The problem with the current modding system is that you can only add stuff to the game, but you can never remove and replace stuff.

In FreeCiv, I think there was a concept called Rulesets. Since everybody wants to play with their own custom rules, the concept of rule set allow to start a game using a set of infomation (XML data) used for determining the rules of the game.

Now it could be interesting that the concept of rule set could be implemented in elemental to remove the trouble of installing a mod that change rules of the game.

For example, you could have somewhere in the XML file a definition of the ruleset. It would define name, various properties and the files to include. For example:

Then I could add my mod definition in another file like

Then each rukle set could have it's binary blob.

Finally, when you start the game, a small window could appear (like the Play game-update-manual windows) and ask you which ruleset you want to use.

You could also have command line parameters that would skip that window like for example:

elemental.exe /ruleset mymod

What do you think?