Thanks for the feedback tootall. I always spend a lot of time tinkering with the appearance, swapping terrains and editing the map until I get the look right. It's nice to hear it is appreciated!
I experimented with the unit shield and eventually discovered it was possible to put a large coloured surround on each health bar. With the ToTPP shield colour setting it was possible to clearly distinguish the reds and yellows, essential in a scenario where both sides often fielded the same, or very similar, unit types. Have a look at the top right corner of the units.bmp to see how I set it up.
If I had worked on this only at home I may well have skipped the pedia. Fortunately I worked several evening and night shifts and had plenty of time to do some copy/pasting from Wikipedia. I thought it would be a nice touch and it helped while away the hours!
When I first started work on the scenario I got detailed figures for troop numbers and the proportion was around 1000 men per Infantry unit. Aircraft, ships and armour were also proportioned correctly. However as the game developed I had to adapt to compensate for the AI's inability to co-ordinate attacks. This means the actual number of troops is skewed in the AI's favour, but the overall effect remains historically accurate. I believe the term is poetic licence.
ToTPP allowed me to be less economical with the events. No need to combine events to save space. When I needed a new event I just wrote it knowing I wouldn't run out of space!
I did have a few issues with flag events during testing, but as it turned out a lot of them were not necessary (esp. unit creation) as I was able to ditch the flag and just give them spawning co-ordinates in certain cities. If the Republic is doing better than expected then the units cannot spawn. The flag events are mainly for text pop-ups now,
To get a particular unit to show on the Intro screen just select it (so it is flashing active) when you save as scenario. This way you can pick any human controlled unit to appear, as long as it is in the scenario from the start and has moves left.
I hope you enjoy playing SCW. I really enjoyed my own play-test which is a good sign I guess!