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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1163748" data-attributes="member: 463"><p>I second the recommendation for the CS War Machine for abstract combat without minis; it allows for quick resolution of arbitrarily large battles - I've used it for battles with over 200,000 troops on each side.  Some of the Basic Force Rating calculations may need redoing for 3e, IMO - the bulk of a BFR in War Machine for most units seems to come from training, and the actual power of the troops is downplayed.  Numerical superiority is also perhaps less important than it should be - eg 1.5:1 superiority gives only +15 to the d100 roll, 2:1 gives +30 - it's quite easy for a much larger army to be defeated by a smaller one even when troop quality is similar.  According to eg Clausewitz a 2:1 superiority on a level battlefield should pretty much guarantee victory where troops and tactics are similar.  Most D&D combat though is between very disparate troop types (unlike Clausewitz's 19th century Europe) so this doesn't come up too often, and the War Machine does give intuitively satisfying results with a single roll - for modelling eg Lucullus vs the Armenians at Tigranocerta (Roman legions beat army 10-20 times bigger) it's probably better than most systems which tend to give priority to weight of numbers.</p></blockquote><p></p>