Preparing to run Kingmaker for a Large Party

[SunJester68]

I am preparing to run the Kingmaker AP for a large group of players (7 or 8). My intent currently is to allow only races from the core book, but to allow any PFS legal classes and other material. Given the large amount of downtime that is available in the modules, I was thinking of allowing the item creation feats even though they are not PFS legal. I am planning on allowing the players 15 points to build their characters.

I am concerned, however, about a party this large stomping all over the encounters and the game ending up not being fun. This same group (6 players until very recently, now up to 7) is currently going through the Curse of the Crimson Throne AP with another member of the group running the adventures. The current DM has put in the effort of increasing the difficulty of the encounters for 6 players, so we are level appropriate, but at 15th level we trash everything that we encounter. We are a swashbuckler, a magus, a sorcerer, a fighter (archer), an unchained rogue, a kineticist, and a healing oracle. The kineticist is the new edition to the party. Even adjusted for the number of characters, none of the encounters even slows us down.

I am looking for advice on how to scale and run the Kingmaker AP for this group to make it challenging and fun. I am currently considering the following modifications to the AP to achieve this:
1) Using the wonderful conversions of Alexander Kilcoyne to increase the encounters to be appropriate for a group of 6 players.
2) Adding 1 or 2 additional minions to encounters, where appropriate to further increase both the toughness of the encounters and the XP reward for them.
3) Putting the PCs on the slow progression track to keep them about a level behind where they otherwise would be in AP.
4) Specifying that magical items can only be sold for 1/4 of the their value rather than 1/2 to decrease the amount of loot the party has and encourage them to use the items they find instead of selling them.

So, my questions...

Does my approach to the AP seem to be reasonable? Any criticism any of you would offer, particularly those with experience running the AP and especially if you have run the AP with a large group of power gamers?

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

[Andostre]

Even if you use the six player conversion (and then some), the nature of the exploration mechanic means that most of the time, the party is only going to have an encounter once a day. This means that the party will be able to regularly blow all of their once-a-day abilities and top tier spells on every encounter. The encounters are so far apart when you factor in traveling and exploring each hex that the party will be able to rest up overnight between most of them.

City and dungeon encounters are less like this, but be prepared to increase the difficulty of the wilderness encounters if what I described above keeps happening.

[Warped Savant]

I haven't read through the 6 player conversion (although I hear it's fantastic) but a few things I would consider:

-The XP awarded throughout Kingmaker assumes that the group encounters a fair amount of random, once per day encounters. Those are REALLY boring as the group quickly realizes that they can blow through all of their big things very early on. Scrap the XP and level them up when the books suggest they should level. (Which, yes, means that in some of the books they level up surprisingly fast but I have yet play with someone that has complained about that.)

-If the loot is being spread among 7 or 8 players instead of 4 there's going to be a huge lack of items. (Unless the 6 player conversion added in a bunch of loot). Also, Kingmaker was written way back when Pathfinder first came out so if you have someone playing a newer class that doesn't get much benefit from the equipment in the AP/gets a lot more benefit out of newer equipment that isn't in the AP you'll likely have to alter what the loot drops are to suit the players. (I find giving them the standard 1/2 value and letting them buy their own works better.)