My players have unknowingly presented me with a problem.
Never expect things to always go as you want, naturally.
Situation, 30-35 pirates will end up attacking a residence where some prominent city figures are meeting. There were four routes they can take and i had planned for the pirates to split up in groups.
Now the party has rallied allies that match this number, but instead of deviding forces they plan to bunker down at said residence, this will result in a 70 (including the 5 party) people battle royale.
Otherwise having the skirmishes would be easy to arrange, but now..
Any advice on how to resolve this?
Pick up troop subtype for opponents and probably allies. Case solved
In what way do you mean that.
Do you mean take melee/ranged devided and have them act accordingly?
Because that still will take one hell of a time with such numbers.
In those pirates position I'd run away and revise the plan as soon as it turns out the odds are not in their favor. Fighting a few protectors is one thing, stumbling into an even battle is another and if they divide up it'll end up with smaller groups of pirates meeting up with resistance that has the advantage of numbers.
If they're any wise they'd regroup
If it's a siege..well they might backtrack a little abd bring forth siege weapons - let the defenders see how it's not such a good idea to gather up all in one place with a falling roof as "residence" does not sound very sturdy to use as a bunker able to resist catapult bombardment.
Or you could get the pirates to switch to a sneaky approach and try to pick off the defenders one-by from safe positions until the numbers are slim enough to get back to the "full frontal assault" plan
Also - if you do run into a large scale battle try to organise people into groups, average out some key factors in a group like AC, to-hit and damage and have groups act against groups (this way you can just roll several dozen attacks at once with the same modifiers and DC)
prepare some equations, maybe an excel sheet if a computer is available, to decide how damage is divided up (perhaps by the comparison of a single target ac against the groups average), perhaps set a condition from what ammount of damage a random person in the group falls out