It’s very painful when you have carts that need to be attached to another card, like you attacks an “item” card behind the “character” card with a section of the card behind visible.
sometimes the top part needs to be visible, sometimes the bottom part or the side.
Is there an easy way to manage this? like an option to “send to back” or something like that?
As a more elaborate option, maybe a new “attach” option? (similar to the new Mat + Cargo feature that will be available on the next release). It could work almost like the “stack” functionality but if would allow defining an offset (so that we can define where the card should be placed and how much of it should become visible (keeping in mind that multiple cards can be attached).
If you select an individual card/piece in a stack, then the down key will send it to the back, up to the front, left shift it down 1 spot, and right bring it up one spot.
As for how they’re offset from each other, the Stacking options for the map window control that.
In that case, the only solution I can see is to disable stacking and use Send to Location with offsets and/or Move Fixed Distance to shift the cards around, instead, which is much more difficult. For one thing, in order to slide a card “under” another, you will need to move the top card back into place after positioning the bottom card.
If there are specific “base” cards, with other cards stacking on top of them, you can make the base cards Mats and the others non-stacking Cargo, so at least they would stay attached to each other (if the extra cards need to go under the base card instead, you should still be able to use Mats & Cargo as long as the cargo cards are on a lower Game Piece Layer, I think).
Basically, not really doable without a huge amount of effort with VASSAL 3.6. Looks like a new feature request to me (which I doubt will be implemented before 4.0, as I believe 3.6 is intended to be the last 3.x release with any new features).
The Pax Pamir (second edition) module does this with “prize” cards that are stacked behind player dials without using the editors stacking function. If you look at the module code you’ll see it’s quite an involved process.
(In this example, each subsequent card is slid under the cards already present, and the first card does not move)
