Faction "variants" and how to handle them

[Garrick]

Hello everybody!

I'm Garrick, and i very seldom leave a post or two around these parts. I'm finally returning to modding, and I'd like to pose an open question to the community here.

I'm resuming a very slow development on my megamod, 'Gathering of Storms, as I've outlined it on Relicnews here: http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?274756-Dawn-of-War-Gathering-of-Storms. The aim of the mod is to add subfactions to Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Chaos, with each subfaction representing one particular flavor of Space Marines, Imperial Guard or Chaos Space Marines (Think Dark Angels, Armageddon Steel Legion, Iron Warriors etc.)

I'm currently busy restructuring the files into a friendlier structure and now i'm considering adding more faction via Promythus' old method (AKA Scaleform editing) to replace ingame selection of subfactions. Given that creating individual variants of each hero for each chapter is not only time consuming, but nearly impossible when one tries to give each variant some kind of individuality gameplay-wise, i was wondering if it would be better to simply create three subfactions, "Chapters of renown" "Chaos Legions" and "Regiments of Renown", each housing the four factional variants (Chapters of Renown has Dark Angels Master, Space Wolves Wolflord, Blood Angels Captain and Black Templar Marshal, for example).

Would this arrangement be functionally better or players would hypothetically prefer to have every faction in a separate slot on the skirmish menu? I'd like to hear your thoughts about this.