I think that's the scale where you really want to use some wargame for the session, instead of trying to tie it to PF2 mechanics at all.
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I think that's the scale where you really want to use some wargame for the session, instead of trying to tie it to PF2 mechanics at all.
I'm a great believer in listening to the PCs plans on what they are going to do to influence the situation and then frantically waving my hands as I describe what happens, incorporating as much of their plans as I can manage.
Depending on the situation, sometime they'll be able to decide who wins the battle, other times all they'll be doing is rescuing some people from the unstoppable horde.
I think that's the scale where you really want to use some wargame for the session, instead of trying to tie it to PF2 mechanics at all.I'm a great believer in listening to the PCs plans on what they are going to do to influence the situation and then frantically waving my hands as I describe what happens, incorporating as much of their plans as I can manage.
Depending on the situation, sometime they'll be able to decide who wins the battle, other times all they'll be doing is rescuing some people from the unstoppable horde.
I'll add the asterisk text here. My previous answer is specifically if you're looking to play out the large scale combat, instead of just some smaller point or event where the PCs are.
Beginning in October 2019 I converted the Ironfang Invasion adventure path to PF2 rules. That adventure path is about a war in which the Ironfang Legion invaded southwestern Nirmathas. The adventure path itself started with mostly CR 1/2 Hobgoblin Recruits plus a few CR 1 Hobgoblin Grenadiers and CR 2 Hobgoblin Heavy Troopers on the Ironfang side, but as the PCs leveled up so did the hobgoblins, such as patrols of CR 2 Ironfang Forest Prowlers at the beginning of the 2nd module.
I replaced the CR 1/2 Hobgoblin Recruits with Hobgoblin Soldiers, creature 1, and ported over the Hobgoblin Heavy Troopers was 2nd-level Hobgoblin Soliders with heavy armor. But after porting over the Ironfang Forest Prowlers, I got annoyed at never seeing the basic Hobgoblin Soldier, the mainstay of the Ironfang Legion, again. So I grouped 4 Hobgoblin Soldiers together at a Large 5th-level Hobgoblin Troop unit. This was before Paizo published its first PF2 troops in Pathfinder Bestiary 3, so I developed my own troop rules.
The biggest battle in Ironfang Invasion was the assault of the Nirmathi city of Longshadow in the 3rd module, Assault on Longshadow. The module set it up as a series of vignettes where the 9th-level PCs handle a few difficult raids or ploys and then rest and recuperate while the city defense forces would deal with the most of the enemy army. I rejected that, because my players were more hands-on than that, and individual fights would have been easy for the party. Instead, I had one continuous battle that had the PCs constantly busy and each player also handled a troop unit of Longshadow Archers. The Ironfang Legion's army mostly consisted of 9th-level 16-soldier Ironfang Formations. This is similar to the advice on page 115 of Battlecry!
The new rules presented in this section, which starts on page 158, show GMs and players how to run these skirmish encounters, with each PC taking control of a troop—a group of allied creatures working as one that’s represented by a single creature stat block. In effect, that PC becomes a member of that troop, moving with them across the battlefield as a unit. This gives the character the freedom to move within the spaces occupied by the troop, but makes them a target, as a troop without a leader has a chance to be routed, fleeing the scene as their morale breaks.
However, I kept the PC as a separate character from the Longshadow Archer troop the player commanded, but the PC token had to remain within earshot of the archers in order to give orders. The archers were not minions, so they had their full three actions per turn.
I had around 20 Hobgoblin Formations attacking Longshadow, along with a few Minotaur Troops and Goblin Wolfrider troops and their leaders, such as Brigadier General Kosseruk. The defenders of Longshadow were the seven 9th-level PCs, their seven 8th-level Longshadow Archer troops, and about five powerful NPCs, such as a local wizard they had recruited. They fought from the protection of the city walls; for example, the Longshadow Archers would typically Strike twice with their longbow attack (my troop design used Strikes, unlike Paizo's design) and then Take Cover behind the wall's battlements.
