Make your own Deployment Cards - in five minutes or less!

By Bitterman, in Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Update - you can now find this tool and more in the Kensei Imperial Assault Tools Suite !

Like I expect many others, I have often wished I could make my own Deployment Cards. This would be particularly useful in a campaign - how many missions say things like "the Imperial Officer represents Thaanos, he has +10 Health and +1 Movement"? Wouldn't it be great to have that on a card! Or, if only I could design my own units... or even combine Darth Vader and Driven by Hatred into a single card for convenience. Fantasy Flight are nice enough to spoil many of their cards online, so someone with artistic talent and a graphics editor can usually come up with something pretty decent... but I have no artistic talent at all.

I can write code, though, so I decided to make a tool to do it for me!

59ede2f1a22ba_example-UI.png.8857eaba815bb88f3e2b791907796b9a.png

That shows the editor, in the process of creating a deployment card I'll be using in the next mission our group will be playing in our campaign. The most time-consuming part of it was finding a suitable piece of artwork in Google Images... overall this card took about five minutes to make.

Here's another example of a card made with this tool for use in a campaign:

59ede3ab3477a_example-campaign(empire).png.bff64d4794f8563fdfb21a9d93031c0c.png

And here's one for a custom unit that I made up, that could be used in homebrew campaign scenarios, or friendly skirmish games:

59ede3aa22bbc_example-custom(scum).png.9c5ac0d521a612a9824227aed50d1957.png

All you have to do once you've designed your card is print it out (either from the tool itself or by pasting the image it creates into your preferred printing software), then optionally glue it onto a spare Deployment Card that you may have lying around:

59ede3aa9530c_example-printed.jpg.188294215abf310966485d97270861a5.jpg

Et voila!

You can download the tool from here . Enjoy!

Edited by Bitterman

Looks good, what systems does this run on?

On 10/23/2017 at 1:56 PM, kingargyle said:

Looks good, what systems does this run on?

Windows only. [edit] ...probably Windows 10 only.

Edited by Bitterman

Looks very promising. Will give it a try!

This is pretty sweet! What’d you use to create it?

2 minutes ago, Uninvited Guest said:

This is pretty sweet! What’d you use to create it?

C# and WinForms... and a lot of time messing around in Paint .NET, examining cards spoiled by FFG, to try and get the generated image as close to the "official" layout as possible (it's not pixel perfect, but it's close enough to be convincing).

I just used it to create a custom campaign card for darth vader so it has a lower cost for campaign. I adjusted some of the over costed characters and this will be awesome to place on top of their cards. Thank you so much for this.

Great to hear it's proving useful already! Feel free to share any of the cards you created.

Here is the campaign one I created by lowering his point value.

Deployment Card - Empire - Darth Vader, Lord of the sith (Unique) [Campaign Only] [custom].png

Any chance you could add a skirmish attachment template?

I also did that one as well.

Deployment Card - Empire - Darth Vader, Lord of the sith (Unique) [Skirmish Only] [custom].png

You're missing: No skirmish upgrade attachments, and Imperial faction only.

Also, the +1dmg is not dependent on using a special action.. You have an extraneous special action symbol there.

25 minutes ago, cnemmick said:

Any chance you could add a skirmish attachment template?

If you mean, how do you do that in the editor - set group size to zero, "Skirmish Upgrade" in the Traits, and "<attachment>" in the Abilities.

Edited by Bitterman
14 minutes ago, a1bert said:

You're missing: No skirmish upgrade attachments, and Imperial faction only.

Also, the +1dmg is not dependent on using a special action.. You have an extraneous special action symbol there.

Ok I give you on the action symbol there but it has the skirmish only symbol at the top next to vader's name. So it means skirmish only. The other is unnecessary.

You can't attach a skirmish upgrade to Driven by Hatred Vader, because there is already one baked into the card.

Ok, I give you that currently you can't take imperial non-droids to another faction, and you probably never can.

This is just for my reference when playing at home or at local non competition game nights. At tournaments I won't be using this and if I do I will have the skirmish upgrade card there. You know to make the people who want you to follow the rules by the book but they don't. I have run into that before which is why I don't do tournaments.

Some custom cards I bashed out this afternoon.

Disclaimer: none of these are playtested at all, just initial thoughts and brainstorming really. Having spent all that time building this tool, I wanted an excuse to use it. ;)

I've found that the old Star Wars Miniatures models are quite suitable for this sort of thing - I have appropriate models for all of these cards.

Spoilered for size!

Deployment_Card_Rebellion_Ewok_Elite_cus Deployment_Card_Rebellion_Ewok_custom.pn

Deployment_Card_Mercenaries_Gran_Raider_ Deployment_Card_Mercenaries_Gran_Raider_

Deployment_Card_Neutral_Gonk_GNK_Power_D Deployment_Card_Neutral_Gonk_GNK_Power_D

Deployment_Card_Empire_Interrogation_Dro Deployment_Card_Empire_Interrogation_Dro

Awesome. This will be great for fancying up The Homebrew Thread !

When I try to put text into either of the Abilities fields, it throws an error for me.

Unhandled exception has occurred in your application.

Details


See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.IO.FileNotFoundException: File not found.
at System.ComponentModel.ReflectPropertyDescriptor.SetValue(Object component, Object value)
at System.Windows.Forms.BindToObject.SetValue(Object value)
at System.Windows.Forms.Binding.PullData(Boolean reformat, Boolean force)
at System.Windows.Forms.Binding.Target_PropertyChanged(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.TextBoxBase.OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.TextBoxBase.WmReflectCommand(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.TextBoxBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.TextBox.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


8 minutes ago, RogueLieutenant said:

When I try to put text into either of the Abilities fields, it throws an error for me.

Unhandled exception has occurred in your application.

OK, sorry about that, I'll take a look and see if I can figure out what went wrong.

Is it literally any text into those ability fields? Like, just typing "abc", not trying to use any of the special codes or anything? Are the other fields all OK?

Are you on Windows 10 or an older version? If you know how to check, what version of .NET do you have installed? (Don't worry if you don't know how to find that out).

Edited by Bitterman

it's just entering any text into those fields. all the other fields seem to be working fine.

i'm on Windows 7 professional at the moment I think.

I'm getting the same issue as Rogue.

33 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

I'm getting the same issue as Rogue.

How did you launch it? Did you launch it from the .zip or did you extracted it out? Does it give error when you try to launch from the .zip?

I'm on Win10 and I can't seem to reproduce that error

I extracted it and then ran the .exe

51 minutes ago, ricope said:

How did you launch it? Did you launch it from the .zip or did you extracted it out? Does it give error when you try to launch from the .zip?

I'm on Win10 and I can't seem to reproduce that error

Extracted it