They are not compatible but that is a nice thought.

I don't think the natural BOTF AI would work, anyway - I've found it's really bad (playing mods that are more tactical (Ultimate Dominion War and UnCivil War), the AI is downright dumb. It doesn't show so badly in the natural BOTF game, because you're so constrained by resources. Anyway, using that AI would mean that the player always wins...

Don't worry Brisub, Mike plans to make his own AI from scratch, so it'll be a lot more intelligent than the one BOTF had - and, with any luck, much more of a challenge. We're looking at a year minimum before Mike has a working version of the AI though, so we've just got to be patient for the time being.

I've actually thought about creating a basic AI that, more or less, just did random thing to at least give some interaction with players while testing. I'm not sure if Mike is inclined to do this and I'm still teaching myself WPF (the C# technology Supremacy is using), so I've never suggested it before.

You might want to talk to Mike. We are looking at some ways to use WPF / Silverlight in development of diplomacy, espionage, AI and the rest.

I suggested a similar thing to SirP right before the (then still AI-less) Alpha2 release. I told him to put up a large fleet at the homesystems of the AI player that you'd need to conquer to win the game . You could expand this idea by creating a map where the AI players are all set and get automatic upgrades and ship type updates (ship class changes automatically when mean tech reaches minimum requirement for a better ship class of that type (type=destroyer, battleship, etc.) with the mean tech being developed by the human players in-game. You could potentially make everything depending on mean tech, number of fleets magically popping up at the given star systems which should be a fixed number that can only be reduced by human player invasions, intel points etc.. Then you could either set all those fleets uniformly distributed over your star systems or implement a simple random walk algorithm with the option to stay over an enemy system and either colonize if a colony ship was by chance in the fleet or bombard or invade if it's an enemy system. To make things diplomatically easier, just have the Klingons, Dominion and Cardassians have war instantly with every major empire they meet, Romulans remain always neutral and Federation tries once to get a friendship treaty and after 20-50 turns an affiliation with every empire they meet, the Ferengi just offer trade contact once in a while.

I don't if that's fun either to play or worth the time to code but it seems quick and dirty. On the other hand I can see people getting confused about this and not see that it's just a placeholder "AI" and thus condemning the game for a (intended) stupid AI so it might backfire. On the plus side, you don't have to maintain the AI as long as the very basic classes and functions it uses aren't changed. Nevertheless, it's always better to code the AI properly right from the start. SirP and CBot did it in roughly 3 months. You can view the code on codeplex.