@Croesus:
My Current Empire Combos Are
Southern Europe: Ottoman, Austrian, Spanish, Portuguese
German: German
Benelux: Belgium, Netherlands
Russia: Russia (1860 Empire)
Franco-Italian: France, Italian
Japanese: Japan (1910 Empire)
America: USA (No Alaska)
British:British
OK, to start with, I think this is an awesome idea. One existing but oop game you should try to pick up as a source of inspiration and to mine for pieces/ components is the Eagle game War! Age of Imperialism It has a beautiful board, mediocre (sculpting-wise) pieces that include pretty much everything you’d need, and some ideas. It’s combat system needs work, though. (I always thought that the biggest mistake Eagle made was departing too much from the basic A&A combat system) but it has an interesting exploration/ resources system that could at least be mined for ideas and components. (Lots of turn-over resource pieces…)
I think you’re best off deciding right off from the start whether you’re going “roughly historical” or “alternate reality.” If you go AH you could maybe create a built-in balance that reality doesn’t give as an option, and you could have something like a “Central Reich” (Austria+Germany) a Tsarist Empire, an Islamic caliphate (or 2), and 1 or 2 “oriental empires” along with a limited # of Western powers all finely balanced. Once you go all the way to an AH approach, you don’t have to worry so much about your various contenders being ahistorical, and build them however you want, with game balance a key concern… but you should then make sure to rename the contenders to make clear that you’re going AH to head off criticism of being too ahistorical.
If you go historical, I think you’re better off going all the way in that direction and not messing too much with the basic list of “players” in terms of core territories, but allow the colonial situation in places like Africa and South Asia to be wide open. (This is the basic approach taken by the Eagle Games W!AoI This allows for a completely different kind of balance: core territories are set and basically historical, but the historical “Scramble” for colonies could happen without limitations, much like how A&A starts with one of several sets of start dates, after which “all bets are off.” (Remember, many of these “traditional” colonial empires were not at all traditional if you go back to 1885… and the further back you go, the less such boundaries actually existed…") If you go with a more historical “Scramble Redux” approach, the lesser powers could be folded into the “neutrals” and/or “minors” category, along the lines of how the advanced A&A variants discussed in other threads of this forum are done.
But say, combining Germany and Austria or the Benelux countries would cause you to lose historical flavor, so do it only if you’re going to rename them and be fully AH in approach.
I’d also say that combining Catholic Monarchies with Orthodox Tsardoms and/ or Islamic Sultanates in the East or Republics and/or monarchies (e.g. Italy + France) that include radically different nationalities in the West would just not work well, so if you really feel the need to do this sort of radical combining, take the full-fledged AH route.