You mention in your post that you're a well funded project. According to your site, your plan is to 'mint' 8,888 images of war snails which will then fund marketing and the development of the game.  If you're well funded why can't you do that now?  What's to stop you completely abandoning the project after raising the money in NFTs?  It sounds to me like your business is in NFTs, not gaming. It doesn't sound like you have any game dev experience in the team. This could easily be a scam if, as I expect, no one is refunded should you walk away.

Agree that Team 17 have overly milked the franchise, it's sad to see...

This NFT venture makes me more sad.  I'm glad T17 backed out of the NFT space when they received the negative feedback. 

We're lucky to have someone with these wizard skills improving the game who also engages with the community and releases source code.  Awesome stuff.  Thanks for all of your work Nizikawa.

I've tweaked the grass to make this more cow friendly

If whatever can be done manually is considered an unfair advantage, I don't think mods should then be created that do that automatically.

For example, some players manually change their water gfx to make it transparent so they can see exactly where the land meets the water.  If just one player does that, I'd consider that a form of cheating (they have an advantage, however small, over everyone else).  If everyone does it, that's technically fair but it's also just dumbed down a part of the game.  A mod could be created for that but I don't think it should be.

I feel the same way about knowing opponent worm order from the start of the game.  That's a dynamic within the game scheme that should work as intended.  Knowing just your own worm order is different because it's information you already have available to you and I imagine most people won't need / use it.

From what I can see it started as an external tool released in 2006 by CS.  Back then you'd run 'WormKit.exe' rather than 'WA.exe' to load the game with wk*.dll modules.  From WA v3.7, this functionality was officially integrated into the game.  My understanding is that Team 17 need to approve all updates by DC/CS before release. The update documentation can be found in the WA install folder.

As you say, a coder could quickly knock up a module that privately displays all team worm order in-game, weapon use and more besides, without detection. Chances are, over the years someone has already done this kind of thing and used it privately or shared it between friends/clan members.

I think it's great that there's a mod framework in WA and there has been some amazing work. But I see the predicament with cup/league games. I think it should ideally be a level playing field; the same agreed setup on all sides. Even things like using transparent water should be consistent IMO.  I'm not saying these mods shouldn't be used in cup/league games, but their use should be set out by the organisor who may very well allow certain modules, to save having to memorise / write things down for example.

To your question, and the problem... enforcement. It's all on trust at the moment. It would need a technical solution to allow participants and organisors to verify mod use, likely in the form of an official update. It may not be infallible, but enough to get the desired result if implemented well.

While I am aware you can extract information from a replay file, is it possible to do it during an actual game, or only after?

From what I can see the game locks the replay file whilst playing as it needs to write to it in real-time.  The OS will throw an error if you try to open the file mid-game.

But there are other ways to get the opponent worm order, in about 10 seconds with no programming knowledge and leaving no trace.  If people REALLY want to cheat like this they'll find a way but these things come down to trust and hopefully respect for competitive play.