Ok, this is somewhat chaotic but I'm posting a strategy, based on some games I've alteady played with army combats. It's not perfect but it has worked to me. Probably you'd need to adjust and improve it a bit but I hope it helps.
Ranger: This ranger's only duty is dealing ridiculous amounts of damage with ranged attacks. If you are fighting an army, most of its members will be probably of the same race, so a ranger can take full advantage of his Favored Enemy. Keep him focused on enemy spellcasters or higher level characters. He also should focus on any flying enemies before they come close to your spellcasters.
Ninja: Cast Invisibility + Non Detection + Telepathic Bond (with anyone who can AoE) on him and Silence on some item that he's carrying and can easily get rid of . He must have Invisible Blade. His mission is to identify and bring down enemy spellcasters. His course of action is making a full attack on one of them, then move to the next spellcaster. He has to keep the spellcasters informed of his position so they never AoE him by accident.
Druid: The Druid is the key here. Control Weather is a good way to make sure your casters and ranged characters don't have their effectivity hampered by unwanted climatic conditions. Control Winds will easily get rid of any cloud spells the enemy could cast or make flying enemies land. You need perfect visibility for this fight. All the party must have Fickle Winds and Air Walk (communal) on them. This way, you won't have to worry about most ranged attacks. Any spell that creates difficult terrain will be useful here, as you are Air Walking and only the enemy will have hindered movement.
Blasters: What we are trying to get here is the highest amount of casualties before the enemy comes to our position and kill all the mounts. High damage and wide area spells are cool, as your enemies shouldn't have a lot of hit points. Rime spells and dazing spells work great to hinder some of them, and enlarged spells allow to affect wider areas.
Cloudkill can be devastating when fighting large groups of low level enemies.
Selective spells can be cool if the enemy comes to melee, but we are trying to avoid that.
Counterspelling/Dispelling: The weak point here could be the enemy spellcasters. We have a Ranger and a Ninja bringing them down, but they can still break us with a well placed dispel or control as well as some nasty effects that could avoid focusing on them. So there must be always one or two spellcasters on our side with readied actions to counterspell or dispel any undesired effects. More than having a single character focused on dispelling I'd have all the spellcasters to have some ways of counterreacting the enemy and determining who is the most appropiate to focus on dispelling/countering each round. When all the enemy spellcasters are down, they can take more active roles.
Area SoS spells: As most of the enemies are low level and presumably martials, SoS spells that target Will saves are more effective than usual. I probably wouldn't have a single character focused on SoS, but they can have some SoS as an alternative to blasting/dispelling.
Frontliner: Probably an army will have some higher level characters who are not dealt with easily with the previous strategies. The frontliner is a melee character that can keep these controlled. In my actual party we have a tankish fighter with TWF and a sword and board build who has a lot of AoO and keeps enemies in their place as well as cutting projectiles. She's very useful when things come to close quarter combat. We also often cast Silence on some of her items and get her rushing to enemy spellcasters, as she keeps them in place with Stand Still. But I can't be of much help here with the better build or class here.
Healing: More than having a proper healer I'd give healing spells to more than one member of the party. You don't need a devoted healer. Having someone able to cast healing spells with some reach (spectral hand, prehensile hair, reach spell metamagic) will avoid the healers to come into melee. A reach spell rod is not very expensive and could be shared by the characters.
The Blockbuster Wizard
Some sort of Dwarven Fighter specializing in reach weapons and cleaving, that is just able to hew through everyone.
With so many weaker opponents, powerful AoE spells are much more useful. At the same time though, a durable all day fighter that is strong e nough to take on weaklings also holds merit.
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IMO: a couple of summoners, ideally with the master summoner archetype. Summons are more than roadblocks against noticeably lower level enemies. Also they can supply some buffs.
You will need some martial types to intercept enemies that get through and to handle guard and watch in the times between active battle. A ranger or three (battle scout, guide, and/or maybe a trapper if the mooks might use traps) would probably be most flexible in this role.
A cleric because a dedicated healer isn't a waste in a large group. Probably an evangelist so as to have more buffs available.
One ninja to assassinate spellcasters as Kileanna suggests.
One sorcerer to handle area blasting. A sorcerer in particular because they get more spells. Rather than max damage (which is probably overkill) you want rider effects. Wildblooded Void-touched wouldn't be the worst possible choice.
If you take only two rangers then you can have a dedicated counterspeller - probably an arcanist.
Dwarf earth/aether kineticist with reach shenanigans
Hunter w' stegosaurus companion and a trip focus (possibly dorn-dergar?)
Half Orc Goliath druid w' Vital striking t-rex
Wizard or Sorc IDGAF
Summoner cleric
Archer ranger
Investigator or grenadier alchemist.
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Ranger: This ranger's only duty is dealing ridiculous amounts of damage with ranged attacks. If you are fighting an army, most of its members will be probably of the same race, so a ranger can take full advantage of his Favored Enemy. {. . .}
This is assuming that they are not all of a type you didn't pick for Favored Enemy, or that you're high enough level to cast Instant Enemy.
Ninja: Cast Invisibility + Non Detection + Telepathic Bond (with anyone who can AoE) on him and Silence on some item that he's carrying and can easily get rid of . He must have Invisible Blade. {. . .}
Invisible Blade can't come online until level 10, at least. So you need something to use before this. Unfortunately, Greater Invisibility is too high level to make a Potion of, unless you allow the pre-Unchained Summoner spell list.
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Blasters: What we are trying to get here is the highest amount of casualties before the enemy comes to our position and kill all the mounts. High damage and wide area spells are cool, as your enemies shouldn't have a lot of hit points. Rime spells and dazing spells work great to hinder some of them, and enlarged spells allow to affect wider areas.
