Greetings,
In this post I'm going to take a moment to explain why I think the Nerve system of KoW is in my view more or less as realistic as removing casualties Warhammer-style. The games (WHFB and it's derivatives, I'm going to use WHFB to refer to those as well) differ very much in both the level and the style of abstraction used in translating fantasy battlefields into a tabletop miniature game. Both styles divide the game into turns and both games use dice to represent uncertainty, but aside from those, many things are different.
Where WHFB revolves around single miniatures (they have distinct locations on the field, they attack on their own, they can be killed and removed), KoW revolves around units as conglomerated wholes (they have a location only as a unit, they attack as one whole, they can be attacked as one whole). This leads to a very different approach to damage and how damage affects units.
WHFB treats damage as a singular event, which can lead to removing models and other effects. Damage, when sufficient, leads to a leadership test to see if that blow is enough to cause the victim to flee. This roll is typically always made against the unit's leadership, which is relatively static and is not affected by the amount of damage taken (aside from combat). Battle fatigue is not represented, and the leadership test is not affected by earlier events (the ninth test is as easy to pass as the first). Damage, as in wounds, is seen relatively purely as physical harm that may lead to other effects in the form of panic tests. Damage and leadership are two different things that are only loosely related. You have to take an LD test without suffering any damage, or you may remove many models without having to pass an LD test.
In Kings of War damage accumulates throughout the game, and thus every Nerve check becomes more and more difficult to pass as damage mounts. Damage, thus, is perhaps not seen as wounds, but as fatigue and loss of cohesion in addition to casualties suffered. Maybe only few soldiers have died, but many are wounded, or perhaps the men are becoming mentally battered by the onslaught of foes. Thus, the tests get more difficult as the troops become more and more battered. Damage and Nerve are closely linked as Nerve is the unit's ability sustain damage, sort of Wounds and LD rolled into a single stat.
Questions I've often heard from beginners (and sometimes from veterans too) include such questions as "why doesn't a unit's effectiveness diminish as it takes more and more casualties?" Why doesn't its footprint change? Why don't the units flee and regroup?
Mostly the answer lies in "because it would add complexity that can be done without", as in adding a mechanic for fleeing would add rules that would be likely to create difficult interactions with other rules and make the game more difficult to balance.
I think one should be careful with statements like "But in a real battle...", because most of those claims are often widely off their mark and often take the discussion off the tracks and straight into the bush.
I'm going to make a statement like that none the less, bear with me and correct me if I'm totally off my mark.
Unless I'm completely mistaken, in a real battle of thousands of soldiers, taking fifty or a hundred, or even a thousand casualties could very easily be ignored if your formations did not lose cohesion. As long as your soldiers are willing to stand in orderly lines and keep their heads cool enough to listen to orders, you don't need all four thousand of your soldiers. You need those four thousand so that you can lose two thousand, not because each of them would be utilized to the maximum from the start.
As far as my understanding of battlefield conditions goes, usually soldiers die when formations break and are caught fleeing way more often than in grinding hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. And as the fighting is mostly done by the first few ranks of troops, it's easy to imagine a unit fighting on with full effectiveness despite having lost the reserve of rear ranks (providing that they're very determined).
In Warhammer taking damage was (and in other variants built on that game still is) represented by removing casualties. This is kind of cool, as you can always see the units grow smaller and smaller as you pound away with magic missiles, but the problem is that armies didn't really lose potency like that. Most units, as far as I understand, would be at full effective strength until they broke, and only very rarely would they fight on after taking immense casualties. So I think you wouldn't really see many heroic lone survivors of units, they'd be running for their lives.
Sometimes more abstraction is more realistic, in my opinion, although Kings of War doesn't really strive for that. If simulating battlefield conditions is a thing you strive for, I'd say marking damage on units that fight until they seize to exist is closer to the reality of a formation being worn down instead of a unit that grows smaller and smaller.
TLDR: marking damage is a good mechanic and simulates contact with the enemy in a relatively satisfactory manner. Removing casualties is fun, too, but might lead to a false sense of realism.
Cheers,
AoW
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