We had our first experience with the Mass Combat rules last session, and I was left with a lot of questions and complaints. Since we’re still learning the rules I’m not quite sure which are which yet.
Resources and Consumption seem wildly off somehow. Improved Armor and Improved Weapons in particular provide relatively little benefit at what seems like a prohibitively high cost. If giving an army of 500 warriors a +1 with Improved Armor or Improved Weapons really costs 16BP per month that seems like 64,000gp which could probably be better spent. I can understand the high cost of healing potions, but do our 500 warriors shoot crossbow bolts of pure gold? Obviously there's training and upkeep, but I'm not sure why guys in better armor would cost literally 5 times as much. Maybe the intent is that only smaller armies should generally use special resources, but one of the enemy armies which attacked us was Colossal and had ranged weapons, which would have cost 80BP per month. I wonder if there's any way to plunder the resources of defeated armies.
The damage bonuses and penalties based on the Strategy Track also seem a little extreme. I guess this is more likely to be a complaint than a question since there’s nothing which seems ambiguous here, just a big bonus for being Reckless which every NPC army seems to use constantly. I’d think that since +4 OM is already +4 damage the extra +6 shouldn’t be necessary. Either way it seems likely to lead to very short, swingy battles even during siege warfare. We ended up winning the battle, but the +12 defense from our city didn't help up nearly as much as we thought it would. I guess we should focus on building up our defense bonuses a bit and maybe invest in some healing potions since at least you don't have to pay for those month to month unless you actually use them.