Spring RTS Engine

i'm sure this has been brought up before but i'll be damned if i can find it. how do you do it?
i've tried hacking an AA nanotower to be the COM but nothing is showing spawning at the start of the game. i can .give myself them no problem and they appear to work. what have i done wrong?

Perhaps you misspelt the unit name?

nope, the names are all consistent

got it: i'd been using a placeholder mod archive with a sidedata.tdf and modinfo in...turns out they were'nt consistent with what was in the spring dir. problem solved