Haktar's page

Now that I have done a few test combats (using the armies linked in my post above) I have a few questions:

The way I understand the morale rules each army should make a morale check every round, correct? This lead me to some weird results with the most capable army on one side fleeing (and disbanding!) even though it did respectable damage and did not take any losses. Those were some admittedly poor rolls, but with the low values of the leadership bonuses and no other source for higher morale values most armies can take one failed morale check at best. Unfortunately this makes the outcome of a battle more or less independent of the strength of the armies taking part in it!

Are newly created armies still supposed to start out at Morale 0? I saw nothing that changes this, on the other hand the Rout phase resets them to Morale 1 if they flee.

Is there some other source of higher morale values I overlooked? The table for morale modifiers doesn't list a lot and since I'm not (yet) using kingdom building winning battles seems to be the only way.

I'm also a little confused over melee combat. If two armies enter melee do they both get an attack and a counter attack? With the rules in Ultimate Campaign that would seem reasonable since an army that was attacked should be able to attack another unrelated army, but with the addition of engagement resolving all melees twice per round seems wrong to me.

Lastly, if I have a melee-only army that I want to use to attack some archers can I move during the ranged phase to attack them by advancing? Does the army of archers I attack then essentially move into the melee zone?

#3: The rules say you can use capital for it's purchase value in place of gp for any appropriate downtime activity that forces you to spend gp. So if I have 1 Goods in the bank, can I go earn capital for Labor, gain 2 Labor, and use the 1 Goods to pay for earning the Labor (by giving out goods to the prospective laborers, like giving everyone who helps you move beer and pizza)?

Sounds reasonable, which in part is probably what scares me about it. :-)

I read it that way too and as you said it makes sense. Under 'Purchases' is a strange place to bury that particular rule though ;).

How do you determine statistics and CR of a troop? The troop template lists characteristics, but not statistics.

Are there any additional rules for designing troops to determine damage and CR? Or is it more approximation?

Any info on building troops would be much appreciated.

I'm trying to build tiefling troops for the PCs to fight.

I found a couple of posts on the forums, like this one. As far as I can tell, one should follow the table for designing monsters in the bestiary and come up with some fitting special attacks (like the fusillade for the rifle troops in Reign of Winter).

Where did you find the template? I could only find the troop subtype.

So, two of the downtime activities don't seem to make much sense to me. The first is promoting a business, it seems like it allows you to make a skill check to generate a few extra resources over a period of 1d6 days. The problem is you could earn the same amount of extra capital in one day by taking the earn capital action. Iis this action just written really poorly or is it useless?

Hmm, I'm not quite sure myself. You could read it that way, but it could also be meant to increase your income for each of the following 1d6 days.

The second one is running a business. Taking that action lets you make a capital check for your business at +10. The problem is, again taking the earn capital action on your own is far more productive, your business will gain 1 less resource, but you will gain at least one resource if you have no skill bonus so at worst it is a wash, and usually you will generate more on your own than giving your business +10 will.

The 'Running a Business' action does not say that you should skip the building income for that business. The way I see it you get to profit from your business twice in this situation, once from building income and once by getting the +10 bonus (at the cost of limiting your 'Earn Capital' action to one of the resources generated by your business).

I also think it's odd that guards and soldiers are both warriors of the same level, despite a much greater cost for the soldiers.

The description points out the difference: the guards are cheaper, but they won't actively go into combat somewhere. That might never come up of course...

I found that part on building army encounters I was looking for: There is a sidebar in Ultimate Campaign (page 237) that basically says you can build armies the same way you build regular encounters, now to see if that actually works out ;) :

I built two armies, the dwarven army listed in my original post and an orc army of ACR 8 (Thats 37.5% of the XP of the dwarven army, should be similiar to an APL+1 encounter).

One thing that I'm somewhat sceptical about is the morale values, since they start at 0 a couple of unlucky rolls could end the whole battle after the first round and with either side winning regardless of which army is stronger :/.

I will do a couple of test combats with these armies next.

Haktar wrote:

I stumbled on this blog post about encounter design, APL and XP rewards.

The assumption that the PCs side has exactly four armies is even less likely to be true for mass combat than for regular encounters. The method suggested by the blog post above probably makes a lot more sense for armies.

Using the XP value of the dwarven army (12800xp) I would end up with an ACR 8 army for a 'challenging' encounter or an ACR 9 army for a 'hard' encounter. That could be four companies of 50 orcs with one or two levels in PC classes (that or a bigger horde). Thats looking better already, but I'm still not sure how well this would work in practice. Its also missing resources and command boons for the armies and I'm not sure how big their influence is.

