Strategic dice fest mechanic

To add a greater level of complexity to dice rolling (although still deterministic), you could make each battle a version of the game of Nim. So, after players decide which dice to commit and how many they roll, the players take turns removing dice until a certain objective is obtained. Perhaps once one player's dice has been eliminated. Or a certain number of turns have taken place. Or something else, depending upon what you want to simulate, the battle would be over.

In this case, rather than abide by the unadulterated rules of Nim however, you might instead imagine a rock-paper-scissors mechanic whereby certain dice defeat others. So... players decide how many dice they want to commit, both players roll dice, the player with the highest command rating in the results goes first (or perhaps just the player who rolled the fewest dice or something else), on your turn you may remove one or more of your dice from the board along with one of your opponents dice provided that your die type results can 'defeat' the opponent's die type (think infantry defeats cavalry defeats artillery defeats infantry), you place your opponent's die either out of the game or in his 'wounded pile' or whatever and your own die(dice) either back on the board, back into your active area, whatever. And then he gets a turn to perform the same action. Keep taking turns until there are no more dice to remove from the pool that was rolled.

If each die has a different combination of sides and there are many more than 6 types of units, then this form of combat would create very strange results because you don't always know what is going to end up turning up. This might work well for a game about brawling between two characters (like Cookie Fu) as long as players could choose the dice that they roll [let's say they have 10 total and they choose 6] and each die is weighted towards certain maneuvers, but for a game about armies using a board, you would probably want to add numbers to each of the dice instead and keep each die as a separate type.

So... in the army battle game, each die has a type and the result would tell you how well it performs. Under these circumstances, rock may beat scissors (1:2) but scissors could still beat rock as well (2:1). The math would quickly show that a mixed force will dominate a single unit force all things equal. But, it could leave open the possibility for a tactically inferior force to get lucky or for a clearly numerous force to defeat even a tactical inferior force just as long as it is willing to suffer high casualties for doing so. By introducing numbers you could also introduce a whole range of values for the dice as well... so a basic unit might have the numbers 1 - 6 but an elite unit might have the numbers 4 - 9.

In this case, the battle would still require some degree of recognizing your greatest threat and eliminating it. But, you could also use some of your units that you want to preserve early so that they are no longer targets. If you want to resolve the battle completely, then you could remove units on both sides (one for one), eliminate the 'victims' and then reroll with all the dice that weren't victims and continue this process until there really is only one player's units remaining. But, you may not need to depending upon the rules that you have for co-occupancy.

By introducing command as well as potentially a third dimension, you might also be able to create a situation where the outcome of forces is not completely obvious so the nim game is difficult to deduce. But, if the real game revolves around the strategic considerations of how to group your forces, where to move and where to attack, then you might not want to introduce non-obvious complexity into the battle resolution. As it is, this method would allow you to choose what units your opponent loses... so if there is a method of retreating, there may actually be quite a lot of decision making to perform in each battle.