Play as Barbarians & Increase player count beyond 7 in Alpha Centauri

[Blake00]

Hi guys,

A couple of questions as I'm about to start playing SMAC again for the first time in 15+ years lol!

1. Is there a way to increase the player count above 7 or is it too hardcoded into the game like with Civ 1 & 2? I've seen how fans have been able to push Call to Power & Civ 3 to quite high players counts, higher than originally intended due to their engines being more open to such things. It would be a dream to play a 14 player SMAC game with the original 7 factions and addon 7 factions all in the one game. Things with the council would get messy lol but oh what fun it would be. I found a thread here at Apolyton where what appears to be one of the SMAC modders talking about how modders were discussing (in a dedicated thread) how to implement this very thing however sadly the link he gave to civgaming.net is dead now. Did it ever amount to anything or was it put in the too hard basket?
2. I'm doing a series of games and videos where I attempt to play as the Barbarians via cheat mode, fan editors, or hex hacking. Had great success with Civ 1, Civ 2 & ToT as there's some good guides out there but as I look to other Civ related games things start to get a bit harder haha! With SMAC I notice that via the scenario editor I can create Alien (Barb) units and even give them regular units like colony settlers. However unfortunately the editor human player selector does not include Aliens (Barbs) so unless there's a hidden trick (like in Civ2's cheat editor) then you cannot take control of them. Therefore does anyone know of a good SMAC save file editor or save file hex editing guide that might make this a possibility?