The only real big story conflictions I've come across is the Legion vs. Stormcloak war.

DragonBorn has the option of making either one succeed, so which do you think it will be?

Will it be either? Or will they retcon (am I using that word right?) an outcome where it doesn't really matter?\
Or, gods forbid, will they pull another Warp in the west?

I know that its not a big deal, but it could have some drastic outcomes. ie: with skyrim in rebel hands, the empire collapsed and the thalmor or more powerful than ever/the empire gains the support of skyrim eventually gaining more strength to stand a better chance against the Thalmor.

Also why'd you choose which side you did?
My Breton Skill Fighter (light armor/dual wield swords) initially went with the cloaks because of the whole execution thing and all. But after learning his place in history, he realizes that the Tamriel needs to be united against those that would harm it (mainly the thalmor now) and he thinks that the empire is the best bet.
Also he wants to see the empire back in its former glory. His great great grandfather (more or less, I'm not all that great with timelines) help defend against the daedra when they attacked the imperial city.

If we take the Beth norm into account, the canon ending will be something that can will be shrouded in mystery, though I am not aware how that can be done with the civil war. I think the peace talks at High Hrothgar (the specifics being mysterious) will be the canon ending to the civil war. From there Beth can be free and go all Red Year on those that remain (aka kill off the important people, like Ulfric and Tullius).

I'd imagine it'll probably be something where it doesn't matter who wins, like the whole country is weakened by the war so the Thalmor take over.

Warp of the North?

Or maybe something more important happens before the setting of the next game and the stormcloak/imperial struggle hardly matters at all.

I agree will be rezzed.

Skyrim will be an aldmeri dominion. Or part of a another "non-Imperial Empire" (I understand myself) that won't be ruled by the Thalmor puppets from Imperial City or the Falmer pulled a Dragon Age Blight and destroyed the country or something.

I think people are overestimating the power of the altmer.

They'll say there was a civil war in Skyrim and that the Empire was shaped by the conflict.

That's it.

I kind of don't see them pulling the dragon break card again.

The "who wins the rebellion" question is probably one of the easier ones - either the Thalmor invade, or some sort of mythic calamity strikes Skyrim, thus rendering who took control of it at the end of the game moot. The basic necessity of the lore is that whatever actions you took outside of the linear main quest cannot matter, and having the Thalmor invade and kill off whoever was the winning side in the civil war will be the quickest and easiest way of doing that.

They can't pull a Dragon Break out of their ass very often. It's an incredibly tricky plot device to use, since it's basically just Deus Ex Machina that happens to be extremely well-written and woven into lore thanks to some retroactive work by Michael Kirkbride, but you can't go digging the Numidium out of the storage bin to clean up your messes every friggin' game. That's why the main quest plotline has to be so linear, where there is only one path, killing the final baddy, where there is only one final baddy to fight, and you have no choice in the matter.

Next game gets to be about how the Thalmor are about to end Mundus after trying to kill Talos in some giant genocidal war to wipe out mankind and all the mer that aren't part of their cult. Maybe this gets to be the game where we actually build a tower, instead of just breaking one.

There's still the option of a third party rising to power too. Especially considering the moot doesn't appear to take place in the vanilla game. A curious omission, imho.

and how the hell are they going to do that? They can't even get troops there, by land, without starting a war with cyrodiil, Hammerfell, and Highrock. And they can't go by ship without a number of Naval battles. By the time they got there they'd be battered and beaten.

Dragon break. I mean, you literally travel through time, and break several dragons.

Neither. Reference to the victor will no doubt be obscure or a dragon break will be used to explain away it.
Maybe another event will take precedence over the civil war, such as a falmer or akaviri invasion? perhaps.

so what dragon did we break at teh end of the main quest? oh the knockoff dragon god of time...i wonder if that might cause...i don't know...a dragon break? Maybe the dlc will also add in some more mythic mumbo jumbo to really set up for the next game

Maybe it will be something like "The empire/Stormcloak rebellion was severely weakened, almost to the point of being wiped out in Skyrim, but in the end gained control" This could work for either party and allow whatever the player did to make sense.

Why can't they do that in between games?

The Thalmor didn't even EXIST until the space between Oblivion and Skyrim. Now, they already own half of Tamriel, and are only temporarily in remission. Plus the Empire is basically knocked down to High Rock and a Cyrodiil that has had most of its cities burned to the ground and most of its population put to the sword by the Thalmor's genocide campaign. Then what's left of the Legion has to fight in a civil war while the Thalmor consolidate their power.

Plus, what's really stopping them from using their navy? Summerset Isle is a chain of islands, after all, they have to have naval transports to even wage war at all. There is no real talk of the naval power of either side, so it's just as easy as saying the Empire suffered a major naval defeat. Then, they can just sail straight into Dawnstar and start going to town.

The justification for taking on Skyrim first instead of going after more obvious targets like Hammerfell again can be that they needed to wipe out the Talos worship there, and that it was already weakened and ripe for the taking.

