Correct on the mixed waves. On minor factions I'm not sure on that yet. Could be a cool idea, had not thought of it before you just suggested it, and I'm not sure of the ramifications.
You'd need to set up a modified response curve, but it'd be a unified way to control the rate/order at which AI gobbles up particular factions. Have each faction start with randomised 0~100 AIP + Shark-AB, and give them slightly varying auto-AIP progress. The AI will then attack them in slowly increasing waves, but they should have the starting resources to fend them off for a while.
Might be interesting to have the AI divide up its reinforcement pool against the various human factions. Gives you a visceral effect on the impending doomsday line, similar to the way funding countries leave X-COM to join the alien overlords. (Harder to balance.)
Er, I might have dramatically misunderstood, but there aren't going to be human factions throughout. They're killed in the first hour and you play the rest of the game against the AI (but with the other minor factions).
The way that I read it was that some of the bonus ships were coming from the other human factions, so you must be able to help some of them? Otherwise you'd never get those.
I'm still trying to figure out some of the specifics on this in terms of what will feel ideal. But my overall thinking at the moment is that they would start out as nicer civilizations that get obliterated early on, leaving you alone. And then little pockets of survivors can still use your help and give you stuff (like those ships) in return for it. Those last survivors probably wouldn't ever die completely out, but they'd be yet another point of back and forth contestation. If you can help them grow back a little bit, that might be extra good in terms of what you can get out of them.