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Enlarge Spell is counterintuitively a nearly obsolete metamagic feat for increasing the range of spells, superceded by Reach Spell except in the case when you need to increase the range of spells that have Long range out of the box (these metamagic feats should really be stitched together into one). The metamagic feat you want is Widen Spell.
Counterspelling/Dispelling: {. . .}
The problem I see with this, in addition to counterspelling reportedly not being very good without considerable investment, is that if you are up against an army larger than you, you may actually hurt your own action economy worse than theirs. If you are using Readied Actions to counterspell, you are losing actions, and so are they, but being in greater numbers, they have more actions to burn than you do.
Area SoS spells: As most of the enemies are low level and presumably martials, SoS spells that target Will saves are more effective than usual. I probably wouldn't have a single character focused on SoS, but they can have some SoS as an alternative to blasting/dispelling.
To this add battlefield control spells that target something other than Will, like the various Entangles, later the various Walls, and eventually spells like Black Tentacles and Dazing Fireball (and even later Dazing Persistent Fireball) (use a Metamagic Rod for the Dazing part). Having some characters (usually the martials and/or skill monkeys) go for multi-target Intimidate builds wouldn't hurt either (especially if the enemies have Occult casters).
Frontliner: {. . .}
If you are up against hordes, you probably want Cleaving feats or Whirlwind Attack on your martials. Also, as noted above, Intimidate could be good, although watch out for feat starvation. In addition, if your party is a small army, Teamwork Feats start to get more attractive, and characters such as Cavalier that can grant Teamwork Feats to other party members become especially more attractive (although watch out for limited uses per day).
Healing: More than having a proper healer I'd give healing spells to more than one member of the party. You don't need a devoted healer. Having someone able to cast healing spells with some reach (spectral hand, prehensile hair, reach spell metamagic) will avoid the healers to come into melee. A reach spell rod is not very expensive and could be shared by the characters.
Doesn't the limit on uses per day of a Metamagic Rod go with the item and not with the character? If you pass it around (which would not be easy in the situations in which you would need to do so, and you DON'T want to have your pass intercepted), it is going to run out of uses per day pretty quickly.
One other thing I want to add is that the bigger your party is, the better a Bard or equivalent gets(*), as well as Tactician types of characters(**), and party buffing items (Banner of Ancient Kings, etc.), and of course Communal or Mass party buffing spells(***) from any class that can cast them (beware of buffs that don't stack, although these are still not useless to have in the same party, in case one buffer gets taken out of action or runs out of the required resource, or one source of buff is otherwise rendered unusable).
(*)Includes Skald, various Bardic Performance archetypes of various classes, and Battle Herald.
(**)Includes Cavalier and archetypes of other classes that get the Tactician ability (and normally a Battle Herald build will have this as well) -- see Frontliners above.
(***)Naturally, this includes spells that have Communal or Mass capability out of the box without having these in their name, such as Bless.
Fire Kineticists can put out very impressive amounts of damage over a large area.
Against 4xtimes the party number of half Cr opponents a blaster optimised for fireball or chain lightning depending on level will probably kill them all in 2 spells.
A kineticist would probably also work.
Totally aggree with you in your corrections, UnArcaneElection. I wasn't very exhaustive with my analysis as I wrote it kinda quickly and it was meant to be a rough sketch of a strategy, similar to some that I've used before with success.
Of course battlefield control as entangle etc. is very useful, but I mentioned it when I talked about the druid.
By the way, I meant widen when I said enlarge. As I call them for their Spanish name I mess up a lot with the names xD
About the rod, I've succesfully used it that way before, as I've used it more often as an emergency than something to use all the time. Depending on how much you use it, it could be better to invest on the feat.
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For an actual full army. a Druid level 13 with spell speclilization control winds is probably best.
Druids are great for this kind of stuff.
In a game I GMed, a lvl 15 druid PC destroyed a whole town, bringing down some stone buildings. It didn't take her a lot of spells to do it (Control Weather, actually casted by the enemy as a defense, and Control Winds).
Agreeing on kinteticist. At-will AoE and DR.
Should also be good against swarms (not that being up against hordes guarantees being up against swarms, but in some ways it is an extension of the same concept).
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I think the opposite is probably an issue, how do you challenge a large party even with a large number or lower level foes ?
And the answer probably starts with an ambush and lots of ranged attacks.
Have the army do the same stuff as recommended for the large party to do, but even more so.
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I would go all wizards and druids. Have the wizards go for battlefield control spells. Get one necromancer with false focus and you can make your own army. Actually give everyone False Focus.
The other wizards can use things like grease and spark to roast people alive. Any creature with DR will be able to stomp a low cr army.
Have the druids use there massive list of battlefield control spells. Stone Call is a good candidate for this. Free damage and slow them and maybe have the wizards drop a black tentacles on there.
Druids handle condition removal and out of combat healing. Wizards handle anything a rogue could do. Fighter can be replaced by another druid with an animal companion. What would a figther and rogue bring to the party?
After the party hits 5th everyone should be flying and you can windwall. Low cr enemies cant get past it. You can then just spam aoe spells or heck cantrips if you have the time.
Also make sure to get sprinkle some crafting feats as the characters level up. Take the garbage gear and turn it into magic items.
Druids wildshaped into tiny flyers blasting away with call lightning, flaming sphere, and other longish duration area effects and blasts. Can also use damaging battlefield control spells, like spike growth and spike stones and battlefield altering spells, like move earth and stone shape. Can also do emergency healing and summoning to block those on the run.