Personally I'd like to see Eastern Front (or Pacific) before more Western Front maps. I'd say make 1 or 2 Ardennes maps and the same for Market Garden and move on to the east. From a developers point of view I get the theatre-after-theatre approach but personally I'm a bit bored with Normandy. I love FH2 to death but the cool thing with FH1 was the diversity in maps and fronts, and my personal preference was always the east and far-east.
So, my thoughts on eastern front:
- Although I like the see the most obscure battles of course, I'd say: remake the old/impressive favorites (The Storm, Seelöw, Kharkov etc for those major tankbattles. Stalingrad, Berlin, Pavlov etc. for close quarters). It probably saves a lot of time.
- Consider that the added value of the more "obscure" maps isn't that much. You'll only please a small amount of people more, but with a whole heap of extra work. The rest just wants cool eastern front maps. So just stay "mainstream". I'm all for the more less-known stuff, but time is of the essence and the mainstays like Stalingrad or Berlin simply have to be in there.
- As for actual ideas: yes, include Operation Barbarossa. As I recall it wasn't featured in FH1 and it's a really interesting period, hardware-wise.
- Maybe try to include the doctrine difference into the opposing teams, with the russians having more manpower (but being very careless with it) and the germans having the technical upperhand (but less resources). I don't really know how this would work in-game but maybe the Russians can have less ticketbleed per killed footsoldier or anything. That footsoldier would have to be armed lighter than his german counterpart to balance it out of course. I dunno, just a rifle with 1 clip and no grenades or bandaid versus the german grunt with full grenade/ammo/bandaid kit.
- Concerning actual hardware ideas, I'll leave that to the guys who know way more than I do about that stuff. But maybe a plane-oriented map would be cool for the eastern front. Especially in the early stages when the Stuka still mattered, like with the Battle Of Sevastopol.