Well an idea I had was that with the normal Empire you have it split into a myriad of factions like it was and each faction is at war with each other as well as the NR, but as an Imperial player you have the choice of choosing what Imperial faction/warlord you want to play and you have the option for diplomacy with the other warlords. In my mind it would work like Shogun Total War, in that you have some factions that are strong and some that are weak all going for the same goal and being able to use war and diplomacy. Also this way you could make the NR much smaller than the Empire, yet with the huge split they would have a fighting chance.
This isn't feasible. Like this thread says, part of what we're trying to do is stick within a certain identity for each faction, and making it so you have like 5 different options for Imperial leaders within that causes huge issues in that area. There stops being any cohesion within it, and then instead of having 3 or four solid factions (EotH, NR, IR, PA/whoever) you end up with a mish-mash of poorly defined areas, since for many of the Imperial Warlords you have to have different rosters and different tech, while removing a lot of the options those leaders would have given us
within a single Imperial Remnant faction and forcing us to spend less time working on each unit because there's so much more we'd have to do just to make there be a reason to have the seperate groups. It doesn't even really add anything to gameplay, while adding a lot of work and diluting the faction as a whole. Who the hell cares if you have two options for a faction, where one is just the other Empire but with Escort Carriers instead of SSDs, when you could just have one faction with both, and a much better developed tech tree? The other thing here is making sure we have enough Imperial options if and when we do the PA. Adding a bunch of other Imperial splinter groups in chips away at the pool of units we can use to make them unique.
We'd have to go out of our way trying to find redundant units to make just to fill the same roles. We had to do this between eras in ICW, but our main goal with ICW was trying to tell a narrative within the GCs, so it was necessary. If we did the 5 main leaders and their rosters from ICW as 5 seperate factions, there's a ton of redundant units we now have to spend time on making for a faction that now is too split up and decoherent to actually survive against a developed NR; it worked in ICW because you were progressing through them as the NR progressed and we made sure each era the IR *could* beat the NR, even if it was with certain varying degress of difficulty. As it is in Sins, Thrawn not only has to contend with the NR's era 2 units, but he's stuck with a smaller pool of options while the New Republic has access to things spanning from ICW's era 1 to era 5.
I mentioned the development aspects of it a bit before, so here's some more on that. Every unit we make requires work to get in. This seems pretty obvious, but what it also means is for each unit added, less time proportionally can be spent on each unit, or it means a longer development time, but again, what are you really gaining out of it besides a few "options" that end up being a series of false choices anyways? A lot of the work from ICW has had to, and will have to be redone as we go, and in several cases in the past the sheer amount of content we had in ICW has made it very difficult to do the reworks we needed for there as well. I'd rather have 20 well done units and a coherent theme within them, than a haphazard collection of units in order to split it into 5 groups which are barely different but no less crippled because of it. It still doesn't remove your ability to have multiple warring Imperial groups, it just means those groups won't have 2 different techs or ships between them, and that the resulting conglomerate has a chance at viability.
This has implications on the performance side as well. I'm sure many of you are aware of this by now, but Sins has issues with memory limits, so we have to be careful with what we add and where we put it or else minidump. Our units tend to be about 5-6 megabytes total (which is actually pretty low compared to the base game and other mods), so assuming we do 5 splinter factions with 2 unique units per faction, we're probably looking at 75-100 megabytes for that, taking into account sound files, UI textures, etc. That's a considerable portion of what we have to work with. It's possible to do the mod styacking thing as Lavo/TLMiller said, however while we're probably going to do it for the fourth faction, it's not really worth it for this. We need to keep the install process pretty simple and don't want significant barriers to multiplayer. It's more necessary in SoGE because there's like 7 or 8 distinct factions, however we currently don't have that issue. On the development side, and I mean no offense to Lavo by saying this, having so many factions under development at the same time has also limited the depth of the factions because there's simply so much to do at once. Those 100 megs are best put towards another whole faction when we have more we can devote to it.
In fact, there is even a way to make the map such that supply caps are entirely based off of the planets you control, like in EaW, however this only works reliably with premade maps. Essentially how this works is that all the game's stock artifacts are removed, and replaced with supply boosting "artifacts"; in premade maps specific planets can be set to have their own caps. Of course, in the interest of not having a bazillion files, having certain supply "classes", such as an industrial shipyard class for Rendili/Fondor and an ecumenopolis class for Coruscant/Alsakan for example. Additionally, though I would need a proof-of-concept to validate this, I believe one could set planets to have no purchasable exploration units which would make the supply cache instantly found upon planetary colonization, but once again only for pre-made maps.
I thought about doing this before, but I'm hesitant to do it because of how "snowbally" it would get. Having more planets than the other player already puts them behind, and if the fleet supply is also tied to that it's just kicking them while they're down. This isn't as big an issue in EaW because until the game is so lopsided as to be won anyways, the differences in galactic cap are balanced out by the tactical cap, whereas in Sins it's just "look at this gigantic fleet I have that you just can't match!"
We do want to have a few preset maps to reflect some canon scenarios, however there won't be as big an emphasis on it as there was in ICW.
TL;DR (jerks) The different Imperial groups will all be represented through one faction, except for the ones that were so different as to have a chance to be the fourth faction (Pentastar Alignment being the obvious one). You can still have more than one Imperial player in a game, however the only way the smaller groups will be depicted is through leader portraits, faction subnames (like where the Ast Eternal, etc go). Diplomacy between Imperial groups will be possible, however the basic hierarchy of ease in diplomatic relations looks something like this, from easiest to hardest:
NR - NR
EotH - EotH
EotH - IR
IR - NR and EotH - NR
IR - IR
The only thing an Imperial Warlord hated more than the New Republic was another Imperial Warlord.
