NettiMotti/MobileMotti

NettiMotti is a wargame where the goal is to conquer enemy capitals and defend your own capital. The game is played with 2 or more players (either over a network or on the same computer), each taking turns and conquering and defending territory.

Rules of the Game

The game board consists of squares, which can either be land or water, water squares are impassable. Land squares can either be normal, towns or capitals. All squares also have a defensive strength, this is higher for towns/capitals and is increased by occupying troops. Any square which is directly adjacent to one of your occupied squares can be attacked. You can also attack (i.e. fortify) any unoccupied square within your territory. For each attack move, you pick up to four potential target squares and one of them is chosen at random as the actual attack target. Attacks to enemy squares can fail, chance for this depends on the defensive strength of the target square and the number of occupied squares near the target. Attacks to enemy territory will always weaken the defenses of that square, regardless of success. Fortifying your own squares always succeeds. Each attack will consume 1 troop and 1 resource. You can also return troops from the board back to your reserve pool, doing this costs 1 resource. If you choose to pick less than 4 attack targets, your attack can also fail to pick a target. If no target is picked, only one resource is consumed but no troops are lost. You can attack as many times as you want per turn, as long as you have sufficient troops and resources.

Capturing an enemy capital drops that player from the game, turns that capital into a town, and transfers all the territory owned by that player to the conqueror. At the end of each turn, any square without land connection (with no enemy troops between) to your capital or one of your towns is in a Motti, they will fall to neutral control and will be distributed to players adjacent to the area. Your capital and any towns you own also generate fresh troops and resources each turn.

History of the Project

While retrogaming with my brother, we ended up playing Motti – The Game (Motti comes from the Finnish word for the tactic of encircling enemy units), an old DOS wargame (released around 1990) we played quite extensively years ago. After some discussion, I decided a remake was in order to add some strategic depth and make the game easier to run on modern computers (Motti works fine with DosBox, though). While there is already an open source remake known as GNU Motti, I decided to start from scratch since I was not really interested in making an exact remake. This was also an excellent chance to brush up my Java skills, so I dug up some GUI code from earlier projects and started coding away.

In addition to Motti, the project was inspired by another similar wargame, Pendulous. The main difference between Motti and Pendulous is that in Pendulous you can attack occupied territory and troops stay on the board unless defeated or removed by the player. The resource/troop reserve system is also heavily influenced by Pendulous.

Download/play

NettiMotti (Beta 0.80, 2008-08-20, JAR archive)

You need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run NettiMotti, latest version can be downloaded from Sun’s Java page.

Multiplayer instructions

This version has basic multiplayer support, to play a multiplayer game have one player (the host) generate the map and then click Network – Host. Other players should then use Network – Join to join the game. Do not change player types in player setup for multiplayer games, players will automatically replace AIs when they join. You should generate the map and adjust any other settings before you host the game, at the moment these changes are not properly handled in the middle of a multiplayer game.

Controls

Left mouse button – Adds or removes areas from your current targets. In addition, left clicking on an occupied square will return the troops to the reserve pool.

Right mouse button – Executes an attack move. You can also use the button at the bottom of the window. To execute defense/guerilla attack, use the command buttons.

Middle mouse button – Ends the turn. You can also use the button at the bottom of the window.

Known bugs/missing features

  • Network port is currently hardcoded to 4445.
  • Trying to start a new game during a multiplayer game or trying to join/host another game doesn’t work properly.
  • First player must be human.
  • Network errors are not handled properly, game should be restarted if one the players drops from the game.
  • Loading/saving of games (both from the game itself and in the map editor) is rather basic

Screenshots

License information

The following material is used under Creative Commons Attribution license: