Aide de Camp 2 Hints and Tips

You’ve made your new Aide de Camp 2 game module. Your map is good, you have beautiful counters and you are proud, but wait. You realize that your counter strengths are not uniform in location, the counter edge shading has two different colors and your regimental designators are different heights. What a nightmare to fix. You will have to erase then add the unit strengths back in, dot in the correct colors for the regimental symbol and draw that line up the side and across the top to get the colors straight. Bummer!

 Editing your counters by using the correct tools and a little innovation may save you some time. A fellow gamer said, “If you see anything else (wrong), let me know.” Well I took it to heart with his game module. His work is beautiful but some of us get goofy when given a chance. I’ll show you how to fix these problems using Aide de Camp’s editing tools.

 Let’s look at two counters. One has all the correct locations and colors. The second counter has all the above problems to fix.

 Counter One Hundred Ten.

The numbers are placed where we want them. Experience has shown that it is better to put your numbers to the right of center than to the left of center if center is not available. These counter strengths are just a hair to the right of the unit type box. While I tend to cringe at that it can’t be helped since other counters in this game set has a two-digit number for the combat strength. If the numbers were over to the left some then they wouldn’t match the counters with numbers like 10-5-4. I like the numbers to stay in the same location on the counters for the whole set.

 The Regimental Symbol has one pixel of National color between it and the shading color. It makes the unit size symbol a bit easier to see rather than run into the shading and border. Sometimes this can’t be helped depending on your counter size.

 The shading on this game set has the light from the upper right. I prefer the upper-left but it really doesn’t matter. It’s a right-handed thing anyway. “Read your book with the light over your left shoulder” is what I remember hearing. However the Allied armor had darker shading than the rest of the other units.

 Counter One Hundred Eleven.

You will see that the shading is lighter, the 3 4 is one pixel to the left and the regimental symbol is abutted to the top shading stripe. Let’s go fix it all.

 Click EDIT then ZOOM+.

  Since I already have the correct shade selected I will click the SWITCH COLOR BUTTON.

 You can see it depressed above between the COPY and GRAB COLOR buttons.

 Next you click on the light gray and the color changes to the correct shading. You DO NOT have to draw the lines or click on each pixel. Just don’t pick a color to change that is used for more than one item on the counter.

 Now we have the darker shade of gray on the top and the right side. Now let’s go to the next zoom level.

We need to change the shading first. We already have the SWITCH COLOR tool selected so click on the light gray color.

 
 The shading is not darker gray. Now we want to delete the top pixel of the regimental symbol. First we need the right color so click on GRAB COLOR.

With this tool we can just grab a color off the screen that suits our purpose. The tan color is the one we want. Click on any tan pixel then select the SET DRAW MODE button (the pencil). Now drag the pencil across the top row of the regimental symbol to erase it. 

See how the 3 Combat Strength is one pixel to the left of the unit type (infantry) symbol? We want to move it and the first 4 one pixel to the right. Click on the SELECT REGION button.

Now select the pixel pixel one column to the left of the three even with the top of the three and drag the box even to the right side of the four.

 You have to ensure you selected the column to the left of the three to make this easy. If you don’t then you will have to erase what is left of the three when we move it. Now the symbol of your cursor changes to an arrow with a box hanging on the back. Just place it one pixel to the right of where you first selected, I.E. the upper left-hand corner of the three, which is tan, not black.

 The numbers are now one pixel to the right. We are done except for one thing. Let’s grab the shading color so we can correct the next counter. 

Click the GRAB COLOR button then click on the medium gray color. Click SAVE then click NEXT. 

We are now ready for counter 112.

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