the setup as you need, and save it and load as a pre-defined setup,.
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