How to transfer your veterans to new vessels

Explains how to assign veteran crews to new vessel, or in general change the assignment of crews via save game editing.
Its easy, trust me.

Introduction

So, you have some battle hardened veterans in old tanks and recently unlocked some shiny new war machinery. Now obviously you want to get the veterans in the new tanks instead of working with all new rookies, right?

Well, unfortunately the game wont allow you to do that. Ingame, that is. Not by now at least, we can hope that they'll add that feature.
Fortunately you can do it with a few easy steps by editing your save file.

What you need:
• 7zip (freeware), or anything else that lets you manipulate archives
• A text editor. Notepad will do, I recommend notepad++ (also freeware)

Step 1: Save your game

Put your old and your new unit in the same deployment. Thats not strictly necessary but it makes it very easy to locate them in your save file.
Here I have a veterancy 7 Panzer III M and a brand new Panther in phase 1.
Save that!

Step 2: Open save game with 7zip

You can find it here.
%userprofile%\Documents\My Games\gates of hell\profiles
There is a subfolder with your ID, and below that a campaign folder. Locate the right .sav file and open it with 7zip. That should look like that
Open the campaign.scn with a text editor.

(Ohh, and obviously its a good idea to make a copy of your save file before you start messing around with it, just in case you add a typo)

Step 3: Find your units

Search for "stage_1", assuming you put the units in deploment 1. Otherwise you need to search for "stage_2", "stage_3"…
And here you have both tanks. The first number behind "stage_1" (0x8367and 0x811b) is the ID of the tank. You probably should write that down somewhere. And the 5 numbers after that (eg. For the Panzer III 0x8368, ..69, ..6a, ..6b, ..6c) are the 5 crew members.
Easy, isn't it?

Step 4: Change the crew IDs

In this case you can just switch the numbers via cut/paste.
You can also move single crew members around, just make sure that you end up with the correct number of crewmen of the right type. In our case we have 5 tankmen in each tank, so we just need to cut/past the whole set.

Before
After

And that’s almost it. If you’re lazy you can stop here. But strange things might happen in the first battle.

Note 1: This also works for parts of crews.
Note 2: This does not work for different ‚professions‘. Tanks have tankman. Guns have artilleryman. MGs have rifleman. These are not interchangeable. The last of our crewmembers here is a 'tank-commander', make sure that it stays that way
Note 3: BTW the sequence of you unit here (at the very file of the file) defines the sequence of your units as shown in game. Yes, that means that you can sort them here.

Step 5: Switch the 'links' (OBSOLETE)

When I wrote this guide I already noted that these links doesn't seem to do very much. As of update 13 (10. sept) they aren't even there yet. You can skip this.


Upon further research, I conlude that its best to delete the link section. New units never have 'links', so assigning your veterans to a new unit with no links is fine. Deleting the links does no harm... ever. It seems they get created when they are needed. But wrong links mess things up.

Search for the ID’s of the tanks and look for a ‚Link‘ area.
If there is one, just delete it.
In this case here this is a link between the Panzer 3 (8367) and the veteran crew. Just throw it out.


Its seems new tanks have no 'link' section, so don't be scared if you can't find one. Its seems its created sooner or later. But wrong links causes wierd stuff to happen (crew members spawn in the tank but also standing in the middle of the map).
You can try to switch the links from the old to the new tank. This willl work fine as long as they both have the same roles. Otherwise wierd stuff happens.

Step 6: Save it

Save it, close it. Upon closing you should get a confirmation messagebox asking if you want to change the file in the archive. Confirm that. If you don't get this message it didn't work at least if you use 7zip, and you'll get the messagebox only if you actually close the editor.
You're done! Load you save!
Now you have a brand new tank with a veteran crew. You can sell the old tank if you like.
That was easy, wasn't it?

[beernacle]

@HE4DEYES worked for me, i think you doing something wrong

[HE4DEYES]

sadly this does not work anylonger.

[LaBamba]

Cheap tank crew

[LaBamba]

Well you can also get chip tank crew to all of your tank. So that no orginal crew dies and no more lost money.

[Void]

Ey, you can also put the {impregnability full} on them, jeje

[Rolbaron]

Thank you, great help

[Irkkunen]

You would think something so apparent would be an ingame feature. Thanks for the guide.

[airbornemongo]

thank you kind sir, this is awesome

[SchuetzeM]

Yep, missed that. Thx!

[Graf Erik]

100%, yes. Did it several times just today.
Did you make sure to check the change into the archive?
If you aren't sure about it you can just reopen the archive and check if you change is there. If its changed in the file, then it will definetly work.