Will a moddable Elemental mean.....?

Yes. AI modding is fairly difficult if you don't have much experiance in that area, but there are some smart people in here....

Yes, but again the modelling and gfx protions are probably going to be limited to the more experianced people.

I believe Stardock's planning to classify community content as either 'canon' or 'non-canon' so that without too much effort, you can include any user content that looks and feels like it fits with the core content.

Yes, AI modding is possible.  You'll need to learn Python if you want to work with it.

This will be one of the features which will allow Elemental to become increasingly more challenging and interesting.  Hopefully the game will randomly choose one of several AI personalities for each AI opponent.  Ideally gamers could then create and add their own AI personality into the list of randomly selected personalities with the option to disable one or more of those AI personalities.

Look at CIV IV. Lots of AI modding and improving. Some of the best AI modding went into patches as well. The future is bright

Correct, but I think that the Civ4 AI still cheats...;)

That is another story. Depends on what you mean by cheating. CIV IV AI gets cheaper unitupgrades, extra units at startup and a couple of more things. This is highly dependant on the difficulty level you choose at the startup. It does not cheat by altering battle odds or such.

I'm not sure if the AI moding is going to be so complete as to write your whole new shiny AI. I have never read anywhere such statesment. Which only means that maybe I haven't read everything said about Elemental's AI and modding or that my memory is failing.

I don't know but I doubt they are going to give people access to the core files. I'm sure what they will do though is give us the ability to write a AI script and place it in a file or folder that will over-ride the standard AI when creating the world. That's how most games with near this level of customization do it. They do still need to maintain intellectual rights to the core game files so other companies don't steal their work.

And why not ? If the game is programmed right, very few things should be hardcoded. For instance, I hope I'll be able to mod the tactical battles and get rid of the "hit points system" to use a "wounds" system.

I am pretty sure that even that would be possible. Perhaps Frogboy will give you a proper answer.

The best thing to do is to ask devs (frogboy) whether or not we should be able to mod something or not.

I don't think that Stardock want's to keep many things hardcoded. I am quite sure Frogboy stated enough times that they make the game as moddable as possible, because they know it's the only way to keep the game alive and make customers happy, so that they can choose a mod that they like better than the original game. Oh, btw, didn't Frogboy said that they want to make Elemental much more a system upon which you can build your turn-based strategy, than just a hard-coded game?

Actually, so you could mod a Carcassonne too. Altough I'd prefer a RPG (out of TBS mods).

Wintersong - I love Tactical RPG games, but they are not very popular sadly.

such as? Warsong? (my favorite)

X-Com Apocalypse was Awesome. I know a lot of people didn't like it but the soldier customization for tactical options was amazing.