US Infantry & Command Counter Set

Having already determined the organisation of my US Army Battlegroup and having designed the necessary templates I went on to produce the infantry and command counters.

US Counter Set (to scale)

Infantry Company

Each counter is produced in Adobe Photoshop using layers (see opposite). After saving each counter as a single image I now had the counter set to represent my US Infantry Company.

US Infantry Company (not to scale)

Note that many of the images are duplicated; their are nine infantry stands for instance. Using VASSAL you can drag-and-drop the same image onto the mapboard over and over again so only a single image of the counter has to be produced.

Photoshop Layers

You can think of layers like the floors of a building. Each layer is represented by a floor. The ground floor is the template;

Each figure that is to be represented on the counter is a seperate floor in the building. There are five figures on this counter so that's another five floors;

Each layer is superimposed over the lower layers and moved around until they are in the final position required over the template.

One final layer is added, the text that denotes this counter as an 'MG';

Finally, the building is collapsed and all floors are merged into one to produce the final image for the counter.

This process is repeated for each counter in the counter set.