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:
- Battalion(100) Veterans of the Orc Wars (Fighter 3) = ACR 8
- Battalion(100) Dwarven Mercenaries (Fighter 2) = ACR 7
- Company(50) Assorted Sorcerers and Wizards (modelled as Sorcerer 2) = ACR 5
- Company(50) Dwarven Scouts (Ranger 2) = ACR 5
- Company(50) Dwarven Berserkers (Barbarian 2) = ACR 5
Adding up to an ACR 11 army overall.
Note: This uses the alternate army sizes from Ultimate Battle, that should not change anything but the number of soldiers though.
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.