When you start a campaign it is possible to customise it.
Victory Points
To begin with, you can define the number of points required for a side to win this campaign. There are three present campaign lengths:
- Short - 2000 points
- Normal - 6000 points
- Extended - 20000 points
along with the possibility to enter a number of one's choice. This only affects the total length of a campaign - milestone values do not change. Note that a shorter campaign is not necessarily easier - given the player's initial firepower is low and the Zed infect territories faster than humans can win them back, it may take time for the point balance to swing in favour of the latter. This is particularly important on higher difficulty settings, when it is harder to establish a constant stream of victory points by capturing territories. Last but not least, in general it does not make much sense to increase this number much beyond twenty thousand - unless you enable No Quarter, you'll simply run out of territories.
Modifiers
Secondly, a number of modifiers can be set to alter the way various aspects of the game are handled.
Make Game Easier
- Party Wagon - lets you carry one more merc unit (i.e. up to 5 instead of 4) into battle from the very beginning. In addition to extra resources, this increases one's chances of actually having combat units at hand. Removes the Big Bad Zeppelin milestone from the victory track.
- Llama Pile - allows spending scientists to purchase additional Llama Bombs, at a rate of 20 per payload. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, this results in Llama Bombs being unlocked from start - increasing the chances of receiving random payloads in addition to being able to buy them.
- Combatant - makes sure at least one unit available to you every month is artillery, infantry or snipers. Helps avoid situations in which you have to kill all the Zed in a mission with one-shot weapons such as dynamite, or with Triplets active in which you get nothing to kill them with at all.
- Casual - slows the Zed down, makes days longer and either greatly reduces or eliminates the risk of Mega Zed showing up. Mutually exclusive with Hardcore.
- Chooser - lets you choose which units to use every month by clicking on the list of available units. One side effect of this is that as you can choose not to take the Evac Helicopter with you, you get one more merc to deal with level-4 outbreaks. One can make this choice at any time, however an appropriate prompt only appears before this month's outbreaks are placed on the world map. The game usually remembers one's last choice but resets it should any previously-selected units not be available any more.
- Triplets - makes it possible to have multiple units of the same kind. This implies new units being awarded to you for winning missions for much longer, until you have three of every unit. It is worth noting that unless you enable Chooser as well, it is entirely possible for you to have very few or even no units capable of killing Zed.
- Fully Stocked - start with all unit types available and all victory-track milestones unlocked. Note that the latter does mean ALL milestones - including the ones from the Zed track. As a consequence, this can be a bit of a mixed blessing.
Make Game Harder
- Hardcore - the Zed are faster and the days are shorter. As the name suggests, this mode is NOT easy. Mutually exclusive with Casual.
- Permadeath - prevents restarting missions. If you win but not as cleanly as you would like, tough luck; if you lose, you HAVE to concede. In most cases, this is not that big of a nuisance - if you know your Zed killing you hardly ever have to restart in the first place. Combine this with Hardcore though... Ouch.
- Alt. Spawning - instead of entering a city from the outside from marked directions, the initial Zed materialise in various spots already *in it*. Greatly diminishes the usefulness of such units as dynamite, landmines and barricades.
- No Quarter - the Zed can invade any territory, including those the player has already purged or even captured. Given new outbreaks still appear faster than one can contain them, this requires a whole new approach... Forget about choosing territories to cleanse as a way of controlling the spread of high-level outbreaks, forget about capturing enough territories and just waiting the Zed out as victory points roll in every month; just hit them for as many points as you can and hope you'll gain enough to win before the whole map ends up full of little purple marks.