Improvements on adding encounters to combat tracker

[alloowishus]

Does anyone else find the encounter and ct a little clunky? I find myself doing this over and over, first I create the encounter and I add the encounter to the story and drop the pin on the map. Now the maps have pins with the encounters but no creatures. I can't drag tokens directly onto the map because they are not in the CT, they have to be there first. And I don't want to drag every single encounter into the CT before the players actually get there. So players enter a room, now I have to stop the game, say "there is something there, hold on". Then I have to add the encounter to the CT, then I have to make all the creatures visible, then I have to drag each creature one at a time onto the map.

Is there a better way to do this? I was thinking that if you have an option when adding to the CT do either have the NPCs visible or not, that would save some steps. In addition, if you could have an option to drop them automatically where the pin is on the map, that would save even more steps!

[Zacchaeus]

Yes there is. Don't pin the encounter to the map, pin the encounter to the story entry and then pin the story entry to the map.

Create your encounters ahead of time by pre-placing them on the map. See here https://fantasygroundsunity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/FGCP/pages/996640999/Preparing+Encounters+and+Random+Encounters and see also video twelve here https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?75515-New-Video-Series

When your players enter a new area click the pin, read any text etc click the encounter link; click add encounter to CT and make the NPCs visible on the CT.

[Trenloe]

A few options to speed up adding tokens to the map:
1) Use token pre-placement in the encounter.
2) Drag/drop the relevant faction button from the CT to the map - this will add all of the records from that faction in the CT to the map.

[alloowishus]

Oh wow! Thank you both for the tips, that helps a lot!