My guess would be the option was pulled because playing against custom factions was causing problems with the new AI re-write. I'm hoping this one comes back soon too.

.. it's there. you just have to create the faction in the faction creater and then use it in the same game session right away (ie.. without exiting elemental)

the issue was introduced well before the new ai being added. (at least 1 stable patch before 1.09 beta)

https://forums.elementalgame.com/400530

note that i don't actually play against custom made ai factions.. i just see if i can pick them.. also can't remember if i tried creating a bunch of custom ai ones in one go and see if they are all available at the same time.

First time poster (huh; guess I can use my Impulse account to post here).

I think I've found a way to fix this. Was looking at my custom races' .xml data, to see if there was anything different from the coreraceconfig .xml which has all the original races, and I noticed one thing:

For the original races, all of them had 'Good' or 'Evil' Alignment tags. For all of my custom factions, they were automatically set to 'Neutral'.

So, I connected the dots, and changed it to Good and Evil where appropriate. And then they appeared as selectable opponents.

Hope this helps.

Note: While you're editing their alignments, you might as well set the sovereign associated with them via the sovereignunittype, else it'll default to Lord Relias. Dunno what would happen if all of them would have Lord Relias, haven't tested. Just copy the name of the .xml file of the custom sovereign you want to link it to.

I can confirm that this works.  Thanks blueoceans10!!

Okay, so I have an update on this issue.  I tried the above suggestion and it worked up to a point.  Changing the alignment of each custom faction indeed allowed them to be selectable as opponents.  However, I've since started two games with a roster of eight custom factions and two vanillia factions, yet both times I've encountered factions I did not place in the game and not a hide nor hair of my custom factions.  For some reason my custom factions still aren't getting into the game and even though they show up in the selection screen and are chosen, the game randomly decides to throw in vanillia factions instead.

Anyone had any success actually playing against custom factions in 1.1?  If so, what did you do?

... wasn't it always the ones in the middle that are picked for the game?!  or at least hasn't changed in the last one or two stable versions?

It's all right, no harm in asking the obvious.  The answer is no, however.  I correctly selected the factions.  As it turns out I solved my issue by (of all things) creating a world that wasn't the same name as before I created the nations and edited their files.  Apparently using the same world name loaded up the nations loaded in the game I had prior to the custom factions working.  Don't ask me, odd bug.  Yet changing the world name did fix it.  So if anyone else runs into this issue, just change your world name if you're like me and continue using the same one.