Originally Posted by
Palanan
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.