Combat mechanics

Hey Miketangos!

First off, welcome aboard! It's great to see new people a the site.

Second, in answer to your question, I'd say, "It depends." What kind of feel do you want in your game? "War Games" covers a lot of ground, from detailed simulations like Advanced Squad Leader through moderate abstractions (Memoir '44) to complete abstractions (Risk). The math tends to get more complex as the simulation becomes more accurate, ultimately requiring huge rulesets with detailed lookup tables. All of these games have an audience, though often it's not the same people playing each one.

So, some basic questions to consider:
1) How accurate do you want your combat simulation to be?
2) What is the scale of action of your game (you'll have to abstract *something* if you want to represent theater-wide conflicts, for example)?
3) What is your desired pace of play?

I will say this: the system you outlined above does suffer a bit from "too many numbers with too many different meanings." For example, if I roll a '1' on a defense, die, it indicates success. To find total defense, I take the number of defense successes and multiply by my defense rating. This requires players to process the numbers on the dice, then count the dice, then multiply times the defense rating.

One way to short-circuit this process and get other parts of the brain involved would be to use symbol or color dice instead of numerical dice. I'll use a color dice example, but symbols might work better (see Memoir '44 for an example).

Example:
Suppose you have 6-sided color dice with the following faces: black, red, green, yellow, blue, white. Black always indicates failure. White is always defense. The remaining colors indicate success for different unit types. For instance, an infantry unit may succeed only on white and no other color, while and armor unit may succeed on white, blue, and red. The success colors would appear on each unit counter for ease of reference.

On the defender's turn, he rolls the dice and separates out those with success colors, then multiplies these by his units' defense rating to compute his total defense.

Even though this is the exact same system, it feels less "mathy" because you've employed a different part of the brain in the initial steps.

Once again welcome! I hope you'll continue to update the site as you develop your system further.
Good luck!