Creating Ship Counters

Having found a simple way to create a Tactical map for Naval engagements it was necessary to start giving thought to the counters that would be needed in order to 'play' the game.

I wanted to get some information on the counter as well as a top-down image of a ship. The problem here was that the ship types I needed to be represented ranged in size from huge Battleships to tiny Corvettes, so I needed a series of top-down images. The images also had to be recognisibly of ships and although not exactly in 1:1200th scale there had to be a clear distinction between what was a Carrier and what was a destroyer.

I searched on-line for some suitable top-down images and it took my ages to find some. I eventually found a strip of images that were practically ideal. Unfortunately I could not ascertain who owned the image so I am unable to credit the owner (if you recognise them let me know).

For ease of use I created counters that were 1-hex wide for all ships although the ship images are themselves of different sizes depending on type.

As for information on the face of the counter I decided on only four items;

1. The ship's type and ID.
2. The ship's name
3. A symbol indicating which side the ship belonged to
4. The ship's main and secondary armament as well as an indication of whether or not that it carried torpedos.

All these pieces of information were placed on the counter from within Vassal and not as part of the image creation process in Photoshop. For those who are interested they were positioned and edited by using the Label Property.

So, the image of the Battleship below can be identified as a Battleship (BB). In the order of battle it is the first ship listed of that type (BB1). It is called the South Dakota and it belongs to the Blue player (indicated by the small blue square). It's main armament consists of 9x16" guns and it's secondary armament consists of 20x5" guns.

This is a counter representing the Battleship
USS South Dakota at actual game-size (100%)

For naval wargames this is a very limited amount of information. However, using Vassal you have a lot more flexibility than simply carrying information on the counter itself. One of the neatest things about Vassal is that it allows you to add all sorts of properties and behaviours to the counter as well as displaying information on the counter itself that can be edited. So, for instance, in only a couple of mouse-clicks the counter can be edited to become BB2, King George V, 10x14" and 16x5.25" armament.

It is the versatility of Vassal and what it offers in the way of manipulating counters that makes it so attractive.

Having found suitable ship images and designed the basic counter my next job was to use Vassal to create properties and behaviours for the counter so that it could be used as a naval unit in a wargame.