Huzzah! I love when people link my blog! :-)

Personally, I wouldn't use my math for army combats for a few reasons.
— One, I haven't done the number crunching to figure out whether the math is sound for armies.
— Two, bigger chance to fail. "Harder" encounters with armies simply mean more numbers. Without much tactical input to affect the outcome, it'll mostly come down to luck whether you win or loose, especially if you go to ACR +4.

What I would do, personally, is slowly scale up the encounter difficulty. See what your players can handle and give them ways to escape from army combat (aka retreat) without having their entire army decimated simply because you were experimenting.

I will see if I can do some math / mock combats / number crunching and figure out if my APL +4 method is a sound one for army combat, but you won't see my results for a few weeks.

Well, I'm doing this under the assumption that army combat (specifically the XP values for armies) was designed for building encounters the same way as for regular combat. The problem being that I couldn't find that explicitly stated anywhere, so I have no idea if this is correct. This is also why I asked about armies in Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous, since those could show me if my assumption is correct.

The bigger chance to fail is the reason I asked here. I don't really want this combat to end with massive casualties for the PCs, it's really more of a sidequest.

I will build the complete statblocks for the armies involved in the next couple of days and perhaps try them out, I will likely post the results here when I'm done.

Not sure if this is the right place to post them, but while going through my copy I noticed a number of mistakes:

On page 11 the paragraph titled "Army Size" ends prematurely:

However, when the same adventure presents an entire fortress surrounded by giant armies, the otherwise impressive-sounding totals of 32 hill giants (ACR 3, 13 hp), 46 ogres (ACR 1, 4 hp), 11 stone giant maidens (ACR 2, 9 hp), and three armies of around 20 hill giants each (two ACR 4, 18 hp armies of 25, one ACR 2, 9 hp).

On page 12 the section on "Command Limit" has the same problem:

If you are using the Command Limit rules presented here, you should advise.

Among the Command Boons is "Magical Barrage", in the equipment part "Siege Engines, Heavy" references "Magical Bombardment" instead. (Magical Barrage is also used in Ultimate War, so I assume this was just a name change?).

In table 5, in the "Special" column the last three entries should probably move down by one line.

Under "Special Abilities", "Create Spawn" looks like this:

Create Spawn: If an army with the energy drain ability destroys a living humanoid army of equal or greater size, it may add a new unit of its own type to itself; an army with 5 units already cannot create spawn.

I guess this is a leftover reference to the combined arms rules later added in Ultimate War? I haven't really looked at those rules in detail yet. Does this mean that armies with create spawn can essentially "heal" lost units?

I really like the book though and I'm looking forward to try out some mass combat in my campaign soon. I'm a little unsure about how to construct an appropriate challenge for a given army, but since that is not really specific to this book (at least I think its not) a made a separate thread for that question here.

I stumbled on this blog post about encounter design, APL and XP rewards.

The assumption that the PCs side has exactly four armies is even less likely to be true for mass combat than for regular encounters. The method suggested by the blog post above probably makes a lot more sense for armies.

Using the XP value of the dwarven army (12800xp) I would end up with an ACR 8 army for a 'challenging' encounter or an ACR 9 army for a 'hard' encounter. That could be four companies of 50 orcs with one or two levels in PC classes (that or a bigger horde). Thats looking better already, but I'm still not sure how well this would work in practice. Its also missing resources and command boons for the armies and I'm not sure how big their influence is.

My PCs will soon be in a position to command a small army of dwarves.

To introduce my players to the mass combat rules (from Ultimate Campaign with some tweaks from Legendary Games Ultimate Battle) I would like to throw a horde of Orcs at them.

Armies in the mass combat rules have a challenge rating and corresponding xp values and I assume one should be able to use these just like when building regular encounters. I'm a little lost at this point though.

Given an army for the players of ACR X what would be an average, challenging or hard encounter?

In case that helps, this is what I have so far:

If I go by the usual "determine APL, take APL+1 for a 'challenging' encounter" I end up with an ACR 7 Army (3,200xp) against the ACR 11 Army of the players. If I wanted to use a similar amount of armies on both sides of the battle (not unreasonable I think) I would have 4 ACR 3 armies. But that would only add up to four companies of orc warriors 1 which seems kind of weak.

I don't have either Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous, both of which feature mass combat I think. How are the CRs of the armies between PCs and their enemies in those cases?

Any help would be appreciated.