As I started playing MA, I was struck by its elegant simplicity. It is like playing one of the early Avalon Hill wargames like Tactics II or Panzer Blitz on a 3D rendered map. So while this particular game is set in a Sci-Fi universe, it basic game mechanics can be used for any setting...Ancient, medieval, US Civil War, World War II, The Great War, whatever. Add in "super weapons" like are promised in the sequal and you can do the Cold War or a hypothetical war in the near future. Just use different 3D models for the unts and cities, change the unit stats to make them suitable to whatever era you are trying to model and make a map that fits.

MA itself is very unmoddable. The only thing you really can do is create your own scenarios (and even campaigns), but even then they only can be played Single Player.

MA:PR (the next version coming out early next year) will probably not have much modding capability either, as the developers have focused on improving the gameplay.

Remember that Wargaming.net is a small-time independant developer, and as such doesn't have the resources that EA, Blizzard, Valve, etc to spend a lot of time coding so that the game is more moddable.

They have talked about working multi-player scenarios into MA:PR, but I haven't seen that in the feature lists lately. I'm sure if there is enough interest though, they may add that as an update later. So far though, there seems very little interest in designing custom scenarios (despite the release of the tools, only a few custom maps have been made.)

i tried making a custom map but it messed up when i tried putting on capitols, was very un-user friendly. I've a;ways felt that the players help make the game more than it start off as, but as MA is very limited single player wise (mainly due to the poor ai) there's no point in making scenarios in my eyes, multiplayer all the way!

I understand the resource issue. I'm sure it is too late in the developement process to make things modable if it isn't already. Just wishful thinking on my part.

However, it does make good business sense for a lot of games. Look at the success of Steel Panthers in the turn based wargaming genre. Because it was so modable and edittable, it has had a cult following for better than a decade now and that has translated into new version and new mods.

Warlords III was also long lived for the same reason. I play a lot of Unreal and without the custom maps and other mods we would have quit playing it long ago. What mods give you is a game that becomes expanded and more fun by the community that builds around it.

Just out of curiosity, do you mean "Mod" as in like a Tower Defense map for Warcraft 3, or do you mean "Mod" as in a completely new game using the original engine like Counterstrike?