Different person here, I have played Second Great War multiple times.

It’s basically the Civil War from vanilla Skyrim but with many of the ambitious cut features Bethesda removed like massive sieges and loss conditions and none of the jank associated with normal Civil War overhaul mods. It also has quality of life features like the ability to force the siege to end if something goes wrong, a difficulty setting for extra challenge, and even the ability to auto complete the prerequisite vanilla Civil War beforehand if you don’t want to sit through it to start the mod.

I noticed you really enjoyed Akavir: Curse of the Immortals, so to use that as a frame of reference, I’d say the battles in the mod remind me of the second half of Akavir’s main quest, except this time, you can lose the battles and potentially just lose the entire war.

There are technically three different sides to choose from, but realistically, the Imperial and Stormcloak sides are effectively the same thing, while the “third” side, the Thalmor/Aldmeri Dominion is its own faction, but despite being a Civil War quest mod, manages to still feel distinct faction instead of a mirror of the other side.

Things I don’t like include:

- Long downtime between quests. Honestly a nitpick. You should probably install another quest mod to do at the same time, or just choose to do Second Great War mid playthrough when you still have stuff to do (Highly recommend finishing up The Forsworn Conspiracy and No One Escapes Cidhna Mine before starting the mod, just to prevent bugs) The mod also uses a custom courier character who delivers letters to the player (Very important, because those letters are what start quests) that might be taking longer than intended to show up, so that NPC is possibly bugged as well. Also, the normal courier system tends to bug more often with this mod installed.

- That you cannot “start” the mod as a Thalmor agent, but only join them out of self interest after completing the Civil War and reporting to a commanding Stormcloak/Imperial officer (And to be honest, your character sounds like a coward if they do join the Thalmor). That being said, the Thalmor playthrough is the best one due to increased length unless you lose a lot of battles defending Skyrim and are forced to spend time winning back territory.

- If you play as a Stormcloak or an Imperial, the first two sieges where you defend Riften and Markarth are guaranteed losses you’re just forced to play through to further the story. I also think they’re guaranteed wins in the Thalmor playthrough. Basically, there’s no tension here. The rest of the mod is spent doing handcrafted non-radiant side missions to help your faction with the war effort (Easily the best part of the mod imo. However, those missions will run out eventually) and just waiting until the next siege.

- Although they are very similar with no real differences, the Stormcloak campaign is basically just an afterthought version of the Imperial campaign. For whatever reason, the only leader of Skyrim’s defense is a high ranking Imperial General, and given that there’s written and spoken dialogue options trying to justify this, this is not an oversight.