I finally had a chance to work on my 'wish list' per a suggestion from designer Chuck Seegert. Between work trips, dead PCs, and other challenges, I've just not had time to wrap my head around it, but I've been wanting to get more ideas on paper.
I turned three bullet points into more than two pages' worth of content last night, so I'm off to a good start.
I might need to boil the ideas down somewhat, but for now, I want to offer campaigns such as in the other Leader series games. Some will be normal conventional campaigns, while others may have a chance to cross a nuclear threshold. There will also possibly be a 'grand campaign' where the player can control a B-52 - the plane itself, not the crew - from it's 'born' (build) date as an A-, B-, or some other model type, all the way through decommissioning (if the player fails to gain enough points at a certain point), or destruction (by being destroyed, naturally), or even the game ending due to global thermonuclear war.
In that larger campaign, we'll follow the life of their B-52 from the base model through 'upgrades' which will be akin to leveling up. I know this is NOT normal for a B-52, but it's a game, and the idea of using an aircraft as the center point of a game rather than the crew appealed to me. Crews will come and go, but imagine having a B-52 from the late 50s through 2020 or so and surviving all the campaigns. It will see some sh*t. It may be the cause of nuclear war. Who knows.
The player will be able to choose a commitment level for some campaigns; a higher level will mean more resources and more targets, but there's also a higher chance nuclear war may be triggered. For example, a hypothetical NATO-Warsaw Pact shooting war campaign may see the B-52 having access to more conventional frontline missions, or it may see it doing deep penetration raids against Soviet airfields. The former may not escalate things, but the latter certainly may; you will risk gaining enough points to 'win' a campaign before it ends, though the trade-off is stepping ever closer to "the line" without, hopefully, crossing over it and destroying the world as we know it.
The player will therefore be responsible for choosing missions within a campaign, and executing them, all the while 'living a life' (such as it is) through their own B-52 bomber. So there will be some strategic control as well as tactical mission control.
That's the initial plan, anyway. I just need to flesh it out some more.