One of the defining characteristics of AI war is just how many obstacles you can put in front of yourself; the challenge is adjustable, and it feels like the experience is even more rewarding when you can take on that much more because you are skilled. You don't get to see, fight, or experience half of what you do when you don't know how to play.
That's what I mean by rewarding skilled players.
Oh, I gotcha -- yeah, that makes sense. For this game we aim to have a super-simple "quick start" way for players to get into the game that is basically like "what difficulty do you want, and what race?" and not much more than that. The amount of randomization and the hugely varied situations you would run into just from that alone will lead to all sorts of hilarity (as we've already been noting in early testing where we just let the simulation run on superspeed and see what the races do without any intervention from the player).
But we also plan to have an Advanced Setup mode that is more like the AI War lobby, where you can change a bunch of different things and create some insane challenges. Some of the ones I've thought of are letting the player kind of have a "semi-restart" in an advanced solar system that they have already won or lost, so that they can take some crazy late-game situation that they are familiar with, and use it as a starting point for a new game. Brutal.
Another option that doesn't require an existing save will be to just "start X minutes into the game," where we basically fast-forward the simulation for you for however long, and your mercenary fleet then enters a more mature galaxy. Some race might already have taken over half the galaxy and created a Fear Empire, or a couple of races might have created a Solar Axis Pact. All of the races would probably be spacefaring, and there might be some intense Psyops going on between a couple of them. Maybe a gas giant already ignited and half the solar system is gone. Etc.
We could probably also make some advanced options for specifically starting with circumstances along those lines, too. There is some nasty stuff that can crop up later in the game if you don't watch what is going on, and letting you get straight to that is pretty interesting. Probably cool to do modifiers on various things like having the ability to make Anti-Federation Demonstrators a lot more likely or numerous, or having them turn into insurgents straightaway instead of just demonstrators, etc.
Likely we won't have the advanced setup screen at first in the alpha unless we wind up needing it for testing purposes (which we might, not sure), but the game is so full of crazy stuff that can happen that it's not hard to turn on things saying "okay this has happened before the game started" or similar.
