Well I don't know about everyone else but what I look for in my gaming is #1 a play style I enjoy and #2 variety.
My favorite play style is turn-based strategy. If the phone rings, the dog pukes up on the carpet, the kid invades my nice quiet room with 10 of her girlfriends, or I just can't ignore the wife's yelling any longer, I want to be able to walk away from my game for 10 seconds or 10 minutes and come back to exactly the way I left it. So PC is perfect for that, and really there is no more work to be done on the play design.
So that leaves variety. We all love PC and I think one of the reasons it's an improvement over PG is because Slitherine went a lot deeper into the variety of units produced by the German and even Allied armies. Yet here we sit anxiously awaiting Allied Corps and Pacific War. Buy why? It's still just tanks, planes and infantry. Because we crave that small amount of variety. The war from the Allied perspective. The war in the pacific which would include larger naval engagements and Japanese units.
Fantasy Corps and Star Corps would offer even more variety. Yes, you will still basically have a "tank" unit, an "air" unit and an "infantry" unit, but now the units are not governed by our laws of physics. And the terrain is no longer governed by the laws of Earth. The amount of variety in your infantry, tanks, air, space and artillery, and where you fight with it, is only limited by imagination.
And although I would look forward to both games, I too would look forward to Star Corps not only because of the variety of inventing different race's units and abilities, but because of the size of the theater of warfare it can give. I am sure many of us have played Avalon Hill's War in the Pacific ages ago spread out over a ping pong table. Although the fuel and supply aspect of the game was a pain in the butt, I loved managing an entire theater's army, navy and air force down to every battle order, air attack or combat air patrol over my carriers. Yes it was hundreds of units, but they were MY hundreds of units.
Ok, but what about scale. As Molve mentioned in a prior post, he dreaded seeing his monitor completely filled with space cruisers. And he probably wouldn't be too keen on managing 10 or 12 planetary invasion armies. But it sounds like Gray Mouser would love a screen filled with star cruisers and ground invasions on 30 different planets. Well then you manage the size of the campaign you want to play, just like PC does.
PC doesn't start you out with 30 core units and all of Europe to conquer. You start with a handful of core units and a small part of Europe to win or lose. Your core and areas of Europe grow from there from scenario to scenario. The same can be done with Star Corps.
For example. Suppose Molve does not want to manage 100 ground units and 100 space units over 100 planets because he feels that it takes away from PC's tactical rock, paper, scissors approach and results in too much time managing units instead of fighting with them. Well then Star Corps can have a small campaign that will start with 6-8 ground core units, and 6-8 space core units and 3 planets, which will grow scenario by scenario to 25 ground core units and 25 space core units and 15 planets by the end of the campaign.
But what about Gray Mouser? 25 units does not slake his lust for numbers and he's anxious to see how rock, paper, scissors plays out with over 100 units. Well he can chose a campaign that will start with the same 6-8 units in each core and 3 planets, but depending on how well and quickly he succeeds in each scenario, he could end up with 200 space and ground core units and 50 planets to conquer at the end of his campaign.
So why not play Civilization? Because Civilization does not manage its units. Civilization and games like it have a simple theme of max production + max research = max expansion and a win. If you have 2000 units, the computer will counter with 2500. You counter that 2500 with 3000, and the computer will show up with 5000. In PC, you have your core and the computer has its core. You manage your core of units better or you lose.
Essentially it would be Pacific Corps' naval and air warfare in space, and PC's land and air warfare on the planets. Variety is a good thing, even for rock, paper, scissors. Don't think so? I give you rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock.
