Welcome back to the Q&A. In this episode I’ll discuss how to add a new type of historical unit model to a scenario. Existing historical unit models are like Infantry Divisions and Corps HQs for example. For this tutorial I am going to add a Coastal Garrison Group for the German side. Basically it will be a kampfgruppe with some artillery and infantry and it is supposed to be used in garrisoning port hexes on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov coastlines to free up formations that could better be used at the front. The unit it self is an abstraction of various kinds of troops that secured the coastlines in reality and its main intended function in the scenario is just to provide the Germans with some extra weak units, that when well entrenched will be able to hold a urban hex quite well, while at the same time being able to shell any enemy in neighbouring (sea) hexes.
First I will create a new NATO counter. I use the great freeware program Paint.NET myself for editing and creating graphics. I am first going to design the new nato counter. So here is my take:
I think the anchor clearly indicates this unit being a coastal garrison group. I save the big version 76×76 pixels as “graphics/dccbmodgraphicsBIG/natocounters/20.png” overwriting an existing natocounter that was not being used by any of my scenarios. But I could just as well have saved it as “183.png” (the next one… since 182 nato counters exist in my scenario as of writing). I also make a 38×38 pixel variant and save it in “dccbmodgraphics/natocounters/20.png” and a 19×9 pixel variant and save it in “dccbmodgraphicsSMALL/natocounters/20.png”
Keep in mind you need to create and save these nato counters before starting up the game to make sure the editor will find them. This is because the nato counters are loaded as part of the so called systemgraphics. Its not ideal I must admit, but it is the way things are for now.
Anywho… We saved our 3 different sizes of 20.png in their respective directories and no start up the game and open the scenario we want to edit (in my case Trappenjagd that I use as a master for all vanilla scenarios).
We now go to the units window and add a new predef unit that reflects the ideal complement of a Coastal Garrison Group:
We now go to the historical units window, create a new historical unit and name it “Coastal Garrison Group” and set it to regime=0 (Germany):
We then are going to properly set some of this historical units properties:
We set the first subpart (slot 0) to the predef unit we created before. The editor also asks for a designation and we just put -1 here since we do not want any.
We set model=true since this is a model for multiple instances of Coastal Garrison groups.
We set the shortname (in the top right) to ‘coast’ and the nato counter (in the top right) to ‘20’ (the graphic we just saved).
We set the counter numbering info to -1 (and in the next 2 popups to 0) because we do not want these Coastal Garrison Groups to be numbered (like for example infantry divisions are).
That’s basically it. We just created a new historical unit model with a newly created graphic for its counter.
If we now go back to the map. We can select a hex and press the ‘HOME’-key to place an instance of this model. It will ask you if you want to autoname and you will say yes.
And this how it will look:
Thank you for your attention and see you next time with the next DC Editor Q&A!
