Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
Yeah, me too.

The largest combat I've run in recent times was a group of Norse raiders boarding a ship in a seafaring campaign--there were about two dozen of them swarming up from a smaller vessel drawn up alongside. I was running the full complement of the attackers as well as some NPC archers who were helping the PCs defend the ship. I eventually let one of the players run the NPC archers as a unit, but even so it took much too long for me to resolve the enemies' turns.

And the thing is, this was a practice run for a much larger naval encounter I'd planned, in which there would have been a larger enemy ship packed with a whole roving clan of sea-reavers, probably fifty or sixty combatants at least. The campaign ended before we reached that point, and I'm not sure how I would've managed that in practice.
Block initiative helps (use differently colored pieces to help keep track), as does average damage (that alone can cut your rolls in half), Markers help track status effects and hp (instead of writing it all down), and your players can help by firing off huge AOE spells that take out bunches of guys at once, meaning you have a lot less to worry about.