Several of my players have expressed interest in running mass combat tactically instead of two formless blobs just hitting each other until one goes down.
Objectives:
Allow tactical combat on a mass level without blowing out complexity
Allow individual heroic characters to take on a role without instantly becoming a fine red paste
Allow Leadership feat to give class based armies
Allow powerful individual creatures pose a threat to regular armies (IE dragons, and other gargantuan+ creatures)
Not change the system so much that armies included in Chapter 5 of Kingmaker all have to be redone.
Allow for mass combat in chapter 4 (I strongly suspect my players will want to strongly retaliate properly against the BBEG)
Keep some form of balance
Comments, critique, and ideas welcome!
I didn't read through everything carefully, but it seems you've based your rules off what was printed in the AP. I would suggest looking at the author's suggestions for modifying mass combat rules as well. It's about as official an improvement as you're going to find. There are a number of posts in the mass combat thread on the subject (middle of page 3).
My group has several people, including myself, who really enjoy war games, and I'm toying with the idea of converting the old 1st Edition Battlesystem rules for use in Pathfinder to do at least some of the battles. This will be a lot of work, and take a lot of game time, but I think my particular group will enjoy it.
Thanks Tem,
Grabbed a bunch of stuff from there.
I ran a trial of the rules last night. 4 small armies of CR3 creatures vs. party of 6 level 7's. (50 large creatures) Being CR3 creatures they were dealing the players very little damage, but were resistant enough to the players attacks to give them pause.
Next session I'm giving my players a few allied armies to play with temporarily for a real trial.
I'm not sure if this will help, or not, as I never really read it...
But didn't WotC do a book called 'The Tomb of Battle'?
Maybe that has some helpful ideas...?
The Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords was a late 3.5 book that introduced three "martial artist" base classes (nine "schools" of special ki techniques make up the "Nine Swords" of the title), but had little to do with mass combat.
The earlier Heroes of Battle focused on military campaigns, wherein it's assumed the PCs are military "specialists" using guerilla tactics to change the course of larger battles. It does not, sadly, cover running entire units in mass battles, opting for a flow-chart-style points-based system of how the PCs affect a larger battle and the effect a commander has (expressed as an extraordinary aura) on his/her troops at close/tactical range.