This is the first draft of the new strategic design. This is only a rough draft and will tweaked a lot as it's implemented.

The strategic game will change to focus on occupying territory. The player will start off with one village and try to expand from there.

Each village that the player owns contributes certain amount of weekly tax to the players earnings and has a small labor pool.

Each person in the labour pool has the following skills:

Life points, Accuracy, APs, auto skill, interrupt skill, repair skill, medical skill

The player can hire anyone from the labour pool for a specific assignment according to his/her skills. 

The player must pay a weekly fee up front, plus an initial hiring cost, which is 20% of the weekly fee.

The size of this fee depends on the skills of the employee.

Assignments are as follows:

Soldier in players squad, militia man (used to garrison villages),  gunsmith / armourer,  medic

Possible labour pool for players home village would look like this:

Soldiers in player's squad are directly controlled by the player in a battle and militia men are controlled by the AI. Soldier's in players squad are paid 4 times their normal salary.

The player must supply militia men with weapons, gunsmiths / armourers with tools and medics with med kits to do their jobs.

Each worker can be given any assignment at anytime, which include guarding village, repairing, etc., or traveling to another location.

Each employee can be equipped with any equipment from the village storehouse.

Each village will send out raiding parties to surrounding villages (as in current game). Raiding parties can only be seen from one hex space away. The player can send militia men to any hex space to act as scouts (i.e. to give advanced warning of incoming raiding parties).

When a battle starts all workers in that location will be put in to the battle and can get injured (even if not employed as militia men). Medics and gunsmiths will fight if armed, otherwise they will try to avoid contact with the enemy.

At the start of each week all employees have to be paid in advance, or let go. They can also be reassigned to a different task. The player has an initial amount of capital, so initially salaries can be higher than tax income, but when capital runs out he will have to let employees go.

At the start of each week, new people may enter the village and can be hired.

Some characters will work for free (such as Watski in the current game)

The map will be hexagonal. Each hexagonal space on the map will contain, either empty country side, a village, or mountains / rivers (impassible)

Each village is normally occupied by a hostile militia clan. Each militia will be constantly trying to take over adjacent villages, by sending out attack parties.

Some clans will be too strong for the player to defeat and so the player can ask for a non-aggression agreement, but this means that the player will have to pay a weekly tribute.

Initially, travel is by foot. Traveling through a hex space with a road takes 6 hours and 12 hours if there is no road. If a location is occupied by the player's militia they can see approaching enemy attacks from adjacent spaces. 

These rules can get infinitely complicated if you get carried away,  so I want to keep things as simple as possible for the time being. Any comments , or ideas are welcome.

Sometimes the enemy drop weapons in good nick, but usually they need repair. Also, the guns wear out the more you shoot. Eventually, you will get a gun jam if you don't repair.

I know that and the idea of repairing weapons and armors is ok. I only believe that having to employ gunsmiths etc. to do these jobs, watch if they have enough to do and eventually sack them etc. could kind of overload the strategic part of the game. I would prefer the current design with some modifications. Major cities could be the places where you can buy and repair weapons and armors, sell stuff, heal your soldiers, hire squad members etc. So the players  would be able to concentrate on the core of the game, which is assembling and equipping a squad with the gathered funds.

One final thought: You could maintain the current campaign mode as a "simple campaign mode" and add the strategic part you are currently designing as another alternative, "complex campaign mode". I see pros and cons for both modes and you would give players the choice whether to play a more or less predetermined campaign with a focus on the tactic battles or a campaign that allows them more strategic movement and opens a multitude of strategic options. IMHO the current strategic mode is almost ready to use, only some minor bugs can be found. So I don't see the need of stopping its development. 

Ok, that's it for now. I will wait for the next beta to do some testing :-) Keep up this incredible work!

> Major cities could be the places where you can buy and repair weapons and armors, sell stuff, heal your soldiers, hire squad members etc. 

The problem with that is that the player has to travel back and forth to the repair shop location to fix weapons. With the new design, if an enemy counter-attack is expected the player's squad can wait in the current village, keeping it safe, while repairing / healing, without needing to track back.