I’m guessing this has been asked already...

[BFG]

...but for those of you who are modding experts: is a version that allows more factions even remotely possible?  I’d love to play a game where all 15 stock factions are active, instead of just 8.

Probably not, but thought I would ask.

[Mart]

I think amount of work needed to do it would large enough to make someone attempting this to consider simply making AC2.

[BFG]

Yeah, I kind of suspected as much. I have been amazed at how much modders have been able to do on such an old game, but there IS a limit.

This makes me wonder how much it would cost to purchase the rights to the series in order to have the legal right to publish a true SMAC2. 

[Induktio]

So yeah, it's been asked before. The short answer is that adding more factions is just impossible without a full rewrite of the engine because of the way it uses statically allocated arrays to store faction data. This also makes increasing any other unit limits very difficult.