Is there any way to select your opponents?

Back to playing this game after viewing Quill18's livestream yesterday, I often forget how amazing this game is. But perhaps I've been spoiled by games that allow me to select my opponents.

My main concern is I don't like the aliens. In fact, I feel the original 7 factions are the best, and in some ways I prefer the original game over the expansion. Though I can't actually play the game without the exansion (GOG version). Though I might be able to dig out my disk version and see if that runs on Win10.

I suppose you could maybe do it via a scenario, but I wouldn't remember how to set it up after all these years. back in 2000 I used to play with that stuff, but that was a little while ago. As far as I can tell, there's no way to really customize the game options in this game, or am I missing something?

The game holds up well. Though I may need to bump up the difficulty level, didn't want to start too high after all this time. Only challenge has been alien attacks, even as I'm playing the Gaians.

 

So after selecting "Start Game" you have several menu screens where you can customize your game, including which factions you want to include in the game, and including being able to remove the alien factions. Or are you referring to something else?

 

Okay, I feel dumb, I for some reason thought that was just for choosing my own faction. I didn't think to click for the drop down menus. Thank you.

Now my only problem is I was playing too late into the night last night. Damn you Usurpers. Is there really any way to get along with these guys? They are just jerks that need to be eradicated off of Planet.

I mean I guess it's good to include the Aliens, but as mentioned above, I'm just going to wipe them off the map. I'm the Gaians, and the Usurpers just don't like me. And even though I'm only on the 3rd difficulty, they are still putting up a little bit of fight since they conquered the Hive completely and a few University cities. They seem to be quite powerful. And now they have needlejets along with me now, but I have momentum at this point, they are gone. Initially I was trying to play too much like Civ5/6 and just use a few advanced units, but the Usurpers can overwhelm with numbers, had to retool nearly every base for building units.

 

The Usurpers and Caretakers are among the nastiest AI's in the game. They always seem to make a beeline for Doctrine: Air Power as soon as they get the chance and especially the Usurpers seem to love having a huge airforce.

In the worst case scenario they love throwing Planet Busters around. Like in a game I had a few weeks ago where the Usurpers took apart the Peacekeepers with one Planet Buster after another. Good to hear you have Marr on the ropes.

It's a shame they're so aggressive. Especially the Usurpers seem pretty good in building up some early infrastructure like Network Nodes and Tree Farms before they end up in endless wars.