How do I move from campaign to skirmish?

[Kiirani]

Hi guys, I've just recently started playing warzone as something to kill my summer holidays with. I'm about halfway through a very successful campaign at the moment and would like to learn to play skirmishes.

I'm having a few problems with this plan (playing 2 player, no bases):

1) The only strategy I can find that works is rushing the AI. I either rush it so much that it never recovers, or I don't rush it enough and it somehow has enough power to regroup and attack me with an obscene amount of units.
(I'm probably just doing it wrong)

2) I never seem to have enough power. After preparing in advance for the New Paradigm attack in the alpha campaign, I've always had a huge surplus of power and units
example, I've only just researched VTOLs in the beta campaign, and I have 20,000 power lying around and have reached my unit limit already.
However, playing a skirmish and trying to research needed techs while defending a base and trying to rush the AI, I'm almost always sitting at a nice even 0.

3) The AI doesn't seem to have this problem.
With a total of two research facilities, 4 oil derricks and 1 power plant, the AI somehow magically managed to construct the same amount of tanks that I had (thankfully in groups of three, so they died quickly) AND begin building VTOL pads before I'd even considered upgrading from MG to cannon.

I'd like some advice on how I should play a skirmish like this to make it winnable, but still interesting.

Edit: Oh yes, while typing this, I managed to accumulate a huge surplus of resources in my currently playing skirmish. Probably due to the fact that the AI has no trucks, no power generator, and no challenge. Sigh. I hate rushing.

[Zarel]

What I do is research rush for Gas Turbine Generator and Vapor Turbine Generator as fast as possible. This helps alleviate low power situations. It's also a good idea to rush up to good weapons early on.

Focus your research. Don't even bother researching machineguns after you have light cannon. Just research nothing but cannon upgrades.

The other thing is to rush for oil resources. You really do need six or seven oil derricks unless you want to never have enough power.

The AI cheats; it gets more power than you do. If you don't want the AI to do this, set it on its lowest difficulty setting.

[Kiirani]

Ah. How do I change difficulty? The skirmish interface isn't exactly clear.

[whippersnapper]

..........

[Kiirani]

Hi again, and thanks for all your help

I played a couple more skirmishes with difficulty down lower (now that I think about it, I don't know why I didn't realise that was the control...). Focusing on power upgrades is making life MUCH easier, I've stopped running low at every turn now.