I recently read and played through a few times Five Parsecs from Home as well as Five Leagues from the Borderlands. Both by Ivan Sorensen, the Nordic Weasel. I recently picked up War Story of his as well.
I then was thinking, I forgot so many parts of 5PFH and 5LFB that I wanted it to be simpler. So, I remembered War|Maker and essentially subbed out the resolution rules for conflict and I had a blast. Made my crew HERO FORCES, and then the enemies either REGULAR or HERO FORCES depending on the size. Given my small table size, it worked out fairly well playing solo. Also inspired me to build some paper and crummy cardboard terrain.
I think one thing that I really enjoyed about blending the two was the story tables and helping guide a narrative I didn’t know much about with Five Parsecs with War|Maker.
This is awesome! I really want to start up a narrative war game like this. I know you’ve shared it with me before, but I definitely need to check out War Story.
Also - Space Weirdos has a really clean activation rule set for solo play, that can be adapted easily to use with War|Maker or any other war game really!
So, I ended up using WAR|MAKER for my mass combat engine in Shadow of the Weird Wizard recently. Since SotWW uses d6s for all damage, it was perfect. The Players could still roll their 11d6 but only count the 4+ hits and then knock out the REGULAR or HERO FORCES as they succeed. Then the HITS from the NPCs were counted against the HP of the PCs and then 1:1 for the REGULAR forces the Players had.
At default, the scale works well for Level 4-6, but then they’re super powerful, and the only way to equalize it is to add more HITS to all FORCES or add more FORCES to the table.