Games focused on Conquest?

Hey Everyone,

Something I’ve come to realize in my years as a tabletop gamer is that despite my love of high fantasy fiction, I’ve never really fell in love with the idea of the classic Dungeon. Many D&D/OSR games I have run with irl friends result in war campaigns and epic battles rather than spelunking and treasure hunting. I credit this to the fact that my general age group of Zillenials grew up on Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies and video games like Total War or Mount & Blade.
This usually presented at least a little bit of tension for me as the game master, as even though most OSR games have rules for mass combat, it’s not quite as deeply considered as delving into dungeons and slaying dragons.

I have been able to make this work to varying degrees with different games at my own table, but I was curious if this dilemma ever cropped up at yours. And if so, what games do you consider most well-equipped for campaigns with a focus on conquest, army recruitment, mass combat, and geopolitical struggles?

I haven't actually played or GMed a campaign with a strong focus on conquest, through I did GM a scene involving a skirmish of a few ships against a few ships a long time ago (or maybe dozen against dozen), so my comments will be very armchair, but here are some that come to mind:

• GURPS has the Mass Combat and Realm Management supplements. I used the former a long time ago for the aformentioned skirmish, but never finished figuring out the latter enough to use it for anything.
• I'm pretty sure FATE Core/Condensed has supplements with factions and mass combats, in fact probably several. From what I remember of the glimpses, they are a bit more abstract than the above.
• I know Exalted seems to have a couple of systems for handling realm-scale stuff, though its original 2e mass combat subsystem is infamously flawed. It's certainly a game line that expects PCs to have their own realms sooner or later though.
• On a related theme, might be worth checking whether Godbound has the right subsystems (because it sure has the same realm-having implications as Exalted).
• I have recently began looking into L5R for unrelated reasons, and one of the editions seems to mention some subsystem related to big battles.
• At least some of the Warhammer-family RPGs have mass combat rules (e.g. ship-to-ship boarding actions in Rogue Trader), though that's a very specific setting.
• Universalis nominally can run at any scale, which means it can nominally handle mass combats and realms . . . but the time I took the system for a test drive, I was very impressed by the ideas and very disappointed by the mechanical implementations, so I'm not sure I'd put much hope into it.
• Microscope has some amount of focus on realm-scale stuff, but doesn't have much in the way of mechanics specifically dedicated to resolving that stuff, so not sure if that's worth looking into for you.

I haven't used them, but Savage Worlds has mass combat rules that are supposed to be relatively simple to use.

Our in-person group just started to get our toes wet with kingdom building/mass combat using DnD 3.5 and the Birthright campaign setting, but we've been on hiatus for a bit. Overall it was pretty neat to focus on more big picture items vs. the standard dungeon crawl/fantasy quest.

Having used the Savage Worlds rules, I can say that they work quite well. I would also remind you that BECMI D&D also has rules for mass combat, and they are pretty straightforward.