tbs mod??

Nope. Not even remotely possible. Something like Empire at War or some of the new 4X games coming out would be closer.

Sword of the Stars would be what you want. Get the first, the second one is still baking.

ah thank you very much i saw legends of pegasus was coming out so i might try that but ill also have a look at sword of the stars. thank you both.

Buff Computer.

Wildly inefficient?  Oh yeah.  But it could be done.  It would just take far more time to create than anyone in their right mind would ever invest.

Buffs can't change the UI. Can't have a TBS game without an end turn button.

Ability on an indestructible structure on homeworld.  Done.

But that's not a button. And how do you tell it how many players are playing? You're going to need to get that somehow to know when its player 1s turn again. And the buff work to get everything to freeze would be mind numbing. Also I believe its impossible to freeze certain things like strikecraft regeneration, even if you get everything else working.

It would end up resembling some sort of a neural net with each planet acting as a neuron.    Definitely possible, but unimaginably hard.  Not impossible though.

As for SC, worst case scenario, you just kill them and then spawn new ones with the same amount of health as before, but I would assume disabling passive regen would work just fine.

Has anyone thought about making a Sins mod for Total War? That might be easier ... all things considered.

Actually... you can.

You use multiple layered applications to enable and disable ships, with ability driven ship function.

You use the impulse setup to regulate forward movement through a facing restricted ability with a timed enabling of angular engines to change your facing on another, and OnWeaponFired condition weapon control following forward movement, or a third ability to regulate weapons independently.  For regeneration, you set the values to zero and have your primary actions trigger a self replicating buff that contains the values.  By storing all of your actions below intermediary PrioritizeOldBuffs lacking a finish condition to prevent repeat usage, you can make ship function require a secondary removal system.

By putting the removal system into the opposition, you can create an effective end turn button via ability.  You take your actions, thus disabling your ships from further activity, and click your "End Turn" ability, located on some invincible, unique structure.  It then removes the intermediaries, resetting the system for your opponent.

You can do counted turn delays on actions quite easily this way.  A shipyard that produced ships via ability and counted them off before reactivating itself for the next ship is just a few extra files to put together.

The only thing I'm not sure I can do is rig a system that can be used on more than two wells.  One well for you and your opponent would be a piece of cake to set up, but I'm not sure if a broader based application system will actually function.  I haven't actually tried an infinite radius areal application to see if it can propogate on the other wells, and you can only get two with a design similar to system vision, the originating and target wells.

In any case, this would not be even remotely AI compatible, would strip most functionality out of the game, and even if everything worked perfectly, would be a nightmare to actually play after spending hundreds of hours setting it up. 

The end turn ability would be somewhere between a dozen and thousands of files long depending on the complexity of it's requirements.  Unique movement patterns require unique file cancellations, it could stack up quite large with the 5 instant actions per file stricture.  If you don't use it for counter actions against multi-turn special attacks, you could just use Interrupt to do all of the turn reset in a single file.