Over the course of a couple weeks, I have been making a military and mining force, based on the dummys (because of the metal composition of the designed characters). I have come a relatively far way in making the mod, but I need some public, open input.

First, what would you want in the way of different bodies? one for military, one for mining, one for Spec. ops?

Second, what kind of price range would you want for different types? low (25 "oz") for a small, basic soldier with 50 HP? high (250+) for a battle mech with over 200 HP?

Third, what style should the vehicles be? gritty, mechanical, or something else?

Fourth and final, possibly give me your ideas for what else I should do.

Don't make the troops have anything other than 100hp, modify their wounds and GibImpulseLimit and GibWoundLimit to make them last longer. Troops with a base health different than 100 sell for (basehp/100) times as much as you bought them for, so a 600hp goliath would sell for 6x as much as you bought him for, even if you just dipped the rocket below the top of the screen and sent it back up again.

As for style, I'd say go with 1-2 strengths of regular actors (around 95oz per) plus one or two specialized ones, like a hulk and a special ops person (depending on worth, between 110 and 200oz).
I personally like the "utilitarian" military look, where everything is gunmetal gray with camo paint and giant polygonal armor plates.

Usually, the recommended for unit variety in mods is to make at least 4 kinds of them: one fragile miner/base-builder unit, cheap but with limited utility; one normal soldier, good speed/power ratio, cost around 90 oz; one heavy soldier, slower but stronger ( and heavier, to wield bigger weaponry ) with a slightly higher price; and one specialized unit, whose strengths/weaknesses depend on your faction's primary attribute: for example, a stealth-based faction would have a fast and undetctable actor, while a more warfare-like faction would have a very heavily armored troop, with a very high gibwoundlimit, and so on.

Just note that this is the essential, what most factions have. Anything extra is usually good, and big mechanical units are almost a necessity after you've done a few updates to the faction.

If you want make THIS! I would love you for that. We have a lack of chicken walkers here. Keith Thompson Art has a lot of good ideas here and here.

Keith Thompson, this guy is AMAZING.

Anyway, a brain unit also goes well with most mods, especially movable ones.

Good sprites. Orginization of download. Included missions. And even a little innovation. *gasp*

Generally the only neccessary component is innovation and the accompianing coding skill required to implement it in-game. However, it's going to be pretty hard to get high enough standards of innovation to not need sprites at all, so I reccomend you get some pretty decent sprites.
Otherwise, it's not completely neccessary to follow a set list of actors/weapons that mods should have.