How does abstract combat work?

I've been thinking a lot about various levels of abstraction of combat. This post on The 20' By 20' Room was pretty interesting, and got me thinking quite a bit. Basically, you've got three "levels" of combat, casual, moderate and serious. Casual combat is resolved by a single skill vs skill roll. Moderate is best of three, and serious is best of five. The "higher" the level of combat, the more serious the consequences. You can choose to start at any level. If you lose at a lower level, you can escalate to the next level, but you fight at a penalty and pay some kind of penalty. (You lost, after all.) It's maybe the best high-level abstraction idea I've seen. (I think most of the original idea is from Trollbabe, by Adept Press, but I've never seen the game, so I don't know how much was borrowed. I'm very interested in seeing the rules, I'm totally uninterested in the subject matter.)

It's very interesting food for thought. It feels like it might do the kinds of things I'm wanting to see in combat without bogging down in lots of maneuvering. It keeps unimportant combats short and sweet, and automatically allows the characters to make a combat more important if they choose to.

But the description of this system does one of the things I keep seeing when people about combat, and especially when it's abstract combat we're talking about. The examples, and whole mind-set of the system, is always about one-on-one duels. And so much of that abstract combat seems to work very well for one-on-one. But how do you adapt that one-on-one duel abstraction to fit team-on-team, where partners may trade targets, attack more than one target at a time, etc, etc? This question is especially important with superheroes....

I suppose that you could apply this abstract roll to the entire group, but that gets rather abstract... and you have to find some way to measure relative combat ability. That can be rather difficult to do when comparing teams of supers. So if you don't abstract the whole combat, how do you abstract the individual interactions?

Supers is, at a certain level, about tactical combat. So maybe this level of abstraction just isn't appropriate for most superheroic combat. I'll have to think on this some more.