Mods in ranked games.

Then guess why people where asking that to be STOCK behavior in the first place? "Smarter units" if you need a search term.

Besides, there are even more such broken mechanics where a bot can gain trivial superiority:

• Auto-balancing and prioritizing your eco by auto-pausing all factories and fabricators few times per second if your eco tips over, so your energy NEVER stalls, your radar and portals never fail, and resources are prioritized to where you need them (that one or two fabbers constructing generators respectively mex).
• Auto-pulsing radar for energy conservation.
• Commanders auto-boxing themselves in with layers and layers of walls as soon as they are under fire.
• Auto-kiting (units trying to fall back to maximum weapon range).

And as you can see: All of these "cheats" are just broken or missing mechanics in the base game. That is where they need to be fixed, not in the client and neither by limiting mods.

Core wars took it to the other extreme by not allowing player interaction. And that is the major difference, you are still making top level decisions at runtime, since giving higher level orders becomes increasingly difficult for any AI to decide. Don't forget that even the smartest AIs have merely the brainpower of a fly.

Yep, good example of how much fun it can be if your subordinates have an intelligence of their own.

oh the hack I have uses the existing default UI APIs and just combines a few commands in some unintended ways to do what I want. Nothing on native level. I've been trying to find the camera positions and unit positions in the process memory and I had some success with finding single instances, but the way pa is setup with coherent (there are multiple cameras and a lot of copying of data towards coherent going on) and curves to hold world state makes it not easy, so I have not yet a way to get anything with doing a bit of searching by hand. Though I have not given up on trying. I so want my minimap to show dots for units in motion :s

Getting full terrain information definitely will be even harder than that.

That's a pretty philosophical question. Currently the available technology still answers it with: "you can't really go that far".
Though I can see the appeal in core wars and similar for sure.