Pitaxian army ideas needed

[Ashikaider]

I'm preparing to begin book five, and due to allowing a few things here and there, my players have several armies and a small fleet of airships.

The army in book four was a joke, as the players took it down rather quickly, and captured the general fairly quickly.

Here's what the players have;
They are all level 13 with appropriate and a few extras here and there due to my having to catch up due to previous GMs and the modules being stingy as well as the party tending to negotiate with most of the intelligent encounters.

A small-medium kobold sapper army, this one is mainly for maintaining defenses around the borders in the inimitable kobold style.

A small-medium kobold glider corps. Originally intended for urban and forest based skirmishes, they now come standard on a lot of the airships, and thanks to a friend of a player, now have their own flag logo.

a harge-huge Cavalier Army

a large-huge centaur army, this is mainly for defensive purposes, as in a recent battle, keeping an invading army from Brevoy occupied until the main forces could arrive.

a large-huge Magus army

a medium ranger army

a possible other large-huge army of a type I'm uncertain of at this time,

a med-large army of Ghosts, which are type of stealthy riflemen trained as snipers.

plus a small-medium airship (as in flying boats with cloudkeels) and possibly a small river navy.

Now I'm planning on Irovetti an being a very canny NPC and know that he's had an eye on both the PC's kingdom, but their adventuring party as well.

What exactly should I include to beef up the Pitaxian invasion forces just to that this won't be a total pushover on the player's part?

[pennywit]

If I were wily Irovetti, I'd turn this into a political game as well as a war game. I'd have my ambassadors at the courts of the other River Kingdoms to talk up the threat of the upstart kingdom to the north. I'd send emissaries to the centaurs and the kobolds asking them if they always want to be beholden to the tyrants of the Greenbelt.

While one group of PCs is leading armies, another group of PCs is going to have to visit all these courts to make sure relationships stay patched up. Even if these other kingdoms don't contribute armies to Pitax, they still might use trade embargoes or other forms of diplomatic pressure on the players.

These forms of embargoes and diplomatic pressure can a) create Unrest penalties in the PCs' kingdom and b) cut down on the kingdom's economy and BP income if the players depend at all on international trade.

Which leads into my second point. I think Irovetti should focus on attacking the kingdom, not its armies. Armies that strong are great, but I also expect they cost a lot of BP to maintain. So ... attack the kingdom. Deprive it of BPs, and its armies will suffer. Additionally, these attacks could potentially drive Unrest up even further, depending on how cruel of a GM you are. Some ideas in this direction:

All will work for Swarms!! If he has anybody with vermin empathy working for him (like, say, angry mites), Irovetti could send locust swarms after the party. I'd take the standard locust swarm, then beef up its size until it's ginormous. The point of these locust swarms wouldn't be to take out the armies, though. Instead, the locust swarms would be after improvements. If they aren't contained or stopped, one of these locusts swarms could denude farmland and wineries in, say, one hex per day.

The worms crawl, the worms crawl out. Lord Irovetti sends a vicious army of purple worms that infest the PC kingdom's mines. If a worm is allowed to remain in a mine for more then a day, it will completely ruin the improvement. On top of that, miners refuse to work unless at least one army is detailed to protect the mines.

Rats. Why did it have to be rats? An army of ratfolk rogues with the Burrowing Teeth racial feat. Given your group's bias toward above-ground forces, these little guys could travel almost completely unnoticed, pop up in a city and start killing people, then quickly fade back. From a combat standpoint, these could also be a nasty surprise. Imagine if your players think their Ghosts are beating back a vanilla Pitax army ... and then the Ratfolk show up in ambush!!

[JohnB]

The very first thing I would do is to change tactics and use all of the Wyverns against the airship - separate itfrom the rest of the armies first, if you can :)

Then I would increase the size of the rest of the Pitaxian armies to make them competitive and forge an alliance between the Tiger Lord Barbarians and the Mammoth Riders :)

Then add a team of mercenary necromancers .....

Not to mention half a dozen Giant-champions to keep the PCs busy ...

[pendothrax]

if the odds look this daunting, Ivrotti may break down and ask for help from Narrissa. convincing Narrissa that the pc's and thier armies are standing in the way of recovering her heart should be easy as Narrissa would be rather biased againsts the pcs at this point. armies of compelled animals and fey could provide enough counterpoint to have the issue depend on the pcs actions as intended, even with the enhanced armies available.

[John Benbo]

This is what I'm going to do in book 5, but it involves enjoying mixing in higher levels of technology. I'm giving King Irovetti a robot army using the robots found in the Innersea Bestiary. Irovetti is originally from Numeria (if you are setting your campaign in Golarion), so in my campaign, he was initially aware of them. It wasn't until he met Nyrissa that he found a cache of robots overlooked by the Technic League near the border of Numeria and Pitax. However, the robots won't be operational until book 5. Currently, Irovetti's agents are scouring tombs throughout the nearby areas for the energon cubes needed to power them. These strange cubes were discovered and venerated by the more primitive people (Tiger Lord barbarians, centaur, etc.) that once heavily populated the area. I'll let my PCs get a little cocky by destroying the suggested armies first before I spring the robots on them.

But like I said, this idea isn't for people who don't like to mix sci-fi/fantasy.