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I would like advice on best next steps for my campaign. I have a group of 7 players but one is on hiatus, so 6 characters in the party. Through use of some of their abilities they cut all of the middle out of VV and basically went directly to Varnhold and then to Vordacai's lair. When they entered the lair they were 8th level. I have been using the conversion for a party of 6 for the adventures, but even with this adjustment and the party being at least one level too low, they destroyed everything in the lair up until the encounter with Vordacai and his graveknight companion (from the 6 player conversion.)

The encounter with Vordacai would have been as easy for them as the rest of the module except I reworked Vordacai's spell list and he gained access to wind wall. Wind wall is the only thing that I could find that would protect him from dropping in one or two rounds to the bolt ace of the party who deals between 100 and 180 points per round in damage.

Vordacai had been scrying on the party as they made their way through his lair so instead of being arrogant, he knew he was at risk of true death to this group. He took a very defensive stance and by the end of the combat had dominated the barcher in the group and paralyzed everyone but the conjurer. The conjurer managed to dimension door out of the lair taking the bolt ace with him.

Vordacai realized that if the group came back with the fore knowledge of his defenses, he might lose, so he offered a truce. He would return the party members to the conjurer if they would leave the area of Varnhold to him. The conjurer has accepted on behalf of their kingdom.

Now the advice. I haven't yet purchased or read the 4th adventure in the series. Does this outcome for VV mean that my adventure path is so far off the rails that my party won't be able to continue in the next adventure?

Also, my group is finding the encounters so easy at this point, that I wonder if that is just going to continue in the next adventure. Their typical approach is for the hunter to send his large cat companion in to tank with its AC of 32 to 36 depending on buffing and then the bolt ace kills everything. The barcher does a little bit of damage and buffs the party. The conjurer adds to the tanking typically with a hound archon and buffs with haste. The occultist is mostly a utility character, but will occasionally close and do some power attacking. He is just at risk from the enemy since his AC is so much lower than the cat's. The ninja is basically ineffective. For those of you that have played / run the modules 4, 5, and 6 of the adventure path, some insight on this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I am preparing to run the Kingmaker AP for a large group of players (7 or 8). My intent currently is to allow only races from the core book, but to allow any PFS legal classes and other material. Given the large amount of downtime that is available in the modules, I was thinking of allowing the item creation feats even though they are not PFS legal. I am planning on allowing the players 15 points to build their characters.

I am concerned, however, about a party this large stomping all over the encounters and the game ending up not being fun. This same group (6 players until very recently, now up to 7) is currently going through the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP with another member of the group running the adventures. The current DM has put in the effort of increasing the difficulty of the encounters for 6 players, so we are level appropriate, but at 15th level we trash everything that we encounter. We are a swashbuckler, a magus, a sorcerer, a fighter (archer), an unchained rogue, a kineticist, and a healing oracle. The kineticist is the new edition to the party. Even adjusted for the number of characters, none of the encounters even slows us down.

I am looking for advice on how to scale and run the Kingmaker AP for this group to make it challenging and fun. I am currently considering the following modifications to the AP to achieve this:
1) Using the wonderful conversions of Alexander Kilcoyne to increase the encounters to be appropriate for a group of 6 players.
2) Adding 1 or 2 additional minions to encounters, where appropriate to further increase both the toughness of the encounters and the XP reward for them.
3) Putting the PCs on the slow progression track to keep them about a level behind where they otherwise would be in AP.
4) Specifying that magical items can only be sold for 1/4 of the their value rather than 1/2 to decrease the amount of loot the party has and encourage them to use the items they find instead of selling them.

So, my questions...

Does my approach to the AP seem to be reasonable? Any criticism any of you would offer, particularly those with experience running the AP and especially if you have run the AP with a large group of power gamers?

Your comments are greatly appreciated.