For long time WinterMOD was up our sleeve, the graphics Weewar player Madmike had drawn long time ago were ready to be used, I just put them together with some XMLs, added and changed some terrains a bit to fit the theme better and also added a new unit, the skidoo. 3 maps are ready to be played.
In WinterMOD movement over most of the snowy hexes generally costs more mobility points than on Weewar’s normal looking hex-fields. Here comes the skidoo in play. It is very fast, even faster, if it goes over snow or deep snow than the hovercraft unit, but it is hardly stronger in combat than a normal trooper. Still the cost of more than double a trooper’s price is worth it, as we all know it is crucial to reach a neutral base faster than your opponent. And you will love its additional move ability that enables you to go one hex further after having moved or attacked already, same as aircraft units can do but even  including a possible capture! The other units kept their combat values but their mobility was rebalanced slightly to make the new terrains more difficult to pass.
The terrains stayed in the principles of Weewar, mountains, woods and swamps have the same combat modifiers, only the graphics changed to winter style, plain is called snow now.
Desert was replacd with Deep Snow, all land units getting stuck in there suffer a decrease of attack and defence of -1.

Completely new is the ice hex, imagine an ice layer that is not too thick, enabling some land and some sea units to enter the same tile which is quite unique. It has these effects on units:

• Heavy HARD units (with low mobility) cannot enter ice, because they could brake it and drown. Light & fast HARD units are okay.
• SOFT units can cross ice but suffer -2 defense as there is no cover on it.
• Light SPEEDBOATS can not enter and heavy BOATS need 1 turn to brake their way through 1 hex of ice (very high mobility cost). HOVERS are not affected and move like on water.
• SUBS cannot stop on ice but they can dive beneath it, if they can reach an open water hex behind the frozen water.

Also new is the blizzard hex. I had that idea as I’ve been playing an Antarctica map on Weewar with Rahl and Norami, where void tiles were placed to represent the hostile environment. I didn’t like the void which was
looking like holes in the map and came up with the blizzard idea instead. This hex does a lot to your units’s stats, it raises defense +10 and lowers attack -10, costs much mobility and air units may not stay on the hex but only go through it.

Basically the mod is not very different to the Weewar rules and feel, the only main changes are the lower mobility, the skidoo and ice. Feel free to expand it or modify it further if you’d like to, it will be  downloadable soon.

edit May 12th 2010 by Casaubon

Hi readers, due to the fact that Norami is very occupied at the moment Casaubon takes over his WaterMOD temporarily. I want to  expand Norami’s ruleset a little and bring it to playable state, with bigger difference from the other MODs. Land units were reduced to a few units, which merged from subclasses. For example I merged tank and heavy tank to just simply “tank” that will perform something like in the middle of the old two. Merged units got new sprites. Capturing is different, you won’t use hovercraft for captures separated by sea  in this MOD like you are used to in Weewar.

features:

• land units: trooper (captures), tank (2 range), anti aircraft, artillery (5 range)
• in air similar to weewar: helicopter (captures), jet, bomber
• in speedboat class: speedboat, torpedoboat (hunts subs), mine trawler (places seamines), jetski (captures)
• in ship class: frigate (fast anti sub & air), destroyer (a bit weaker than in weewar), cruiser (5 range), battleship
• in sub class: submarine, diver, scuba scooter, seamine
• 2 stationary land units (not buildable): coast gun, stationary anti aircraft
• additional sea & underwater terrains like deep water(+ subs, – speedboats), shallow water (no ships), reef (+ sub),underwaterbase (divers), ledge (blocks), shipyard (ship building)
• harbors can produce speedboats but also troopers and add to naval repairs like repairshops do for land units

what could be done in a future update:

• further balancing when there is some more gaming experience (are seamines too expensive? perform destroyers not differently enough from frigates, are cruisers too powerfull, do divers need an own class, etc.)
• maps maps maps maps maps :)
• implement the aircraft carrier and freighter unit to the ship class, if transports are implemented in weebot. also change seamine placement from a captured build (like an oilrig build in KajahMOD) to the mine trawler’s real cargo without making the trawler disappear after placement, which is also possible only with code enabling implementation of real transports.
• I also tried to draw a Harrier (aircraft) but failed, planes are the most difficult to draw in weewar style. Maybe anybody can achieve that later.

For a more detailed Html information table see the

new WaterMOD Unit & Terrain Specification

WaterMOD land units in action:

WaterMOD navy in action:

I thought it would be fun to add weebot as a playable unit to KajahMOD to have a kind of maskot :) so there is a small update to KajahMOD uploaded. to top it I added also a weebot headquarters terrain that actually can build those robots so some folks might get confused by the same names of unit, terrain and the apps  ;-)

Changes since last update:

• download updated
• new map weebot industries: a 3 player map you can play as teams (red + plue vs. purple) or FFA. the pressure from both sides competes with the economical potential of the middle player.
• new unit: Weebot
  though it is hard class (like tanks) it can capture structures and terrain(!). combat values are 5 in attack & defense, range is 1, move is 3 hexes.  the main feature of weebot other than capturing  is it’s cheap prize of 100, low upkeep cost of 2 and the fact that snipers wont do much damage on them (for comparison troppers have an upkeep of 10 and defense value of 6)
• new terrain: weebot headquarters
  the new weebots can be built in the new weebot hq only, this hex has the same combat modifiers like  a base. it doesn’t produce any income though and cannot produce any other units than weebots. so if you don’t want any weebots appear on your map and stick to the classic units,  just don’t place the terrain that could produce them.

