Sides and Countries

[pd]

Had a short discussion (more like a monologue) today on IRC with DCoder about my plans concerning sides and countries.

Talking about ParaDrop and how I made the tech paradrops customizable for single sides, what came into my mind is that people will probably ask for country specific settings as well.
That will probably go for any new side feature.

Vice versa, if I add settings to countries, people might want defaults in their respective sides.

What I have in mind is stop extending countries from here (custom flags, loadscreens etc) and only extend sides, because after all countries are just a group of instances of a side with slight modifications.
The basic features should be per-side.

I'm not sure why WW chose the country system in the first place - in TS, every side had exactly one country (called house types there) - why have countries at all?
In RA2 they are inevitable, of course.

But since sides are planned to be as easily addable as countries and vehicles and whatnot, in the case you actually do need a side feature for a country, simply create a new side.
My plans are to extend tags like AIBasePlanningSide to take arrays (ie AIBasePlanningSide=Nod,ThirdSide) and the rest will be customizable per side anyway, so stuff like sidebars and building sets can easily be linked.

If you feel countries should deserve more attention and country specifics should be implemented for new stuff, please let me know and why.