I think the most salient point when it comes to stories, is that you don’t have to save the world - just save a world. Whether or not PFC Joe Smith, or the family living in the small town of Moos, survive, is just as important as whether or not the Allies win.
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I think big sweeping power trips can be used to cover up a lack of characterization. Essentially saying the little guys isn’t well developed because the little guy doesn’t matter in big earth shattering event A. So I think it’s a case where if you go smaller scale it can really force Charecters to be fleshed out more, because there’s less excuse not too.
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I love game about normal people being tradesmen a mayor to the local police.
I always thought something in the Warlord Era of China would be excellent, feuding with other warlords over railroads, industrializing, japanese invasion as an “End Boss” of sorts. I had an outline of a game set in not-china with a dieselpunk flair but it turns out thinking of a game and making one are two different beasts, go figure
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And the End Boss would be like… bro, this isn’t even my final form.
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I’m not sure if “Kill All, Loot All, Burn All” would make for the best, or the absolute worst endboss final form.
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I know, right? It’s provocative because, if you’re talking about effectiveness, then is it effectiveness with or without regard for ethics and humanity? I personally cannot support a scorched earth policy.
I might equate your use of best and worst final form to like the way spies are described as “best” or “worst” of course the “worst spy” meaning someone who defects, gives away all the secrets, all that sort of thing (I think?).
So “worst endboss” would then be the endboss who gets the job done, but at what cost?
I think the ethical dimension of war is one that gets overlooked a lot, especially by military historians (that’s why we love the western theatre of WW2 so much: the good guys and bad guys are “clearly delineated”). The idea that the moral high ground is a strategic asset which makes itself felt on the operational and tactical levels is really something that should be written about more, especially when it comes to “accessible” depictions of war, aimed at the general public.
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Paul,
There’s your next great CoG project right there! 
Maybe? You play as a military historian charged with writing an account of “War X” but you have to decide not only how to approach it, but the consequences of upsetting the opposing factions.
- Join “The Narrative” and write what they tell you - but at what cost to your humanity?
- Alternatively, go underground and write your own truth - at the risk of being hunted down!
- Will you protect the members of your family that have opposing views, or will you expose them?
This is just a really basic structure, but considering it’s you, I figure you could make this into like a million dollar project 
I’ll take like one percent for the idea, ok? 
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I would totally do this if I had the time and resources.
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Another under-explored alternate history would be based on this question, “What if Britain had retained Canada as a colony?”
Until when?
Canada was a net drain on the Exchequer, and London didn’t want the cost of defending it, especially since most of the monetary benefits it brought (trade, mostly) would have been entirely unchanged if Canada had become a Dominion or fully independent. Given the agitation for independence and London’s perfect willingness not to have a colony with a massive, impossible-to-defend land border with the United States, it was really only a matter of time.
Now, India, that is an entirely different story.
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True, but the story would have read differently if Britain had tried to hold on to Canada anyway… Perhaps Britain found a way to protect the colony better through volunteer army? Or maybe a super-valuable resource was discovered and the revenue from that was so much that they could afford to protect it better, giving them incentive to hold on to it…
Or maybe Britain decided to pump a bunch of money into Canada to try to quickly develop it into a trade empire. Especially if they focused on extensive railroad lines and better roads, that would give Canada a huge jump on the Industrial Revolution. If Canada controlled all the major trade in North America instead of the US, history could have been vastly different. The money from all that trade would make protection of the colony practically take care of itself. Given that America was exhausted from the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War before it, this would be a very effective approach.
Or, go super-alternate history and say that they couldn’t afford to not hold the territory because Britain was secretly gathering troops there to reclaim America and didn’t want the U.S. to discover it if they (Britain) abandoned the colony…
Or maybe Britain was keeping tabs on American progress through a complex spy network based along the Canadian/ American border…
Britain did keep part of Canada - Newfoundland and it still fell under the Monroe Doctrine.
The British Empire was too hollowed out after WW1 to be a player independent of anyone else.
A better alternative to explore would be the Union of Canada and the US by various means - through purchase, EU union models, Imperial forced union, etc … a lot of these have been already explored by various authors but my favorite was by Clive Dexler(?) when Churchill negotiated a union with Roosevelt called the United States of Canada … I read the book years ago and haven’t seen it since; it actually was quite well written.
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There was a sizable annexationist faction in Canada during the 1850s and 60s. Peaceful union with the US was considered a viable alternative to Confederation, especially after you outlawed owning people as farm equipment.
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What do you think it was about the 30s and 40s that facilitated societies’ belief that “this war is different. This war is war is existential and any shred of mercy is weakness. In fact the secret to victory is to out atrocity our enemy.”?
Nothing at all at the time. I think that most people in the 30s and 40s saw the Axis powers as expansionist and predatory, but not necessarily pure evil. Nazi anti-semitism was harsh, but it didn’t become openly genocidal (in the eyes of the general population) until after the war started. Italy’s conduct in Ethiopia and Japan’s in China weren’t necessarily well known in the West either, probably for the same reason nobody really seems to care about the Yemeni Civil War.
The narrative that WW2 was a purely black-and-white conflict has, I think, two facets. The first being the propaganda of wartime portraying Allied soldiers (especially British and American ones) in the best possible light. The second being the very real proof that Nazi Germany was not “merely” brutal, but wholly committed to the clinical extermination of a substantial portion of the world’s population. The extent of the Holocaust certainly wasn’t well known during most of the war. I’d think that the people at the time who thought of the war as an existential struggle were the ones who were actually fighting for their right to exist as independent nations.
Of course, it should be noted that Western portrayals of the Second World War tend to leave out the “out-atrocity the enemy” bit.
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I think most people saw it as a continuation of the first world war. Which is why concepts were accelerated from that war. Especially in the Eastern Europe front where the conflicts of the 1900-1930’s was still ongoing and WW2 was really just an extension of those.
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Doesn’t really explain the Asian theater, but I think the mutual animosity the Germans and Russians felt for each other from WWI certainly contributed to the horrors of the Eastern front. To my mind though it still doesn’t explain how the masses of average citizenry that composed the IJA, Wehrmacht, the Red Army and both sides of the Chinese Civil War felt that systematic atrocity was the key to victory and then went along with it. Really you could attribute it to any belligerent even the US in Okinawa for instance.
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The IJA’s got an easy explanation: a large conscript army which is kept together mostly through beatings will end up with soldiers with a burning desire to take out their own suffering and anguish on those considered “lesser” than them. Following the examples set by their NCOs and officers, they end up visiting the same kind of no-holds-barred brutality they receive on those they “outrank”: enemy civilians, and PoWs, who are made “lesser” by their willingness to surrender.
The Red Army’s pretty easy too. Given what the Soviet Union had already suffered, it’s not hard to believe that they were simply out for revenge.
The Wehrmacht is an interesting case, and I think it has a lot to do with the way that the war (especially the way in the East) was framed in moral and political terms. Before Barbarossa, Deutsches Heer troops were given a pamphlet that basically said that the Geneva Convention did not apply to Soviet PoWs. This was explained by the idea that Communism was the enemy of western civilisation, and thus any means necessary was justified to extirpate it. German troops were encouraged to think of every act of resistance as one part of an existential threat to their own way of life and loved ones, a mindset which almost necessarily leads to acts of unwarranted violence and brutality.
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