Hi,
To mod the exe like I did you will need a disassembler, like
IDA Pro Free 5.0.
When you open the ascendancy exe with IDA you should load it as an MS-DOS executable. When you continue it will say something like 'file has extra information at the end. Continue?'. (choose yes) This is because the ascendancy exe uses a 32 bit dos extender and IDA will only load this part. To get to the actual game code you will need to
extract it. Once you have followed the instructions in that link you can add this LE file to the part you already loaded in IDA using File > Load file > Additional binary file... Once IDA is done loading you can start the real work of reverse engineering the game code to something meaningful.
Be warned that you need a lot of patience.
I decided to use the antagonizer version because I *think* it is the latest version. Diplomacy was never very good in the game to begin with so I don't miss it very much. Ofcourse, if the AI gets a huge boost like in your mod it would make sense to allow the player some peace