Slitherine

How come there's no option to have the opponent decide his side?

When you issue a challenge, you have to pick your own army and the opponent's army (or otherwise set them to random). If memory serves, in the original FOG there was a game mode where your opponent was allowed to pick whatever army he wanted so long as it was within certain parameters set by the host. For example, only from Immortal Fire, etc. (hint hint, Immortal Fire is the only appropriate choice for the first expansion pack)

I think it's a really big omission that detracts from the multiplayer experience. I like to post challenges, but I don't want to pick my opponent's army. I want them to play as any army they please. I'm going to win a stunning victory no matter what, so I would like to do them this little courtesy.

This is on the wishlist, but it does not really jive with the current MP flow, so it may take some time to implement.

Also, it would be good to be able to set up open paired game challenges as we could in FOG1. At the moment we have to set up two separate challenges if we, say, want to look at a stronger army versus a weaker one (Carthage v Spain perhaps). Then what happens is someone comes along and takes the Carthaginian army and leaves the Spanish one. Which sort of defeats the purpose of the paired game really. In FOG 1 I used to have several opponents who played paired games with me and we compared aggregate scores at the end to see who had triumphed. So for now, you have to pre-arrange the match-up by PM and then password protect the two games. It is quite cumbersome compared to the open paired game set up.