Simplifying warfare with a duel system

The post is very long. I hope you enjoy it.

I probably made a similar post a long time ago. I recently got a new approach to the problem which was inspired on "Age of mythology" and "Fury of dracula".

In age of mythology, you have unit cards, each player play a card face down, reveal, then roll the dice and remove the units in the battle. In a variant I made for this game, since I did not liked the mind games mechanic, I changed the rule so that the player pickup the cards to duel randomly from their opponent's hand.

In fury of dracula, player select a combat card, reveal, roll a die and resolve. The card played stay on the board and players can only use cards which are left in hand. When the second card is played, the first card played returns to their hand. So there is always one card that cannot get used.

Objective: I want a combat system that allow players to take decisions during battle, that can allow a huge variety of units and abilities that can still be resolved in a reasonable amount of time. The problem is that is very hard to synthetise all the special abilities of all units for the whole battle to make sure it can be resolved easily.

Solution: So my solution would be to have a warfare of duels. Units duel each other and the result influence the war. So there could be a large amount of stats, abilities and counter abilities it does not matter because I only need to resolve what happen between both these units rather than how does these units impact the whole battle.

How the cards are going to be played? I want it to reflect how the decision would be taken in a real battle. So I was thinking that the attacker could place a unit card and the defender can play any card he wants. The battle is resolved. The loser discard his card and the winner leave it on the table. This card is resting and it will get back in hand on the next turn.

Defender: The defender can do the same, but staying in defense allows him to gain the benefit of any defenses in place. Then, the attacker can attack the card resting instead of a card from the defender's hand. So using a card expose it to further attacks for 1 turn.

Paralysis: Some cards would have special abilities that could [b]paralyse[/b] a card (ex: Paralyse, sleep, confuse, fear, etc.) This card would stay in front of the player like a resting card and could be the target of attacks and spells. To put that card back in hard, you would need to succeed a save roll at the beginning of your turn.

Card types: There would be various kind of cards availble: Units, traps, Heroes, defenses, spells, etc. Traps could be triggered in specific situation (ex: the first flying unit to attack triggers the trap). Spells could be used to target exposed units or support units you use. Defenses are permament bonus that only applies when you get attacked.

Discard Units: When a unit lose a duel, it gets discarded. Which means that unit card has received severe lost and cannot be used again. According to how you invested in your army, you might get a 2nd or 3rd card of the same type. Some cards will be "endless". Which means that you have so many of that unit in your army that it is always available. There are some basic units (ex: spearmens) that are parts of the bulk of the army, these will be endless.

Duel impact on warfare: Each time a unit lose a duel, your army lose health. According to your invenstement through the game, you are going to have an army size which determines the number of times you can lose a duel. If you lose a duel that many times, you lose the war. Which meant there will be situation where players can have small/large armies with few/lot of cards. This reflect the quantity/quality aspect of the army.

Tactical Victory: I am not sure yet about this one. I wanted to have a situation where you can win without killing everybody. If the attacker manage to get 3 tactical victory, he wins. A tactical victory means capturing an important target that brings you closer to making the ennemy surrender.

Some units like flying or teleporting units makes it easier to capture tactical points. So my first solution was if a player lose a duel against a unit with an high tactical value, the attacker get's a tactical victory. Or each area of the map has 3 terrain location. Each location has defenses ability and the attacker target one of these 3 areas when he play his card. If he wins the duel in a certain way, he can capture the tactical area.

What do you think?