Might I suggest:
Right now pawns are placed on the grid in the editor ahead of game time, with their skills chosen from a public editor variable drop down list. Simple, static, and handy, right?
Soon as I got deeper into working on my game did I realize that these skills and player stats need to persist to the next battle, and the static placement and selection of stats doesn’t work for that, so characters needed to load from a data file.
Perhaps you might consider loading the characters/pawns and all their stats, placement locations, and skills from an start up struct file, and placing them dynamically on the grid at game (grid manager init) start.
Thoughts?