Dungeon Building and Army Equipping

[Lord Loss]

I have two questions, as I'm going to be running a hybrid wargame/D&D 3.5 mini-campaign over the next few weeks. The three players are getting together on Monday to build their armies, Generals (PCs), equip their armies and general with weapons and magic items, design their dungeons, lairs, castles or strongholds.

I have three questions.

1) How many soldiers (roughly) per army (3 armies) would make for a good-sized battle that's not too long (taking no more than 5-10 4 hour sessions, ideally closer to five) but still feels meaningful?

2) How much do materials and whatnot cost for dungeons? What about for custom made traps? Should I use an entirely different type of points for this, or should it be drawn from their reserve of gold pieces? How much do thing like catapults and other seige engines cost?

3) How much gold should I assign to cover all of this? Armies are being created with AP (Army Points), but the players can purchase golems or hire mercenaries if they want to.

[Cieyrin]

I was trying to make something similar involving Orc Warlords and their Leadership derived warbands that stalled a few months ago and my conclusions from such are that there's a lot of work involved in trying to turn regular D&D into a skirmish game. Taking a look at other skirmish games, I think Warband clashes (10-20 creatures a piece) are more in line for getting a game actually done in a good amount of time. Just have warbands strike at significant points of tactical value (take control/destroy bridges, hold/overrun mountain passes, etc.) and have the results affect the overall war effort on who is succeeding and who is falling back as objectives are won and lost.

For equipping/hiring mercenaries, I had a War Purse mechanic that was based off of the war leader's Leadership score, as a measure of the trust and leverage a leader has to gather resources. Given you probably don't want to take a similar route, I'd gander 10-30k should cover equipment and pay.

As for buildings, siege equipment, etc, a lot of that is covered by Heroes of Battle and the Stronghold Builder's Guide, with traps and basic siege equipment being in the DMG and expanded a bit in Dungeonscape. For a more basic approach, I'd have a separate pool of points for such largescale equipment, as a lot of building of such large scale stuff is in terms of labor and time, with money only coming in if you hire out your workers or need to ship material in.

I hope this helps at least a little bit. Them's my 2 coppers. Take as you will.

[opticalshadow]

as far as building the dungeon, it could be done rather cheaply depending on the players. hireing wizards would take the least amount of time and allow probly cheaper way to do it.

if the pc's were actualy classes, a dread necro could have an army excavate the whole thing for free (well minus what it costs in raise dead)

[Lord Loss]

Thanks for the help so far, I forgot to mention that the armies will contain soldiers and creatures of CR 1-7 and the Generals will be either CR 10 or 12 (I'd appreciate advice on which to go with).