Setting Up a War

Setting Up a War

The Galactic War Overhaul button on the start menu opens the war setup screen. This page walks through it in screen order. Every setting is remembered from your last war.

Faction

Pick one of five factions: Legonis Machina, Foundation, Synchronous, Revenants, or Cluster. Your faction decides where your Sub Commanders and any allied Commander come from, which faction you never fight, and your colours. It does not change your units, tech, or loadouts. Picking Cluster locks your race to MLA. See Factions.

Commander

The Commander button opens a picker with every loadout. Loadouts you have not yet unlocked are shown locked, and loadouts your race cannot use are dimmed. Each loadout carries a favourite toggle drawn as a commander face; it lights up when pinned (tooltip "Toggle Favourite") and favourites sort to the front. The picker restores the loadout you used last. See Loadouts.

Race

The Race picker appears when the GW Server Mods mod and at least one race mod are installed. Its tooltip reads "The units you and your Sub Commanders field. Each race's AI is picked with the AI button." See Races and Add-ons.

Difficulty and AI Settings

The Difficulty dropdown offers nine named tiers from Beginner to Uber, plus Custom. Beside it, the AI Settings column shows every value the tier sets. On a named tier the column is read-only. Choose Custom to edit it. See Difficulty.

AI

The AI button opens a table with one row per installed race and two columns, Opponent and Ally, so you choose the brain your enemies use and the brain your Sub Commanders and allies use, per race. From the next release, a third column, Co-op, chooses the brain of the AI players a host adds in co-op. See AI Brains.

Game Options

The Game Options button opens the eight switches that shape the war: Hardcore, Faction Scaling, System Scaling, Easy Systems, Large Planets, System Lore, Static Tech, and Unique Races. See Game Options.

Techs

The Techs dropdown picks the deck of tech cards the war deals from: Basic or Galactic War Overhaul, plus any deck another mod adds. See Tech Cards.

Galaxy size

Small, Medium, Large, Epic, or Uber, from 18 to 78 systems. Bigger galaxies are longer, harder, and need a faster PC. The Bigger Galactic War mod adds four larger sizes. See Game Options.

Seed Value

Leave it alone for a fresh galaxy, or enter a seed to rebuild a galaxy you have played before. See Game Options.

War name

Name the war, then start it. Playing a War explains what happens next.

Mods that change this screen

• Shared Systems for Galactic War replaces the generated systems with real maps, and changes what System Scaling, Easy Systems, and Large Planets do. See Game Options.
• Bigger Galactic War adds the Vast, Gigantic, Ridiculous, and Marathon galaxy sizes.
• GW Server Mods enables the Race picker, the Unique Races option, and allows Shared Systems for Galactic War to use maps with custom CSG.

Scaling Reference

The Scaling Reference tool shows the enemy economy, army count, and AI tech at every distance into the galaxy for any difficulty, player count, and galaxy size.