So you want to have water but without having "real" water. While reading your post I was thinking about using the 16 textures in any world's effects folder (the ones which have water).
I guess you take the water_normal or bumpmap, color it to blue (Or any color you want to have) and put them all into a 16 frame texture. 4x4 images per square should fit to the number of 16 (Copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste....16x times). Now here's what I visually imagines just by now: Make the texture (Which should be a 1024x1024 now) transparent. Give it an Alpha channel and remove ~50 percents of its visibility. Now create an environment map which reflects the roof (Or whatever it has to reflect on your map; depends on where you place your water tiles).
Now you have two textures, a watertile map and an env. map. Now when you create your model have two "grids" being stacked of eachother. Maybe give it an altitude distance of a few milimeters. Apply the animated texture onto the upper grid, give it it's material: Rendertype "Animated", transparency "2" (two-sided) and that's it then.
Now apply any texture you want below the animated grid. It could be a water texture like seen in other maps; or one from here:
http://www.textures.com/search?q=water
And give it an Environment map: Rendertype "6 (I gues)", put the env. map name (with .tga extension) into the texture3 slot and decrease the "Specular Decay" a bit. I recommend 18-22 (others told that; the rebel visor helmet uses the same) .
Now in-game, after you placed the object into ZE, you should see an animated water tile, which reflects the environment (by your env. texture) and it's moving (animated texture).