Mass combat - 3 different armies or 1 multi- one?


Rules Questions


In Pathfinder mass combat rules, is it assumed that one army will have a variety of different units in it, or that separate armies work together to create a battalion?

Fer instance, when I think of a medieval battle, I imagine rows of archers firing into the enemy while the infantry surges forth, and a well-timed cavalry charge coming in from the sides.

Now, in PF terms, is this A) one, 200-person army with the the 'mount' and 'ranged weapon' resources? or B) is this better represented by maybe a 100-man army, a 50-man army with 'ranged weapons', and another 50-man army with 'mounts'?

Dark Archive

I'd say B, because that is how I've handled it. However, I really can't recommend the Ultimate Campaign mass combat system, because it is really swingy. Consider low level/HD units that can be wiped out with a single lucky roll -- even if they superior cover. For example, 50 orcs throw javelins at 50 archers protected by parapets on a high wall. The orcs need to roll 18+ to completely decimate the archer unit. All dead, regardless of how absurd that is.

I practically created my own system, because the battle ended almost always prematurely when I playtested it; either the 800 goblins easily ran over the defenders (despite stone walls), or the defenders got lucky and suffered no or little losses while killing the whole "horde" in a few rounds.

The system works better if you have two vast armies (1000+ infantry on both sides) clashing on an open field, but that is rarely the case.


A long time ago I created my own mass combat rules, in effect I created an entire wargame system so that I could do large combat in D&D. But that meant moving between different rules systems to work out the situation.

In the past several years I've decided that massive combat between armies is part of the background story of the campaign, and is not something I even game out if the party is not directly involved, I just write the ending I want.

If the player party is involved, I define some critically important tactical objective for them that will impact the battle in some meaningful way. Perhaps it will mean army A wins if they succeed and army B wins if they fail, but usually it is less impactful than that, but determines if a key prisoner is rescued, or if the defeated army can retreat without massive losses to fight another day or if some key enemy is captured.

Then I set up encounters that are sized for the PF rules and run the encounters as the battle rages on in the background.

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