Hello ! Don't mind the giant spoiler textwall, you can ignore what is tagged as spoilers if you're not willing to read the details
Those who know the game Star Wars: Empire at War might know and appreciate the ability we've got to build fleets, armies, to move them around on a whole strategic map, then operate them on the battlefield, having to take care of our units to keep them alive for the next battle (kinda like in the Total War serie). So i've got an idea, a little more than a year ago, about porting the Pacific Theater from WW2 into this game: we've got a global map to offer different campaigns, a space mode to convert into naval battles, a ground mode which also offer the ability to use airplanes and naval artillery support, heroes who'll likely be officers giving extra boosts, etc..
So here is my question : what do you think of a mod about the Pacific Theater during WW2 ? Have you any ideas, suggestions, or thoughts about it? Would it be interesting to play, what kind of things would you like to see, what kind of mechanics might be absolutely terrible to add?
I've been emulating about this project for some time now, but i'm looking for some feedbacks on my ideas 
I'll post below some of these thoughts if you want to read them (tagged as spoilers so you didn't got too afraid at first glance.. at least i hope so )
Feel free to share the ideas, concepts, suggestions and all you thought about while reading this, thanks 
Historical accuracy
I've determined three different paths :
- the first one, which might be the hardest to implement, would be a "historically accurate experience" : similar to the base game campaign, you have locked techs, locked islands, and you can only play historically-accurate battles ; however, you'll have to keep your fleet alive, to keep the "campaign map" part still valuable. So yea, you could play the last battles of WW2 with 20 japanese aircraft carriers if they're still alive I maybe need to find another way to implement the historically accurate idea
- the second one is a "fully arcade experience" : you can build 10 Yamato-class battleships if you want, and have fun with them Not accurate, but it will probably increase the life span of the mod
- the third one, which is my favorite, is an "in-between" : a part of the game will be heavily locked to offer an experience as historically accurate as possible, and other game modes will be way more free, to offer another experience to the player.
Game modes
You might remember/know that the galactic campaigns in the main game offer differently scaled experiences : from 10 to 50 planets. So we can have a campaign about the whole war, and a few more campaigns about specific campaigns - the Battle of Leyte or Guadalcanal are a few examples.
We've got a second game mode : the skirmish mode. In Empire at War, and in most RTS games, skirmishes are about building a fleet of your own, and destroy your opponent. However, the "historical accuracy" will be in conflict with this game mode, since, you know, american ships were built in America and japanese ships in.. Japan. And there's roughly a few thousands kilometers between them. So yea, in Empire at War we've got space stations, who call in the new ships. So my idea here, is to replace the Space Station with a "Flagship" - an admiral ship that allows you to call for reinforcements.
And here comes a new idea, that i'm happy to know we can get in Empire at War : a "singleplayer missions" mode, similar to the "Simple missions" we had in Sudden Strike - basically, you get prebuilt units, you cannot produce more, and you have to beat your enemy, in historically-accurate battles. Replicates of Pearl Harbor, Midway, etc.. can be made here.
Units & Technologies
The technology tree is only available in the skirmish mode, since both campaign and singleplayer-missions modes do not let the player build units as they wish (i'm thinking about letting the players produce some units once they get some objectives achieved / time limit reached)
The naval mode is going well, i've done a bunch of tests thanks to XML files, and i'm quite satisfied. The ground mode is.. a little bit harder to balance. As you might have experienced, artillery in the base game could be quite overpowered when protected by frontline units. And WW2 was about artillery. A lot of artillery. But artillery is frustrating: when using it, you just shell an opponent without having a retaliation, so it quickly get boring ; when facing artillery fire, you cannot replicate, so it easily gets annoying. So i don't know how to implement this in the game. I've thought about using the building pads to produce light artillery (mortars as example), and howitzers as a classic unit with a slow fire rate, but i'm not satisfied with it, tho i haven't done any ingame test.
On the naval mode, i've got two different ideas:
the first plan is to do not allow the players to build anything in the sea-based maps. I mean, it doesnt make much sense to build stuffs in the sea out of nowhere.
The other plan however, is less historically accurate but way more interesting gameplay-wise: players can be able to produce specific objects, such as some observation towers, submarine mines, and even coastal artillery if the map contains a small island, where boats could go near to allow the production of the guns. Some dry docks to repair ships in a specific range could also be an idea.
Pacific Empire at War
I have thought about a separate project which can be used as a "crash test" to see if some of these new additions can be fun to play with: an Empire at War mod staying in the Star Wars universe, where the existing content will only be slightly modified to see if the gameplay modifications are playable. A few of these gameplay modifications are:
- submarines which can destroy the heaviest ships with only a few shots (but they've got a slow rate of fire)
- planes are way more efficient than in the base game (but not many planes are available)
- new hardpoint system (the hardpoints icons disappear, you'll have to localise the hardpoints themselves on the ship and aim at them)
- damage system reworked (you can aim for destroying hardpoints, but you can also blindly spread a massive amount of fire and still destroy a ship without even hitting a single hardpoint)
I've got some sort of design ideas as you've read, but i'm open to more ideas, to criticism, questions and all As it's hard to work on Blender to create models and animations, and i've also to do sounds, find how to compose a soundtrack, find a way to do voicelines, using GIMP (i guess) to do textures, etc.. i still work on my ideas while (very) slowly learning all of that. So here i am, looking for ideas, suggestions, etc.. And i'll see if i can get all of it working, teeheehee
I hope you've enjoyed reading this! Good night, and take care of you, cya !
(PS: sorry for any weird grammar/syntax, my english can sometimes be really broken)
