Sure I would love to have your help with the 2071 mod!
I've made somewhat of a start on the new version but recent progress has been slow, as I am now having to re-train for a new job and move to a new city. Due to my working a lot, as fair warning I may be around sporadically at least till later in the year and may often be slow or absent
But especially with someone else around to help out this could help keep some progress going.
For the time being, if you are totally new to modding the best way to get started is to start reading through some of the good existing tutorials about Civ4 modding and XML, to get a general idea of what you'll be dealing with and learn the basic foundation of how to accomplish the things you want using the XML files. I think a great place to start learning is the
Civ4 XML Modding Reference on the Modiki site, starting by reading the general XML tutorials toward the top, and then looking at Modiki pages describing some of most important XML files like
CIV4BuildingInfos.xml and
CIV4UnitInfos.xml. If you like, in a mod folder on your PC you can start experimenting with editing some of these XML values to see how you can achieve the results you want, as you've already started doing.
More specialized tutorials are available at
Civ4 Modding Tutorials, and some good Colonization-specific ones are at
TC01's Colonization Modding Tutorial Thread. Especially look at the one for
getting Civ4 Units into Civ4Col, this will be ultra useful in getting scifi and starwars graphics to work in Col mods.
In general one of the areas I could use help on the most, and where you might quickly learn how to accomplish it effectively, is in starting to import the scifi building and unit graphics I've collected and link them to the buildings and units in the XML Artdef files (the ones in the Assets/XML/Art folder, documented starting
here), to allow good graphics to show up in game. Fortunately I do have a huge bank of scifi 2D art and scifi-themed nif graphics for Civ4 that I've been gradually building up over the millenia, and will try to upload a pack of these soon, you are of course welcome to eventually use them for A New Hope as well as the base 2071.
If you can start getting familiar with the Artdef XML files and some basic graphics stuff like the
nifskope tutorial, I think you should soon be able to make quick progress at adding scifi-themed graphics to the mod.
Anyway I'm sure that's too many terabytes of data to absorb all at once
But once you get tired of learning & would like to relax, maybe try your hand at playing a few games of the older (fully playable) version of 2071 and see what you think of it, keeping notes on things that you like or could be changed or improved in the future version.