Ugh, I hate posting these kind of topics, but I don't know if this has been considered before. Has anyone considered a play by email style of multiplayer such as that used in frozen synapse or dominions? basically each unit is given its orders by the player as normal. fly around, shoot here, dig for gold, etc. The game would run for lets say 10 seconds then pause. you can loop back to the beginning of the 10 seconds, the units would fallow their script of keyboard inputs, then you end your turn and submit it to the next player. each player in the fight would record their turn then the fight would resolve.

Here is where things get sketchy, ideally the 10 seconds of keyboard inputs would play out the same for all players. some actions won't be performed fully as characters get killed or damaged.

I know that there was a way to save active scenarios. a glitchy way, but a way all the same. I also think that it is possible to script actor behavior.

There are two unknowns that can sink this.

1: how cortex command handles random, ideally the dropship would blow up the same way everytime the scene played out. I suspect that cortex command might not be able to reliably produce that.

2: If it is possible to "record" an actor's actions. thus making the whole actor scripting accurate.

The first issue can somewhat be played around, players could take turns "resolving" turns or have an independant judge figure things out. the second issue, well these multiplayer threads never live long anyway.

I recognize that this has probably been considered before, after all CC is partially inspired by worms, but heck, forums been quiet.

Yes, it has been considered before, but nobody felt like doing all the work required (since it's a lot of stuff to do).

Multiplayer in general is a lot of work.

My question was if it was possible to mod it in. Does cortex command give enough resources to theoretically make this work, or would it require extensive work on the developers side of things?

You can do it with Lua, it just might be slow and annoying and generally not worth it for what you get.
Another idea put forth was taking the metagame campaign and adding turn-based multiplayer to it so that each player fought against AI opponents manning the bases that the other player set up the previous turn.

that's actually doable now with some ground line rules among players and by editing the save files. I was actually thinking about that before I wrote this topic. I decided it couldn't work unless players agreed not to attack simultaneously.