Alternate history VS Complete fiction

You can convey the inspiration through the artistic style without tying yourself a specific history that might turn out to be problematic.

For example, there wasn't a whole lot of the Pacific that was uncharted in WW2. It still might be a tough sell having uncharted waters with submarines, steel warships, and aircraft carriers... but a random map and fog-of-war hiding the current status make perfect sense in a purely fictional world.

The players know where the islands and major landmasses are, and probably ports, just not the exact population of units at each location. In a videogame the state is simply hidden; in a board game the hex's compliment is randomly determined when visited by a player.

For the steampunk setting, there's even less reason to tie yourself to real geography. For one thing, it removes the real-world plethora of languages from the equation. And you can lay out the railroads rationally rather than the historical accidents that drive real track locations. Or maybe lean into the huge variation in density, depending on what the game needs.

What I dislike about historically accurate games is that there is little left to the imagination. I mean i think that @X3M offers a very interesting alternative:

Same goes for the board... Look at Scythe which is somewhere in between reality and pure fiction. Steampunk is more or less an alternate reality where things evolve differently. So if you go with that theme, naturally you'll be on your own and need to think up your own "world".

As far as the Pacific, that's a more limiting context. Like you say there are only a few islands and the units are limited also. This is the least interesting theme from those that you have listed.

Changing the outcome of history could be in between because you can imagine a different reality. This is sort of like "The man in High Castle" (Amazon Prime Video Original Series) where the Germans and Japanese win the war.

Purely fictional themes like Sci-fi are the most flexible but you need to do a lot of work to make the game. Think like StarCraft and so forth. TradeWorlds is an imaginary universe and was fun to design. I went to get a freelance writer to help flesh out the factions. That can help too... in that you proceed iteratively and work with skills in writing stories.

Out of what you proposed, I like #1 Chinese theme the best. You can invent your own tech tree and simulate the expansion of the empire.

You don't even need to worry too much about geography... You can ignore the fact that their evolution is restricted by land masses and other countries.

I really like #1. It's different. From building the Great Wall... to mysticism like the Tibetan Monks, to cultural signs, dragon, rabbit, dog, etc. And the whole creation of gunpowder...

Very rich set of options and how you can evolve ignoring actual reality.

Anyhow that's how I feel. Best of luck with these options. Cheers!

The third Reich will be the first one to launch nukes.

You could have the player make a choice at the start of the game.

Nuke England.
Nuke Normandy at D-day.
Nuke the Sovjet Union.

If England is nuked, the game could continue with battling US and Sovjet Union.
Less troops will land on Normandy. Thus this time possible to defend or they get less reïnforcements etc.

If Normandy is nuked, the game could continue with battling England and Sovjet Union. But England would be stronger with the help of US.

If Sovjet Union is nuked. That side will be weaker.

It will be a simple case of where you want to weaken the opponents. Just enough to get another nuke. And actually survive longer as the third Reich.

Everytime a nuke hits. You could not only remove troops. But increase the radiation levels by 1. Meaning you are slowly changing the map and pull up walls.

A level of 1 will kill 1 enemy every round.
A level of 2 will kill 3 enemies every round.
etc.

Every X rounds, you get another nuke. But you need to put in resources for it.

If every month is like a round. And you set the US having their first nuke at August 1945. They could start launching it at the Third Reich centre.
Having the same radiation effect. But to make things worse. The US launches 1 nuke every month.

So, the end game will be slow at first.
This event does require invading US as well.

I just thought about it. You could have a modification to Axis & Allies for this.
A&A nuclear edition, with tracking time.

If I understood the setting correctly, the players are pirates and not (officially) aligned with any state.

Each state can have a progress track toward developing then manufacturing nukes (Germany is not helping anyone), with a simple flowchart of who'd they drop it on, obliterating their largest port city and any units there.

Left to their own devices, the states' progress is random leading to a random shake-up of the states' relative power at some point mid-game.

The pirates can have hush-hush ties with a state, maybe primarily to move more expensive booty, but this allows the pirates to help the state along its nuke track should they choose. There's always the possibility that the state accomplishes the step on their own, depriving the pirates of the chance to sell their aid (though they could sell it to the other state they're secretly helping).

If you want the pirates to have a nuke track of their own, it should have pre-development steps of establishing on land base to even begin the process. Such a land base always has a chance of being discovered and attacked by a hostile state. Or pirates can be limited to profiting off helping the major states.

I still think this works better in a fictional setting so the map and resource allocation can be random, but should work in a historical setting too. In the real world, there are uranium deposits near the Pacific in Australia, Canada, China, Russia, and the United States. Smuggling from further afield is also possible, though in this setting Germany will have seized all reserves in Europe.

Other components include

- Heavy water which can be filtered directly from seawater with the right equipment
- Electronic computers (these are the huge ENIAC-class monsters that are hard to move)
- Precision machinery to allow making the centrifuges, accelerators, etc.
- Precision machinists to do the making
- Scientists to figure out exactly what needs to be made
- Raw materials like steel, copper/silver, etc.
- Defensible and/or remote production site
- Test site (which can be a tiny island no one's using)

Or go with one of your other ideas :)

What if the goal was to build the "Flying Fortress" ... which is the first city in the air. That could be a cool and non combative type of game play!

So it's all about economic and technological development all for the purpose to be the first player to build this "World Wonder" (like the pyramids or Great library, etc.)

That could be cool! Best.

If the game is setup so that the area map is known from the beginning (just with fog-of-war about units), alt-historical Japan/Australia/Chile/Indonesia/Mexico/Russia/US/etc can be a non-random map layout.

While WW2 submarines were an important part of the naval mix of forces, remember that they were not the stealthy vessels of today. There's no need to come up with complex hidden-movement rules, though you may want to say only certain units can damage them (e.g., destroyers) and they can only damage certain units (not aircraft).

The techniques are more sophisticated today, but so are the submarine designs.

A WW2 submarine was a small ship that could slip underwater for limited periods of time.

They were raiding vessels that wreaked havoc on supply ships, but didn't fare nearly as well when up against warships with depth charges. In that era, the Japanese were probably the least adept at using and defending against subs.

A modern submarine is a stealthy thing that can loiter for months on the ocean floor or move around virtually invisible to available sensors.

There are a number of episodes where modern submarines - mutually invisible to one another - have collided in deep water. You'd think the ocean is so big that it'd be unlikely, but at the sea floor there are only so many "valleys" for the subs to move through.

The upshot is that WW2-era subs can be normal units that are visible on the map, though they may be capable of a tactical "sneak attack" move.

That was the case in WW2 because it made the vessels lighter... but this is no longer the case in modern day. Now they are made of steel.

BTW let me know what you think about those Midway videos. It's so fascinating to watch and learn some of the timing when it came to attacking the Japanese fleet of carriers.

Cheers.

But only because that one guy types soooooo sloooooow.