There's commonalities that develop across fields, video games, the more restricted little brother of the tabletop have in multiplayer forms frequently suffered from balancing the fun right out of the game.

Now, it's certainly no good to have no concrete rules at all, to have a calvinball melee of armies where the mad hatter calls shots, but simulation or abstraction one can certainly lose sight of what what was the point of the whole thing quite easily even when not being driven by headless greedy suits.

Speaking of coin though, it isn't as if your line of thought wouldn't also support purchases, as with different logistics and locations, you'd field different units of your army, which of course means that within a particular army you'll want to have more models, to field different situations. Certainly more elegant attraction than point shuffling, but undoubtedly a higher requirement on the designer's part.

A final obvious note, is that an advantage of wargames is that you can fight countless unwinnable battles without the consequences of their real life counterparts.

Doubtless there's many games and scenarios built upon famous last stands, but history or fiction this teller is uneducated, so his main point of reference for this would be the 300.

Point is, a game needs to be taking into account asymmetry in its design.

You are quite right to consider the fortunes and logistics of war.