User blog comment:Tuckerscreator/Wars Never Ends/@comment-1210220-20121003204429

I'd have to agree with you. Halo Wars was a decent game, and in my opinion, deserves some kind of sequel regardless of how it's been panned by some. Here are a few of my opinions on what would make HW2 great:

First off, I've always imagined a Halo Wars 2 with a similar feel to Star Wars: Empire at War, which had various epic space and ground battles. I suppose that for balancing reasons Covenat and UNSC ships would be under/overpowered in certain aspects, but something along those lines would be nice.

A sort of Galactic Conquest-ish mode would be a nice feature, fighting over and capturing planets across space to win the war, with, say, Earth and High Charity as each faction's starting bases. I'd say that a Halo Wars game could be set in the HCW era, with campaigns covering important battles over the war such as Reach, Skjope, Sigma Octanus and so on.

Heroes would play an important role too. The SPARTAN-II's in Halo Wars, while reasonably effective, had little character info and their sole talent for jacking vehicles, while useful, wasn't that amazing. You could have people like Admiral Cole in the Everest or Keyes in the Iroquois/POA with their own special abilities in battle, e.g, the 'Fire Everything' manoeuvre that Cole performed. The SPARTAN Teams could be deployed as specialised ground units, with Sangheili Counterparts and their own heroes, both from the main series and newcomers.

There could even be non-combat heroes, e.g. having Halsey on a planet halves research time, or Ackerson allows you to train SPARTAN-III's, who hit hard but are weak in return. On the Covenant side, we have the Prophets. In addition to holding their same ground role in HW1, they could inspire troops to fight harder and have their own bonuses.

Of course, the story is important too. Just as HW1 followed the Spirit of Fire, HW2 could follow another UNSC or Covenant ship with it's own characters through the war and beyond. Or, it could even follow up on the very ambiguous fate of the SOF from the first game. Whew, I've been waiting the share these ideas for a while.

Though Halo Wars was decent with it's ground battles, things just did seem to boil down to whoever had the largest amount of tanks, with little else. While, of course, these features would probably be difficult to implement, this is just my general idea of how HW2, if it is made, could be. There are a great many things in the Haloverse that have only been explored within the EU rather than the games, and while it's all good to read about these amazing feats, imagine being able to play them. /Rant.