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

This post is ment  to give you guys an idea of the features implemented for CasaMOD and the ones probably to be built in later…

By now CasaMOD is kind of finished and fully playable and the current features are:

1. New units: cruiser, strike fighter, flak tank, sniper. minisub, torpedo boat, cushion launcher
   
2. New terrains:  town, bunker, jungle, hills, deep sea, shallow water, ruins, wasteland, roads, mountain peak
   
3. Repairing differs in some ways;
   I liked the air unit repair in weewar and kind of used this idea for the other units as well, the basic “in the field” repair is cut down to 1 hitpoint per turn for all units, except air which still can repair its 3 points on airfields only. To boost repair you move your unit to a certain terrain. In Weewar the repairshop was the only terrain that boosts repairs, in CasaMOD most of the “structure terrains” (like bases, towns & harbors) can do that in a slighter manner. SEA units can use harbors to increase their repair rate and HARD units (tanks and stuff) do it in towns or bases. SOFT units (all kind of troopers) repair 1 in the field and can boost repairs on towns or bases. The second new aspect about repairing is the additional repair bonus, if the structure terrain you are repairing on is owned by you. This example explains it best: Your blue tank sitting on a plain is hit –  Ouch. You decide to increase its lifespan, if you hit repair (right mouse button in Weebot) it will recover 1 point. If you move to a neutral town, its repair will be 2 per turn. If the town is your color, it will repair 3 even. With this I hope to give the players more options to either fight it out to the end as both you and your enemy`s unit dont repair that fast, or tactically redraw to your strongholds for repairs. The other idea behind this was that this repair system also might increase a bit the value of faster or better armored vehicles, and decrease the amount of trooper spamming seen so often in Weewar.
4. Income differs slightly. In Weewar you capture bases for income. In CasaMod there is additional towns you can capture, they increase your income by 50% of a base´s income (dependent on the map settings). Not much of a difference you think? Nope there really is a big difference, because towns cannot create units at all!  This means maps have areas that are valuable income sources, but once conquered they need protection from your other areas that actually CAN produce units. With that, suddenly reinforcement tactics become more important. And you can bind your adversary’ s forces with sending some raiding troopers into such of his areas. Towns in combination with roads make your move decisions even more important and tactical.
5. Some Weewar unit specifications tweaked and rebalanced (bomber attacks from 2 distance, jet speed increased,destroyer values changed,  AA gun is static and  fires 5 hexes,…)

What I would like to add in the future:

• More maps
• Transport units (freighter, halftrack, aircraft carrier, maybe airlift)
• Paratroopers ay!
• Victory conditions (like adding flags in a not yet programmed  ”capture the flag” mode)

Where to find hard facts & detailed infos about single CasaMOD units/terrains:

You can see  the specifications for the new units and terrains in the specifications.html file, that is included in the CasaMod download root directory. If you don’t want to download and just have a look into the details, you can see it  online here (opens new window) on my fansite. In some cases they might slightly differ to the specifications tables presented on my website (opens new window). I can recall that shallow water behaves differently in CasaMOD than described on my website for example. Shallow water described there allows land units to stay on it with big combat disadvantages, but the actual behavior for CasaMOD in the download is like land units could move trough but not stay on shallow water. The reason for that is that the tables on the site are ment as idea collection for all kind of mods, not just CasaMOD. E.g. I think in KajahMOD units can “park” on shallow water… And yes another way to see the specifications is the geeky look into the particular unit or terrain xml.files in the MOD itself, thanks to Kajah, these files are quite self-explanatory and easy to read.

Maps that were changed for CasaMOD so far (most are included in the CasaMOD download, others will be downloadable here separately):

Waters, Roads,  Jungle, Vietnam, Casablanca to Cairo, New York ruined, Central America, Lakedon

some thoughts about complexity:

Honestly, if you or your buddies are new to Weebot or even never played Weewar before I suggest to play your first game in a different mod or in basic classical Weewar setting to get used to the differences in user interface. The amount of changes might be overwhelming in the start. Also some people might don’t like the changed repair system or the quantity of buildable units. In that case I also would suggest to load KajahMOD where the range of units is not that big and the rules stick more to the ones known from original weewar. A real con in CasaMOD is that the bots provided in weebot were made for the original weewar ruleset and perform worse in CasaMOD (e.g. bots don’t understand that towns can’ t produce units and leave them unprotected). So if you play Weebot in  CasaMOD setting with several people and 1 is missing to fill a mulitplayer map so I’d suggest to set “fog of war” to “true”, the bot replacing the missing player performs more unpredictable and is harder to beat then.