How do I "tune" game difficulty, postpone 1st alien attacks?

[Peter34]

The game seems to lack a genuine difficulty setting slider. I can control the size of alien Nests, and how common they are, and how strong they are, but as for alien attacks, I can either have them enabled or disabled, as a binary thing. If disabled, they won't happen until I start attacking their nests. If enabled, they'll always start occuring after the same amount of total elapsed time, maybe 90 minutes or so.

Is there a way for me to postpone the alien attacks, so that they start occuring, say, 50% later than normal, but still start occuring on their own, without me having to go and trigger the waves by attacking a Nest? I find that they come too early relative to when I'm able to build and set up a quantity of Turrets, and if they can be delayed a bit, without the first attacks then being more intense than they are now, that'd make the game a lot more fun for me.

So I guess I'm looking at some way to tweak the speed at which this "Evolution" thing escalates. How do I do that? Is there a good, stable, popular and well-tested mod for it? Or a concole command? I suppose if Evolution starts at 0.0 and goes up by 1 per minute, and the aliens start attacking at evolution 100, then if I tweak the starting value for Evolution to become -50 then I'd be where I want to be.

[DaveMcW]

Make the starting area bigger.

Alien attacks occur when your pollution cloud expands beyond your starting area.

[n9103]

could also start the game with the 'enemies never attack first' option enabled.

[Xecutor]

Aliens start to attack when your pollution cloud consistently covers their bases.
Explore around your starting location to see where their bases are and keep this in mind while expanding.
Try to keep your pollution in the middle of starting area.
Once you have steel armor, you can kill a few border nests.
At early stages of the game you don't really need to put walls around your whole base.
A few bunkers (several turrets surrounded by walls) in different directions usually is enough.

[Xterminator]

Yup as others said, they really start attacking when your pollution gets to their nests. So increasing starting area size could help, and maybe building away from the closest bases to delay the pollution spread to them. or get a map with a ton of trees to slow down the pollution spread. Of course then it is a pain to build anything because of the

trees. :p