As far as I am aware, battles usually fall into several phases
- Campaign, where political and logistical considerations happen
- Approach, where troops manoeuver into position
- 'Battle', where troops try to achieve objectives / orders that are given to them (no orders = no movement . .)
- Withdraw / Pursuit, which may last a brief time or can take weeks (eg Prussian army destruction 1806)
- Return to campaigning under revised circumstances
In game terms all rule-sets naturally gravitate to the exciting bit, ignoring the reasons for the battle or the aftermath. Hence the suspension of disbelief, which I also loath. So, many years ago, I created a set of simple rules that covered these two aspects by changing the quality of an army over the course of a series of battles. IMHO this would be ideal for an alternative form of 'tournament' . . .
- Players define the size of their standing army, eg 4000 points worth
- Prior to each battle, each player decides how many battlefield locations (objectives) he intends to control, which in turn determines the type and number of formations he can use from his list using a pre-defined table.
- The winner of the battle is determined through the actual control of these objectives. Both players my attempt to get reinforcements / reserves to assist them during the game at the cost of awarding their opponents objective points. The player with the largest number of objective points in the winner of the battle
- After the battle destroyed formations are returned to the "standing army" in the lowest form (eg Raw) while survivors are returned in their state at the start of the battle. Some of these survivors may be upgraded (veteran, elite etc)
- The winner of the campaign / competition is the player with the highest value army
In E:A terms we do not recognise 'Raw', 'Veteran' or 'Elite', but we do have upgrades; So for example, the winner could be given 300 upgrade points, the loser 100 upgrade points, to be banked or used as required for the following game.
(Note, these are the bare principles; there are a lot of other elements that would need to be covered to make this work for an E:A tournament and I suspect that 3 games might be too few, making this difficult to do in a single day)