Recently I’ve been working different shifts at work- rather than working in the middle part of the day, like I usually do, and working in the late morning, afternoon, and evening, I’ve had to make donuts, which involves getting to work at 3 a.m. and going to bed accordingly. Thankfully it’s not a long commute, at least, but it’s been rough having to go to bed (or, more accurately, collapsing from exhaustion) in time so I can get up after 2 and be at work at 3. There have been at least a couple days lately where I was late, so that threw things off.

But none of that, of course, is germane to the topic of this post: A game idea!

I’ve been playing Star Wars: Empire at War again lately, which is a real-time strategy game that came out in 2006 where you can control either the Galactic Empire or the Rebel Alliance. The Empire, of course, relies on industrial might and numerical superiority, while the Rebellion has to rely instead on quality over quantity and highly motivated freedom fighters.

The changes in canon and new material since 2006 aside (thinking here particularly of Andor, Rogue One, and Saw Gerrera and his Partisans), recently I’ve thought it would be interesting to have a game where you could play as either the Empire or the Rebels, and whatever side you picked would affect the playstyle. Of course, I guess to some degree this is true anyway in Empire at War (if you pick the Empire, in space you get powerful warships that carry their own fighter and bomber craft, versus playing as the Rebels whose hyperdrive-equipped starfighters make them capable of independent action and hit-and-run attacks), but it’d be interesting if the gameplay was more different.

I suppose what I have in mind is more like an RPG or small-unit tactics game, like XCOM (which I’ve never played). For example, if you’re in charge of a small Imperial unit, you might know the characters only or mainly by their individual designation, while the Rebel equivalent might allow you to know characters by a callsign or name, rather than whatever the Rebel equivalent to a “serial number” is. Of course, another glaring difference is that the Empire is human supremacist, and with few exceptions all or most of your Imperial troopers (or pilots or crew or whatever) would be humans, while the Rebellion is more diverse and you might have just about any conceivable species in a Rebel unit, whether they’re Mon Calamari, Twilek, Wookiee, Rodian, Bothan, or of course human.

A main problem with this idea would probably be the scope- if you’re the commander of a fighter squadron, that’s going to be a bit different than if you’re an infantry squad, the bridge crew of a light cruiser, or the crew of a vehicle. Something like this seems like it might work best as a special forces-type unit or a fighter squadron, though I welcome anyone who wants to try making a game about the rare Rebel armored brigade, haha.

Maybe it’s the contrarian or the masochist in me, or just enjoying counterfactuals, but I’ve long thought it would be interesting to have a tabletop role-playing game character who’s part of a Rebel starship crew or vehicle unit, when neither of those are among the Alliance’s strengths as a insurgency against the established galactic government. Sure, some Rebel armored units and capital ships existed (if nothing else, there’s the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi), but the Rebel Alliance didn’t have the industrial capacity, logistics, or personnel, mostly, to engage in conventional symmetric vehicle or space warfare. Any significant concentration of Rebel armor, if it wasn’t degraded by Imperial attacks on its supply chains and logistics, could probably expect to be greeted by Imperial air and armor superiority (TIE bombers, AT-ATs, heavy artillery, and turbolasers against whatever passes for Rebel heavy armor) even if your garden-variety Imperial stormtrooper or Army trooper doesn’t have much anti-vehicle capability. Realistically, there probably are heavy crew-served anti-vehicle weapons available somewhere within the Imperial military, whether it’s part of the Army or the Stormtrooper Corps.

Anyway, I think a game set during the Galactic Civil War (or really, just about any war, not just in Star Wars) based on these differences could be interesting. “You’re playing a commander with these traits, so your units have these reactions, and these messy interpersonal dramas are playing out, oh and then this happens” seems fun, but I do enjoy Rimworld, Crusader Kings, and similar games with RPG elements, so adding that into a Star Wars game seems fun. I don’t know how you’d do that for something like the Clone Wars, considering the Clone Wars featured the Republic’s Grand Army of clone troopers and Jedi versus the CIS’s Droid Army (and some organic auxiliaries), but you could also probably come up with a story where you get the choice on the Republic side of either a Jedi and clones or a Republic-aligned local defense force and the CIS option could be either the main Droid army (though with less interactions between droids) or a unit of Separatist-aligned organic soldiers (though they would probably all be from the same world, or at least the same species).