Cannot add 8th faction

[bullseye0913]

Like many of you i've recently picked up this game after its re release and I love it! Panzerkorps but 40k? amazing.

I noticed pretty quickly when looking into modding that all mods with new factions either overwrote existing ones (like the dummy ork_2 faction) or added to existing factions. I know the culprit is the factions.whdat file, specifically if you try to add anything to the end of the file, the editor refuses to launch.

Ive scoured the forums and read countless posts. Reverse engineered other mods, looked at panzerkorps mods. I cannot figure it out. I used a debugger and think it may be one of the dlls, some sort of an accidental hard coded limit.

I know this is a shot in the dark but any insight would be greatly appreciated. I can always just created merged factions / alliances but it feels so unclean!