No Stormtrooper Management Game where your homebase is the Death Star for me.
This is what everyone always wanted. A sense of being more or less regular guys who actually have to work at and solve problems within some massive machine. Several successful Star Wars games have touched on this appeal and exploded with success. In Battlefront 2 I wanted to be a stormtrooper, not Luke Skywalker. The idea of doing
good work inside some kind of
authoritarian (styled) regime is so quaint. The sense of home,
base, I think would be an essential booster to this. It's a
place in things. Downtime. JRPG Resonance of Fate house. The clones from Republic Commando are still remembered just for a few quick bursts of time with them on the job. Imagine if we hung out in their quarters for any serious amount of time.
You take this game, dress up the sides as Rebels and Empire, and you're taking an already appealing premise and probably turning it into a money printer. I don't know what
you meant when you wrote "stormtrooper management game" but that made me think of the original X-Com and its conversion mods. Loading up at home, going out, doing the job, then bringing everything back to recover, reload, prepare to do it again. This rhythm of up and down I think is essential for a sense of
homebase. And people love the
world of Star Wars. Not just flying lasers. A sense of being in it I think is what smaller tactics can sell very well, and what a Star Wars tactics title could uniquely aspire to compared to both other Star Wars games and other Tactics games.
I think that the 40k mod for x-com, especially the ROSIGMA expansion, is the model to aspire to in trying to do this. Just model everything. Let it be looked at, let it have consistent interactions with every part of the world, let you pile up guys and give them stuff and have them interact with more stuff. Make Star Wars a world you're moving parts and people within. In ROSIGMA for the real trooper management experience you can go Imperial Guard, then you're requisitioning soldiers, piles of gear, assigning people stuff, assigning them to a deployment craft things pile up in storage to be used, traded, or forgotten. Soldiers stick around or die. It's a great feeling.
That's where my thinking goes anyway. Maybe by Stormtrooper management you meant something even more distant. Guys as names on paper, little guys milling around in rooms, being sent off, and it's not even such a strategy game. I liked 'Star Wars: Empire at War' mostly for just building stacks of stormtroopers and moving them planet to planet. It's fun to build raise a unit one place, move it to another, then land it and use it for something. Makes it all feel alive and real.
So many cool ways this could be done. But doesn't it seem likely we're getting none of them?
