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Skirmish Games
Skirmish game rules apply to those games where individual characters are more important than regimented units. The Lord of the Rings miniatures game from Games Workshop and the board game Heroscape are great examples. Skirmish game rules revolve around the specific personalities involved in the conflict and greatly stress their abilities and point values or resource costs. Often the characters will possess special abilities or weapons far beyond that of typical soldiers.
Unit-Based Armies
Games that focus on units as the central core of an army create another set of rules. Unit-based games rely heavily on commanders and morale, and it becomes possible to rout enemy units by destroying a specific number of their troops. Age of Empires for the PC and the miniatures game Flames of War focus on unit-based combat. Most characters in these games are either assigned to a unit or gain benefits from being near a friendly commander. Units are cohesive groups who have trained together and share the same abilities and attributes.
Aerial Combat
Games such as the Crimson Skies series and the interstellar miniatures of Battlefleet Gothic eschew typical terrain settings to take combat to the skies. Aerial combat rules can either be skirmish or formation based. Typical considerations for aerial rules include ammunition and loadouts, travel speeds and agility, and even fuel consumption. Planes and airships may come crashing to the ground by taking too much damage or colliding with one another at high speed.
Naval Battles
Many skirmish and unit based games include rules for naval ships either as transports or gunboats. The video game Battlestations: Pacific and Davey Jones' Locker model game illustrate the genre of rules where sails and propellers need both damage charts and speed information. Gunboats must deal with the ever-changing pitch and yaw created by the sea as well as ammunition and reloading times. Naval rules will focus heavily on the ships themselves, with each having their own statistics in addition to any crew units.
Fantasy Rules
The various games from the Warhammer 40,000 and Warcraft lines make use of a wide variety of rules for miniatures, board games, video and card games. These games also incorporate fantasy elements such as magic spells and summoning reinforcements. Rules dealing with magic will typically include ranges, limitations, and define how many spells or what types casters can utilize in combat. They may also indicate how these arcane elements interact with technology and units on the field.