Thats a nice idea, pretty complex. I wonder if the complexity of the game chosen would scare away people though. I'm not sure I would even know where to start to build an AI for that. I typically would want to tinker at first (get a unit moving around) and go from there. Small progress and victories keep people interested. And like others have mentioned, the challenge will be finding a way to let advanced AIs play with basic AIs.
There were a few ideas that I thought might help with those problems:
1) The goal is primarily to gather/produce resources, not to actually force combat. Combat is one strategy that could prove beneficial (since you avoid the cost of mining/production by just taking it from their wreckage), but with minimal effort, you should be able to outrun/avoid most of these 'pirates'.
2) By employing some sort of hosted code, you can organise some sort of a market for code snippets/components, encouraging people to share what they have done in a variety of ways, on teh basis that profitting from it being used by others outweighs the cost of others using it against you.
3) It doesn't need all that complexity to start, or even in the same game. But the complexity helps to some extent by making it harder for a single abusable game mechanic to control the whole system. Most people will focus initially on developing a good (or just workable) solution to a single aspect.
