Thomas, I kind of suggested a similar idea in one of the other threads. I haven't played EAW an awful lot, so I dont know how moddable it is though. My suggestion related to splitting up the task of building a new game into the action and strategy parts. Allowing several people to work on it in parallel. The problem you will have with using a commercial game like EAW, is that that even if you could get EAW to run a battle, I doubt you would be able to get sufficient data from it to feedback all the information you'd want to the strategic portion of the game. I'm currently working on a strategic game which will hopefully offer more of a challenge than rebellion. Once it is finished I was hoping to bolt on someone else's 3D engine rather than learn from scratch how to code one myself. The intention is that the strategy game will pass full details of the battle to the 3D component. This data will need to include details of loadouts of individual weaponry on ships, any existing damage, crew & commander experience/skill etc. The 3D section will then run the battle and pass a similar amount of data back. If we have a 3D module written in C# or .NET, then I can release a library of classes to handle most of the donkey work of loading/saving the data. I estimate I'm about 30% through so far, after about 3 weeks of work in my spare-time, so you are quite correct in that it doesn't need to be a major headache to code, if you use the right tools & techniques. I may have made an error of judgement, but I'm hoping I can get away with C# and GDI for it. Its looking at the moment like there will be no performance issues....but that could change as I scale things up and add features. If/when I finish it, I will make it available for download. I will most likely release all the source code as well, so that people can change/extend it as they please. One major problem I could run into is having enough copyright free images. I can't draw at all, and I'm surprised that there isn't a section here where people have posted lots of nice artwork that can be re-used(with some kind of acknowledgement of course). I could be wrong as I'm only a fairly new member here myself, but I've not spotted any such repository.