It might be possible to do that Jean, but there would be a number of problems from going down that route:

• The cost. Mike would have to pay, and it would technically be illegal for him to even have a way for us to give him donations towards it, since Supremacy is an unlicenced Trek game. Jig had to foot the bill when he bought the A6 engine for New Beginnings, and that cost him several hundred pounds. Not cheap.
• Licensing. Just because Mike buys a licence, doesn't necessarily mean he will be able to do whatever he wants with it. There could be all sorts of restrictions that would prevent him from implementing the features he wants. Those same restrictions could also make AI modding by future modders illegal, which is a situation we would want to avoid at all costs; just imagine the AI creators filing a law suit just because someone decided they wanted to create a Terran empire mod.
• Compatibility. Supremacy has been created from scratch to work as a Trek game. A bought AI has not - it could have been designed with the Terminator in mind for all we know. Supremacy is also designed to work equally on both XP and Vista - the AI would need to be the same. And after going through all that, Mike would still need to do a lot of work to get it doing what it *should* be doing. Supremacy isn't a killing machine like the Terminator afterall, it's a game lol. In the long run there might not actually be anything gained from buying an AI.
• The AI needs to be compatible with several completely different programs AND programming languages. It needs to be compatible with the game itself, Wolfe's combat system, and needs to be convertable so that the BotE guys will still be able to use Wolfe's combat system when it is ported. This problem also ties in with the licencing - multiple licences may need to be bought to allow it, pushing up the cost - or the licencing may even specifically forbid such things.

Like I said, there would be a few problems to overcome. An AI built by Mike might take longer to make, but we would be much better off for it.

Mike isn't doing it alone. There are some other programmers, but i've never actually met them. I only know they exist coz there are some strange/foreign/alien user accounts on Codeplex that Mike has assigned some programming work to.

I never said that the A6 engine cost £600 - I said it was in the hundreds. I know this coz Jig told me on MSN, he just never said the exact amount. But yeah, buying code isn't cheap. Still, just because I highlighted all those problems in my previous post, that doesn't mean it won't be the route he takes. You get what you pay for afterall, and there may even be multiple AI's he can "browse" from. He may find one that comes with few or none of the problems. Still, I believe he's looking to make one, he's made the rest of the game afterall.