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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8362623" data-attributes="member: 72555">Adding up CR does a decent job of how beefy each side is.  But fate and fortune is important; baseline 5e combat rules are not swingy enough to handle how a large battle could swing.The things that make a huge battle swing away from "best army wins" are things like a force breaking and fleeing, mispositioned troops, a commander doing something really smart, dumb, lucky or unlucky, etc.And even a force breaking and fleeing is going to be based off of a lot of chaos; they won't know if they are winning or not, they just have their local information about it.In any case, I'd start with slightly modified CR, like I do for encounter buildingFor mass combat, I'll make weak creatures a bit weaker than they are in encounter building, with the assumption that they are a bit less able to "fully engage", and because it makes the math easier.For a creature up to CR 20, the power per creature is equal to its CR.  For a creature above CR 20, add twice its CR over 20.So a CR 30 creature has 30 + 2*(30-20) = 50 power.A unit of 100 basic trained troops (CR 1/4) has 25 power.A unit of 10 knights on warhorses has 35 power.For such units, add up all their save modifiers and divide by 5 to give a generic "save" bonus.  If the unit has a mix of creatures, take the weighted average.  So the knights have a +11 total (so +2 average), the warhorses a +0, so the unit has a +1 total save modifier.Make combat take place on a scale of minutes, not rounds.When hit by something epic, like a dragon's breath against knights or troops, roll a save against it.  On success, it loses 25% power, on failure it loses 50% power.  (a sufficiently large breath might up this to 50%/100%).Dragon breath weapon, reroll on scale of minutes; the reroll includes the chance you get a great chance to use it offensively.  "Regular" use of dragon's breath is assumed to happen, just not an epic wipeout chance.When two units clash, compare their power.  For every doubling of one side's power over the other, they get a +1 to their roll and the other gets -1.  Roll 1d4 for each side; each does 1d4 times (power/10) damage to the other side.If one side has a tactical advantage, double its damage and give it a +1/-1 on the conflict roll.So the knights engage 100 troops equipped with pikes.Neither side is 2x the other.  So even rolls.  Pikes are anti-knight weapons, so +1/-1.  Knights engage the troops.Knight rolls 2-1 for 3 damage, Pikes roll 4+1 for 25 damage.  Knights are reduced to 10 power, pikes are at 22 power.Oops, don't charge into pikes.A force of 10 stone giants charges in at the pikes.  70 power; so 7 damage.  Pikes have no real advantage against giants.  Giants roll 4, pikes roll 1.  Giants deal 28 damage, pikes deal 2.Bye bye Pikes.---You can probably codify how "AOE" attacks work, as they are pretty common, by looking at the HP of each piece of the unit.</blockquote>

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