Often it is the developer who provides the tools for something unexpected to happened.

This project has the goal to become a freeware RTS engine. A basis for a computer game, a skeleton where anyone with a bit of technical skills can read something about how to edit the game play data and then, with some effort and the use of a scripting system, extend or even alter the original concept. The proverbial community.

That's what I call "bang for the buck", only in this case the buck is non-existent, and the bang is limited by your imagination.

If enough momentum can be made, then expansion packs can be provided. These would allow any form of weird and wonderful modifications to the original game rules, even creating derivative games, or any form of other non-game related activities, like chat rooms, virtual museums, even virtual pet units, if done right.

We can see that a good modifiable game play system is key to a project of this nature. But replay value is not limited to full scope modifications. These do represent a large part of can be done, after all the "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" motto is the one who promises the most impressive and innovative feature set possible.

Even so, in a closed game system, where all the base rules and infrastructures are already plotted out, it's the small modifications and the fine tuning that can make the big difference. So does this mean these two concepts are mutually exclusive? Technically they only differ on the degree of modifications, but that's more than enough in practice to change how the game is perceived by the player.

But there is a way. If we think about it, given a large enough world, these two apparently opposite concepts can coexist together. All the diverse mods instead of being defined on a script file ready to be loaded as the module of choice, could be very well part of the grand picture, coexisting together as locations or zones of the world, all at the same time, all globally available at user discretion.

With world zones in place, one problem would be having different enough game rules to create the absolute chaos on game play. One can imagine the situation of having say, world war I type foot soldiers against the HellMk III Super Tank from the space age mod running into each other... someone would not be happy! To avoid this, access control on zones can be enforced. So that two distinct set of rules would not be allowed to coexist in behalf of a balanced game.

On the other hand, zones could be optional, and distinct servers could handle the diverse mods possible or better yet share the load of a larger scheme.