I've had decent success with the Mini's handbook. I was able to run a battle with about 300-400 soldiers per side, plus a dozen or so PCs and bad guy officers. It took too long to be something I'd want to do regularly, but was serviceable as a "change of pace" battle. That's higher praise than I'd give most mass combat systems.
-KS
I'd say that's fair. The
Miniatures Handbook took a few too many knocks, in my opinion. While not being a terribly easy to use system - it served. I think the people who reacted poorly to the
Miniatures Handbook were expecting it to be something other than what it set out to be.
Cry Havoc by Skip Williams published by Malhavoc Press was also designed for this purpose, albeit it on a more macro scale. Overall, I found
Cry Havoc to bog down in more detail for mass combat that I was willing to mess around with for my group's needs. You may find otherwise.
Still, the scale of the battle is really the issue.
Miniatures Handbook will serve for 200-300 combatants and even twice that in a pinch. More than that, it becomes simply too unwieldy at the scale the book uses. It might be that
Cry Havoc will then be what you might prefer to use if you are looking to do a battle between thousands.
Fields of Blood from Eden Studios attempts to do the same thing as
Cry Havoc, but does far less successfully than
Cry Havoc or the
Miniatures Handbook, either, imo. YMMV.
For involving the heroes in the battle, the
Miniatures Handbook will serve, although in many respects the flowchart approach in
Heroes of Battle is innovative and interesting and bears looking at closely. It gives the players the FEEL of battle and the SENSE that things are connected to a greater whole. A series of HoB encounters do not play the same as ordinary combat. It just
feels different in many intangible ways which serves to underscore the difference in what's happening in game without upsetting the apple cart in terms of rules or the power of the PC's on the battlefield. A hybrid approach of
Miniatures Handbook/Cry Havoc and
Heroes of Battle is probably the best way overall to resolve your "war". I would suggest one or three
Cry Havoc battle resolutions with heavy influence drawn from
Heroes of Battle missions to make the PCs feel connected to the war effort in a real way.
Please do have a look at
Heroes of Battle and consider bringing it into your campaign as a transition point for your party of players, if you prefer to fight some aspects of the war at a more macro scale.
As you might have gathered, I thought
Heroes of Battle was excellent and I believe it is an extremely underrated book from the 3.5 system. Players who bought it were expecting something else - but
Heroes of Battle is a
+5 Squirt Bottle of Awesome Sauce for many a DMs' campaign.
HoB deserves all DMs' strong consideration for use in their campaigns at an appropriate stage. Question is -
does that serve your needs for this particular segment of your campaign? Only you can judge.
Indeed, I think
Heroes of Battle represents one of the high water marks in the 3.5 series, in my opinion.
