okay, I think I figured out how I can make my fog of war system work. I just have to write code
like not a lot of really complex code or anything. it's just like... a grid of fog states (stored as an int), a pretty simple shader setup that renders the scene from the top down to a render texture, have a view object that's only rendered to that camera for each unit (just an unlit circle), and then some save/load functionality because I'm a kind and benevolent gremlin who will let people save mid-mission
for SOME FUCKING REASON unity doesn't have a built-in generic-ass blur effect for the post processing stack but since I'm using a fixed distance for the FoW reveal shapes and an orthographic camera, I'm just using the depth of field effect and some tweaked settings. it works p well I think?