I ran into two problems with this plan. First, each 6-second turn took 1 hour real time to play. Second, the party was spread across three city walls, so they could not communicate with each other. I invented an impossibly fast messenger, Amelia, to keep them in touch. I later explained Amelia as a time oracle.
Long time player. How would you do a Legion of troups?? say 5000 orcs. so 1000 sargent orcs, 200 lietenant, 40 Captians, 8 majors, one General. for a total of 6241 segments ( indivduañ troups)... would that work?? for Path2e? I think it could.
I had intended for the assault on Longshadow to have 1000 soldiers in about 60 Hobgoblin Formation troops, but the PCs destroyed the magic portal through which the Ironfang troops were arriving when only 20 troops (320 soldiers) had passed through. I calculated that the entire Ironfang Legion would have at most 10,000 people in it and some would be support rather than soldiers. Furthermore, fantasy worlds have much small cities and armies than the matching history on Earth, at most one tenth the size. This is a cinematic convention, because fewer people makes the heroes look more impressive.
the leitenants would also have to be signalers with war flags for the various moves. would appreciate an answer to would this work? question.
The GM Core section on Basics of Ability Design says, "Avoid 'invisible' abilities." In this case, invisible means not visible to the players rather than turning invisible by magic. For example, an enemy based on a ranger, such as Hobgoblin Archer, never has to Hunt Prey, the iconic ability of rangers. That is because the players can't observe the Hunt Prey activity. It looks exactly like the ranger standing still for one action. The players need to see what their enemies are doing partly to keep them interested and partly so that the players can invent tactics against them.
Thus, if the enemy army is relying on signalers with war flags for various moves, the players need to clearly see the signalers waving the war flags. The PCs make Society or Warfare Lore skill checks as a single action to read the signals themselves. My very tactical players would try to take out the signalers to send the troops into disarray. As for the lieutenants themselves, make them a Commander-like creature of the same level as each troop they command, because we don't want them too easy to kill. Given them a few Commander Mobility and Offensive Tactics from the list on pages 25 to 27 in Battlecry! Save the Expert and Master tactics for the generals.
I'll add the asterisk text here. My previous answer is specifically if you're looking to play out the large scale combat, instead of just some smaller point or event where the PCs are.
The problem is that PF2 is fundamentally not designed for this. It's combat system is designed around small scale tactical combat.
Battlecry's squad combat rules let you scale that up to "medium scale tactical combat" with dozens (or low triple digits) of participants by grouping them together into squads/troops so you still have a limited number of effective participants too deal with.
You can't run something this scale in PF2's encounter mode and have it work because rounds will take forever to complete, the army sizes are massive, and most of what's going on will be NPCs fighting other NPCs. You'd have to scale the troop sizes up to be absolutely massive to have anything actually workable in encounter mode, and "one PC attacks a 1000 soldier troop" is kind of silly unless the PCs massively outlevel the enemies (because if the PCs don't massively outlevel the enemies in the troop, you have a situation where the fight should end instantly because 1000 Orcs firing bows are going to get enough nat 20s to do a lot of damage and it'll be really immersion breaking that they're not).
What you're talking about is full on army combat. Kingmaker's Player Guide does have rules for that, but it's effectively a different game where the player characters aren't involved.
For real: the best answer for how to do this is "don't". A dedicated war game or army combat themed board game will work better as they're built to do it. Making it a victory point challenge will also work until you can focus in on a smaller scale part of the overall engagement, at which point you can use encounter mode.
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IMO, the "best" way to handle a large battle with hundreds or thousands on each side is narratively using the Victory Points subsystem. The PCs go through a series of squad-level encounters under the Battlecry! rules that simulate the "critical moments" for the larger conflict. The number of Victory Points the PCs gain determines the outcome (with several degrees of success or failure).
You can make the "critical moments" less linear by incorporating some elements of Chases, Infiltration, or even Duels and using a flow chart to base subsequent encounters/events on the results of completed encounters/events.