My second post for WildWestMOd is regarding
the graphical style for terrains; I left the Weewar design principles in some points:

1. bases that can be captured do not change their color as a whole but the change of ownership adds only distinctive  attributes. those are side specific colors at the  hex-borders (as you have seen already in the factions post)  and a flag or any other side- specific symbol
2. items that can be manipulated (like units or capturable terrain) have a black border to display more contrast to background
3. the playing field consists of terrain hexes that look less symbolic than in weewar and are more naturalistic. I’m working on 3 naturalistic terrain sets : grassy (green set), barren (red set), and prairie (yellow set).
4. combination of naturalistic terrain and more comic style units (and buildings) should help the player to distinguish between the map and things he actually could manipulate
5. terrain of the same kind may show just 1 or more than 1 slightly different graphics to increase diversity of the whole map appearance
6. hex size is 10 px larger

This will give you an idea of the sides you will be able to play in  WildWestMOD.  I was working on new graphics for the 6 factions. Each set with a total of about 10  different looking units, split into the 3 combat classes infantry, cavalry and artillery. A building class (like in KajahMOD) will also be provided to display destructible fort walls. The support units are part of the infantry class, such as builders or wall destroyers, can be built in special bases only and do not appear that often on the maps, if there is no forts or spots to found new income generating structures (such as gold-mines etc). In average the three main combat  classes contain three different units and the drawing is almost finished, the few units marked with a *  have not been drawn yet. The units visible below are shown, when a structure is beeing captured.
Faction balancing: Normally infantry has 3 hitpoints,  cavalry 2 and artillery 1 only.  Because Indians, Pioneers and Mexicans will not be able to build advanced artillery such as the siege cannon, they get other balancing bonuses such as cheaper basic units or  some of their units get an additional hitpoint. Also Indians will get another balancing advantage (not figured out the details yet, probably an extra income generating unit like the hunting party) because they can not (re)build forts at all, but burn them down only. (I will write about terrains and forts in my next post…) Some units in different factions will share the same specifications like the yankee trooper and the rebel conscript for example, but others will be quite faction specific. Because unit hitpoints are mostly set to 3,  I’d like to have built in a certain probabilty of a unit missing its target completely when shooting on it. Especially long range units such as cannons should have a certain chance to miss charging enemies that want to get close. This option of “bad luck” will be stronger than in Weewar and balancing will be important to keep the golden mean for that.

Yankees: regular United States Army in bluecoats and light blue pants.
3 in infantry class: militia, troopers, skirmishers (+ 2 support units: garrison, settlers)
3 in cavalry class: cavalry, skirmish cavalry, veteran cavalry
3 in artillery class: horse artillery, field artillery, siege artillery
1. Rebels: civil war Confederate States Army in cadet grey or butternut colored uniforms.
   3 in infantry class: militia, conscripts, marksmen (+ 2 support units: garrison, settlers)
   3 in cavalry class: regular cavalry, volunteer cavalry, veteran cavalry
   3 in artillery class: horse artillery,  field artillery, siege artillery
2. Indians: plain Indian faction in greenish clothes or half naked.
   4 in infantry class: warriors, archers, musket shooters, elite warriors (+ 3 support units: pillagers, hunters, refugee party*)
   4 in cavalry class: pathfinders, horseback archers, musket riders, chief riders
   0 in artillery class: none
3. Pioneers: not uniformed frontiersmen clothed in individual colors.
   4 in infantry class: townsmen, farmers, trappers, gunslingers (+ 2 support units : pioneers, tnt blasters)
   3 in cavalry class: wranglers, cowboys, desperados
   1 in artillery class: fort cannons
4. Mexican: patriots’ faction in national tricolore (green white red)
   4 in infantry class: peones, guripas republicanos, guerillieros, pistoleros (+1 support unit: colonizadores)
   3 in cavalry class: charros republicanos, caballeros, caudillos
   2 in artillery class: morteros, artilleros
5. Empire: royalists’ forces with French,  Belgian and Austrian colonial troops in empire tricolore (blue yellow red)
   3 in infantry class: line infantry, mountain troopers, legionaries (+ 1 support unit: garrison*)
   3 in cavalry class: hussars, dragoons, colorados
   3 in artillery class: mountain artillery, field artillery, le brutal

Some words about my Wild West mod:

This is the  most ambitious modding project so far for Weebot I dare say. I had a brake for the last 2 or 3 weeks and I continue working on it now. The mod will change the game a bit more than CasaMOD, its focus shifted from a wide range of units to less units, but a bigger difference in game mechanics and a new feel of the game. I also tried to make more genuine graphics and move a bit away from the Weewar look. In this mod you will be playing different sides with different and side-specific unit sets. Because of that, WildWestMOD will take longer to develop. Besides the many many new graphics that need to be drawn, I need to balance the different war parties and require the help of Kajah to implement some of the stuff only a programmer can do.

Prelude:
My initial concept set the mod somewhen in the middle of 19th century, first I wanted to do a more general colonial scenario and gave it the working title “Empire Mod”, heavily inspired by the kinds of movies about the colonial wars throughout the world, like the war for Egypt in North Africa. In the mod I wanted to have colonial forts and masses of cheap units branding on these forts’ walls, like seen on many old oaters or colonial genre films I liked to watch as a kid on telly on sunday afternoons. Not sure if I chose the right words to describe it, better have a look by yourself:
Khartoum (1966) on Youtube

Soon I realized that making a colonial mod that takes place in different parts of the world, it would be difficulty to make “realistic” maps, if the mod features the e.g. British Empire, African Beduines, Indians, Chinese and so on make them meet on the same battlefield. There would mostly be only 1 on 1 maps in realistic historical settings, and as I like to create historical settings most (yeah right – I studied that at college once…), I learned that with the 6 player limit I need to set the mod in a single geographical area and therefor chose North America’s Wild West in the 1840ies to let’s say 1870ies.
After that decision I found 3 larger conflicts in this region that would fit perfectly and that made me start drawing 6 warring parties:
American Civil War 1860ies: Yankee Faction vs. Rebel Faction
Indian Wars throughout the whole century: Indian Faction vs. Pioneer Faction
Mexican – American War 1840ies & French internvention in Mexico 1860ies: Mexican Faction (National Liberation) vs. Empire Faction (Mexican Royalists with European support)
The good thing about that is, that you can use all 6 player factions & place them on the same map and it still doesnt feel that weird, other than if you had Beduines vs. the Russian Empire fighting for Ohio…

Before the brake I had done the following:
Created the basic unit sets for all 6 sides, made a bunch of terrain tiles with buildings so far. And yes a total of about 200 Fort tiles made facing different directions, this will be hell of work to make bugfree xmls for each of that ones, much worse than roads for CasaMOD ;-)
The factions will have 4 classes: infantry (foot soldiers), cavalry (riders), artillery (cannons) and structure (buildings). Each class will have different amount of health points – only up to 3 is average, some destroyable structures (inspired by KajahMOD) will get up to 10hp, I made new health counter images for the non-structure units (the hearts on the pic). The terrain hexes are a bit larger than the 32×34px tile in Weewar, making it possible to show a bit more details in the sprites. Some factions like the Yankees will have some expensive and technically advanced units such as siege artillery. Because of this some other low-tech factions get cheaper to build grunt units, such as the indian pillager for example. The balancing process is important, it would be cool if someone could help me with it later when the graphic sets are ready to be used.

Currently I’m testing the fort upgrades and destruction of forts, which is a bit tricky as the factions have different units and not all of them actually can (re)build destroyed fort walls and towers…