In between games, say there was 10 years of chaos following the death of the Emperor, the Empire couldn't recover in time, Skyrim got invaded, Hammerfell's on the ropes or already conquered, Cyrodiil is being invaded again, High Rock is in danger, Morrowind is still largely out of commission, and Black Marsh is still neutral. Humanity looks ****ed.

The next game can be centered around the Thalmor trying to break one of the last few towers, with an Empire that can't even extend past the Imperial City, and only a handful of rebels from whatever province the game is centered on resisting Thalmor rule.

Correction, the Thalmor have existed since Tiber Septims time they do not own half of Tamriel, they own Valenwood and have Elsewyer divided into client states, which is hardly half of Tamriel. The distance between the isles and the northern ports of Skyrim are beyond the logical reach of the Dominion without having ports in the storm to resupply and rest.

It would be quite a long haul, even for the Thalmor. On the one hand you'd be sailing through the waters of Hammerfell who may or may not find it in their hearts to attack the ships, so that would be quite unfortunate for them (including potential piracy). On the other hand longer route in the opposite direction, but that seems hardly efficient. Add in the fact that the sea of ghosts is less than hospitable and you got a recipe for trouble. The Thalmor would be better off taking Highrock and going from there than trying to invade Skyrim directly.

They were only a footnote of the past lore before the time between Oblivion and Skyrim, and got promoted from nowhere to continent-menacing power, so that's a fairly minor distinction. The point is that they rose from "something nobody ever really knew about" to "the biggest threat to humanity" in the space between the games.

Also, how do you really know they can't make that voyage? There have been naval transport actions going between continents like Tamriel and Akavir on multiple occasions in Nirn's past. How can you really say the trip from Summerset to Skyrim is THAT much further than the trip to Akavir?

Besides which, the primary weapon of the Thalmor are not soldiers, but spies, assassins, and propaganda. They already have agents there, and they can further cause Skyrim to crumble from within what with the tremendous infighting and chaos they caused with setting Ulfric off against the Empire that could serve as cover for more subtle sleeper agents to just kill off everyone who could stop them.

Unless you follow the MQ treaty portion, where you

Ninja'd

So what? You think the Thalmor would just say, "Oh, darn, that means all our sleeper agents have to leave, too!"

Besides, that peace treaty is an obvious joke that is more flimsy than the peace accord between the Empire and the Thalmor - it won't last, and the Thalmor probably won't respect it.

Look, if the writers want the Thalmor to invade, they are going to invade, and any reason they couldn't invade is just going to get swept under the rug with a handwave explanation. Just like how the Thalmor rose to power out of nowhere, Valenwood and Elseweyr collapsed with minimal conflict, Hammerfall and Black Marsh are now independent, and Cyrodiil was so utterly unprepared for the conflict with the guys who took over Summerset from nowhere.

Noo, in the past they were the ruling body of the Aldmeri Dominion, and only a minor foot note because the majority of information comes from a heavily propagandized Empire. Its only recently their religious fascism has really come to the forefront.

How do we know? simple common sense really. Such an Armada would need first and foremost to have several way point in which they can dock and establish a supply line from the homeland. This would mean having to secure ports along the way in which they can dock. Tamriel's invasion of Akivir was done in several stages in which the Empire secured islands in which they basically hopped their way there. If we say their about the same distance, the Dominion would still have to take the same precautions. An armada cannot simply sustain itself and the men it holds on the sea without ever making port. Its just not logical.

Those may be their best weapons, but we were referring to an invasion, in which one by sea would be illogical and impossible without further conflict with the Raga and the Bretons and possibly the Empire yet again.

edit: If you pay attention to the lore, they didnt' arise out of nowhere, they had a very large power base before the Dominions conquest by Tiber and they have vast hold amongst the old and powerful Altmer families.

If you pay attention to what I'm saying, I'm talking in the meta-game, not the lore.

The lore is rewritten or at least fudged any time the writers need to have some events happen in their story. There was no real indication that the Thalmor were "resurfacing" in the lore until they needed to start ramping up the lore to meet the requirements the writers would need to write the story for Skyrim. They needed a threat that sounded nice and menacing, so they dusted off a name that was sitting in the dust bin of their game lore, made them out to be the new menace, and set them upon the Empire.

If the writers want to invade Skyrim, they will make a giant magical portal to teleport their ships halfway around the world if they have to. The Thalmor threat appeared from nowhere to begin with, canon-wise, so they can give them new menacing secret weapons from nowhere just as easily.

I did pay attention to what you were saying, to which you said explicitly that they didn't exist until the inbetween time of Skyrim and Oblivion, which is wrong. You then say they were but a minor foot note, which again is wrong lore wise. Before the new lore the Thalmor had heavy ties with important and influential families in both Summerset and Valenwood.

I simply brought up a point about how logically an invasion of Skyrim by the Dominion would not be feasible without further conflict with the free states of man. You asked why they couldn't use their navy to avoid having to go into conflict with the Empire via land war, I gave a logical reason why they couldn't in response. If they want to force an invasion, they will like you said, but that wasn't the discussion.