Creative Director
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A mass combat book has always been on the far periphery of the "Maybe some day" projects we've considered, but it's never reached a point where it's a more important or compelling book for us to create.
So, rather than just make up numbers and values for the nations and then force us to tailor those numbers to work with whatever rules we might come up with for warfare in the future, we've simply never taken this step yet. For a similar reason, it's why the Jade Regent Adventure Path didn't launch with volume 13 or 19 as I'd initially planned—we wanted to have robust rules for things like samurai and ninja and the like before we did that Adventure Path, and it would take us long enough that the earliest we could do that Adventure Path was to start with volume 49.
What makes a mass combat book even less likely is the simple fact that the game we publish and the stories we tell are traditionally about individuals, not about entire armies or nations. A mass combat game we produce would have to find a way to mesh comfortably and elegantly with the core focus of the RPG and would need to find a way to keep your PCs the focus of the story, which is a complicated thing to pull off right (having gone through a miniature version of this twice with Kingmaker is all the proof I need personally of this complexity).
Alternately, we could produce a standalone mass combat game, I guess, that wouldn't dovetail into the RPG side of things, but that would limit or complicate our Adventure Path line becuase there ARE mass combat/war stories we'd like to tell there.
Anyway... TL;DR We've never produced these numbers because we never created rules to create those numbers.
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Creative Director
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That's fair James, and good to know I am not searching for something that doesn't exist.
I am getting ready to run Skulls and Shackles and was wondering which nation has the strongest navy, just for plot purposes.
Cheliax? Absalom? Taldor? Rahadoum?
Since we don't nail those down, feel free to pick one that works great for the story you're looking to tell.
In my games, I'd say Cheliax does, because that kinda forces the good guys to team up if they get frisky.
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For myself I'd say: strongest is Cheliax, by a less wide margin after the events of Skull & Shackles but they're still #1 in the Inner Sea. #2 is probably Taldor or Qadira but mostly these are aimed at each other and have less left over to make the Inner Sea their lake. Andoran comes in next, then I would guess a sizable gap before Osirion. Another sizable gap before you reach Rahadoum, and another still to get the Thuvia.
Absalom has just enough nave to make law enforcement feasible in their claimed waters & to stop anyone from getting funny ideas but their main levers of influence are economic and political.
I would be guessing Cheliax for biggest permanent Navy, probably "most powerful" and kinda tend to have the biggest ships as well, but lack elsewhere in naval abilities, especially outside military stuff, the loss of some of their holding might affect this to a degree.
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For myself I'd say: strongest is Cheliax, by a less wide margin after the events of Skull & Shackles but they're still #1 in the Inner Sea.
Given that OP is planning on running Skull & Shackles, and is trying to get a sense of things as of that AP, post-Skull & Shackles assessments wouldn't seem terribly relevant.
Further, it means that the relevant theater to assess command of the sea isn't the Inner Sea, but the Arcadian Ocean. The major state powers besides the Shackles itself are Cheliax, Rahadoum, and the Linnorm Kingdoms of the Thanelands and Ironbound Islands in basically that order; other powers include, in no particular order, Riddleport, Magnimar, Korvosa, Nidal, Senghor, and Sargava.