Quoting Yarlen, reply 3Initially we had planned to go this route, but it proved to be confusing to testers. As such, you must now choose to be rebel or loyalist during game setup.
Seriously? Am I the only one who wanted to be able to scout the map before choosing a subfaction?
Is there any way there could be more dialogue about this? I know the community has vastly varying opinions so maybe it might not be beneficial, I don't know. It just seems like a 'choose your own tech tree' worked well in games like Age of Empires III where you could rebel against your homeland and gain access to new units while losing access to others.
I've got to say (at the expense of sounding like I'm 'whining' [e digicons]:'([/e] which is unsettling in and of itself) that I had hoped that we could have something like where you would play through Tier 2 research and in order to get to ANY tier 3 research you had to choose rebels or loyalists or something like that. That way you could at least take the map configuration into account before you committed to a game choice.
I understand that there is probably balancing issues with having three factions per race but at the very least I was hoping for a limited in game window of time for scouting and jockeying for position before I nailed down a race and research tree I wanted to select.
...
Outside of that, everything that we've seen so far and the answers to the interviews have been awesome so, keep up the good work and keep us in the loop! Thanks! 
