Rayhawk wrote:I tried making a system for stuff like this back in the nineties, but it always got too bogged down when you actually tried to use it, so I gave up. Maybe it would work for something like a forum battle though, since the time scale is different than games played in person.
The idea was that you took a map of territories like this, except built on a baseplate so you can stack bricks on it to show how the territories are built up. Territories might have all the usual wargamey bits, towns or forts or roads or weird terrain features, but the important thing to keep track of game-mechanics wise were Infrastructure (how many CPs of buildings and fortifications are present), Workers (how many minifigs are producing resources for you), and Investment (how much the people in that region support your cause). You also had little army flags that you could run around the map, but you didn't have to decide what kinds of units were in them until the enemy scouted them or they moved into a region where you had some Investment.
It was nice in some ways because you could avoid deciding what kinds of things were actually in any particular army or region until it was time to have a battle there - then you built the infrastructure according to how much Infrastructure you had, and laid traps and got advance knowledge of enemy positions and army composition according to Investment, and had workers and workshops to protect according to Workers.
It was a pretty clean little system in general but bogged way down when it got to specifics. But maybe there's some ideas in there you can play off of, if you really want to do an epic-style strategic campaign.
Why not just make the field smaller? You could reduce this scenario to a few minifigs per team, individual buildings on 32X32 baseplates as territories, and small vehicles (4-wide cars, motorcycles, horses, etc.) and simplify it greatly. The backstory could be something like a turf war between different crime gangs in a city: the gangs make money according to the number of Workers in the buildings they control, then use that money to hire more people and buy vehicles and weapons. But... if an area's investment falls too low, then all of the people you hired from that area (as opposed to the people you started the game with) will desert you unless you pay them more, and the workers in that area will start forming unions and demanding more pay (or, if the investment gets really low, rioting). I'd do it myself, but as I've said before I don't have a lot of baseplates or the money to buy them.