Like I said before, I plan on adding the factions form the Clone Wars at some point, and it can either be as an optional download or like you said, a choice the player can make at the start of the game. This is definitely something to discuss in the future
About the shields... I can see some options:
- The ships could have very inneficient 360ยบ shields (inneficient for balance and because shields seem to go down in seconds in the movies anyways xD), so they would cover the whole ship like in the movies but the player can't really rely on them to prevent hull damage;
- Omni-shields with very fast deploy rates and small radius for both nations;
- Frontal shields with an anchor point that would make the edges be exactly aligned with the back edges of the Imperial Star Destroyers, for an idea of continuity while leaving the entire rear vulnerable. Every faction needs to have a weakspot anyways so... The rebels on the other hand have more "traditional" ship designs (except, for example, the Liberty Star Cruiser), so the angle of the shields could be slightly higher with some shield efficiency or even raise speed adjustments for balance. Or...
- ...The empire would have frontal shields and the Rebels would have omni-shields.
So I guess I'll have to make some kind of poll to see what the public would prefer to see.
No matter what I decide about the shields, the Imperial ships would be well armored and quite slow while the Rebel ones would have less armor and be more agile, so overall the Rebels are weaker in terms of durability but will have the speed advantage (gotta put those blockade runners to good use
).
In terms of armor balance both factions will have high amounts of armor because the shields are quite weak and/or small. The rebels will have low-tech levels of armor while the imperials will become the faction with the highest armor values of all the existing factions, forcing all nations to either use energy or explosive weapons or numeric superiority. Armor won't last forever and the player can't rely on the shields to prevent armor/hull damage like they would on a high-tech ship, plus there is a reason they mostly use lasers in Star Wars
Lore wise (ingame) this would be a cool idea... The factions from Star Wars came to SS with highly advanced weaponry, mostly energy based, but kept the big amounts of armor from their past, not having developed good shields yet...