I've looked in the "Everything I need to know about modding CC" thread and used search, but couldn't find anything relavant to what I'm wanting to do.

Basically, I was wondering if there was anyway of modding how the metagame works? I'll go into detail about what I would have planned, but firstly just wanted to know if the metagame is hardcoded into the game engine because then if so, I wouldn't know where to go.

However I've tried looking in the Metagame.rte folder and also looked in other to see if there is anyway of altering it, but found you can only edit current saves. I'd like to be able to change the mechanics so that the AI opponent doesn't just thrust all of it's money into attack and defence. Would be great to change some of the gold values of things as well such as make brain liquidation give around 3000 oz and make scanning more expensive.

Anyway, anyone who is more capable than myself with these things please inform me if I'm on a doomed quest or whether there is something in this.

UPDATE: I've managed to locate and change the level ini to allow for a change in currency given per round, however the player ai is still far superior compared to the other two. Also despite changing the lz areas, the ai still goes for the same deployment positions, however I'm currently sifting through the meta scene.lua file to try and see I'd this can be adjusted.

A simple way of changing the ai is to, once a game has been started and saved, you can adjust the auto an extent by changing their attack and defence budget, however this still means that player 4 will still come out on top.

Again, I still havn't found out whether this is related to the engine or if this is at all moddable within an lua, but I'm going to continue to try and see if the basic meta game can be altered.

I may be wrong (though I doubt it) but I'm pretty sure the strategic metagame is in engine and can't be touched. You can change metafight (i.e. the tactical portion of the metagame) all you want, it's just a fairly simple activity, most of the complexity for it at the moment is picking landing points.
You can also of course change the ini gold values for sites.

How weird that I should check on here not long after you post...

Either way I've had some time this evening to properly scour it and I'm afraid that I'm drawing the same conclusion... which is a shame, as this would really make the game a lot more enjoyable.

Still going to continue looking into it, but I think you're unfortunately right on this one.

If you haven't tried it out I'd recommend weegee's Unmapped Lands 2 metagame. It's got deeper than the real one (researches, a variety of territory bonuses, etc.) and since it's all an activity in lua, it's fully modifiable.
Here's a link for it: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=31383