If anyone was wondering with regards to being able to play in a single player mod or doing comp-stomps in multiplayer, I asked and they said that AI would be included in all liklihood, and that it was very likely to be moddable
(Ok, I'm kind of an AI (and singleplayer) nut but still... Its always fun to make an AI, and then face off against it and see if it can beat you. Back in supcom (where I was the second modder ever
), my 3rd mod was a simple AI mod... I've progressed from there to my current projects, including giving every single ship, station, system, and even faction its own advanced AI [I already did a fully functional prototype on a single faction, and am working on the intra-system AI system right now; that should be done in a matter of months, and then the interstellar (AI vs. AI 4x metalevel game) AI will come down the road once the engine supports it correctly (ie, based on the environment it can make decisions about what it wants to do, ie, a trader will look for deals, while a miner will search out ore-rich asteroids, while a command ship or military station will launch attacks against other such stations/ships in the system, while entire factions will be waging an interstellar war; all of this will be going on in the universe around the player) - then my OTHER project is creating a simple sub-general AI based on a neural net; I have already had some success with small neural nets (Numbering in the 10s of thousands of neurons), and am working on larger and more efficient/powerful implementations, eventually hoping to get the funding to build a prototype with millions of neurons for my senior year project, which I then plan on expanding and improving down the road.)
Wow I really went off on a tangent there >.>