Mecha Omega: walking a fine line

So Mecha Omega sees me returning to alternate history. I've used alternate histories a lot in my books (as well as not-so-alternate histories in Legends of the Dark Ages and Legends of the Samurai).

In books like the original Vigilance, Blood and Relics and Blood and Time, I've dealt with history and with its permutations for gaming purposes.

In this case, I'm trying to walk a fine line. Clearly the Omega Matrix and the things that can be created from it, including mechs, have had a profound influence on human history.

And of course there's the issue of alien visitation and occasional conquest.

Still, I want to walk a line where not EVERY weird event and great man is somehow influenced by the weirdness of the setting.

I've seen this happen, hell, I've done it myself but here I want to make sure that plenty of things happen just the way we think they did, while a few things were very different.

So for example, while Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Caesar Augustus are men capable of wielding Omega Energy, I specifically left Julius Caesar "out".

He was a great man and was driven by a desire to capture and control the Omega Energy, as his hero Alexander had done but he was never able to succeed in that quest.

This line will get harder and harder to walk as the timeline moves forward I think.

For some reason, making Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan able to manipulate the Omega Energy seems cool, while having JFK be assassinated because he could manipulate those same energies seems dumb.

I'm also aware this is a matter of personal taste and there will probably be people who want Omega Energy's influence on history to be extremely rare.