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Do you mean the party again the CS? Or the party along with a sizable force against the CS?

If the latter, I usually set up to where the players are going at a specific part of opposing forces, and would just have a fight as normal, excpet they are likely to be outnumbered and even though they may kill someone, there is another to take it.s place. After a set amount of time (and I like this option, where I tell my players that they have to get through a line so thick by a set amount of real time or they WILL die, makes for great tension) or when you see the players are starting to get tired of all the rolling and whatnot, they will at that moment get through that wave of fighters, and when looking out over the battlefield they can see numerous individual fights going on. They can choose to help out their side, or go do whatever else they need to.

If the former, I usually do what I call, "Goblin Tactics". In that I have the players up against maybe 200-1000 enemies. I give every 20-50 similar weapons with similar damage and have the damage set. For example, for a sword that does 3d6 I will make the damage 8-10 (i.e. the average), and so on. I will also give their HP equal to about 5. So it's more or less a slaughter fest.

More info on what you are wanting to happen will give you better answers.

You will need to leave a few outcomes open. let the pc battles decide thoes outcomes but the majority of the battle should be predetermined by the GM .

there was rifter that gave a pretty good breakdown on how to do large scale battles for rifts. it was really simple and still left room for your pc's to be the heroes or have an affect on th outcome. look in the rifter forum in the index, i'm sure its there.

Modern Army Combat Rules - - 77, R#23
i believe this is it. i'm not at home right now so i can't be sure.

A good question indeed. I always use a set of rules that I have devised years ago. Those rules were based on a rule described in a homepage that I have lost the address a long time ago, so if anyone knows from where I got that please tell me. I have expaded it so it can be a bit different from the original.


Handling the big battles
(taken and adapted from a Homepage that I don’t remember the name)

Sooner or later, the PC's will get caught up in a whirling **** of doom. We're talking about robots, mages, dragons, infantry, the whole ******* nine yards. Artillery will be pounding down, magic fire blasting out, golems and other magical constructs duking it out with the big boys, and demonic beings will be wreaking havoc. How the hell do you handle the chaos like that?

How to Tell Who Wins: Take the amount of the enemy, divide it by friendly forces, then add 50%. That's how many each of the PC's will have to kill before the battle is over and they are not engaged any more. For every extra foe a PC kills before the others have accounted for theirs subtracts the amount of troops they had to kill from the enemy force. Once the enemy force is depleted, the battle is over. To tell who wins, take in account the number of soldier in the engaging forces, situation, defenders position, etc. Then subtract or add a percentage to a base chance of 50% for the players side to win. Special conditions and situations can increase or decrease the chance for the player side to win a battle. These conditions and situations are determined by the GM, and will change greatly from battle to battle. A small list of special conditions and situations are given below for reference. Other GMs can modify the existing ones or create others for their own campaigns as they see fit.

Battle Conditions:
Winning Slighting +10%
Winning Easily +20%
Evenly Matched +5%
Losing Slighting -10%
Losing Badly -20%

Battle Situations:
Attacking -15%
Defending +10%
Outnumbered -5% to -25%
Enemy on Defensive Position -15%
Artillery Support +15%
Air Support +10%

Choosing Foes: This is nearly impossible, since the combat will be a swirling chaos, and there will be only 1d6 attacks someone can make on someone else before the swirl of combat will obscure a target. Snipers will have to make a weapons systems roll to stay locked on, while robot jocks will have to make sensor system rolls to keep track. As for standard radars, forget it, they will be little to no help, having been over swamped by the number of objects detected.

The random fire effect: Bullets, shrapnel, missiles, projectiles, magic spells and effects will be roaming around the battlefield looking for likely targets. This is dangerous, since all of it is addressed "To Whom It May Concern", not specifically addressed like the GB shot that puts a PC down in a small melee. A way to handle this is assigning a percentage, depending on the amount and ferocity of fighting going down, of a PC getting smacked by something every melee round of battle. This attack will do a amount of damage based on the level of the battle. The level of the attack will be random and it will hit in a random location. True, a PC may get whacked by this, but hey, shrapnel kills.....

Chance to get Hit:
Minor Battle 15%
Light Battle 30%
Medium Battle 60%
Heavy Battle 90%

Extra Damage Dice per Level of Battle:
Minor Battle +1D6
Light Battle +2D6
Medium Battle +3D6
Heavy Battle +4D6

Attack Level (roll for level):------Damage and Number of Wounds:
01-20------Minor Injury------------1D6x2 MD (3d4 wounds)
21-40------Medium Injury---------1D6x4 MD (2d4 wounds)
41-60------Heavy Injury-----------1D6x6 MD (1d4 wounds)
61-80------Superior Injury--------1D6x8 MD (1d2 wounds)
81-00------Explosion---------------1D6x10
Note: For characters wearing body armor, the damage is always considered as having bypassed the protection that the armor it offers, and so the damage is in S.D.C., instead of M.D.C. For natural M.D.C. characters, the damage is in M.D.C. Power Armors, Robots and vehicles receive damage normaly.

Yes, some PC's will come through without a scratch, others will be badly mauled, or even killed. When fighting monstrous forces, there is a great chance that the demonic forces will tear open damaged robots or power armor to kill and eat the crew. Because of the monsters eating the wounded or dead, there is a smaller chance of arranging so that PC's were merely knocked out. Of course, military forces can definitely use prisoners, and some evil creatures will take prisoners for torture or later use in horrifying rituals.

Nightmaster, that's very very cool!!!

Thank you!

Lucky wrote:How about this: determine exactly how many enemy and friendly forces will be present at the battle. For every successful roll the PCs make, kill off one enemy in the background, and for every unsuccessful roll, kill off a friendly.

This way the characters have a direct impact on the outcome of the battle, either raising friendly "morale" through their [successful] actions, or impacting their side negatively through failure and incompetence.

Dang that's just too easy. Consider it stolen.

Spinachcat wrote:Nightmaster, that's very very cool!!!

Thank you!

Thanks but I am not the only one resposible for this little set of rules.

I found part of it years ago in a homepage of Rifts that i stumble upon. I dont have the link anymore thanks to several HD crashs I had over the years, but lucky me I had it on paper so all I was to do were to type it again.

Most of the text was already done. I just added more details, game mechanics and some text. Then I added it to a set of homebrew rules that I was writing to make battles in Rifts (and the Megaverse as a whole) more dangerous, using the optional shock and blood loss rules presented at the Palladium Compedium of Contemporany Weapons. If you wish I can send it to you.

Nightmaster wrote:If you wish I can send it to you.

Even better, post them here for everyone!

I had a somewhat large scale battle last night and it was awesome. Especially when i started pulling out all the figures from the box and the look on the guys faces. Even though the odds were not entirely over bearing. 30:2 it was still enough to make the guys think before they acted which helped a lot. My guys like to jump in to situations a lot more than thinking. they like bullets not brains. So, I try to put them in situation to make them think.

How i handled it would easily transfer to larger battles and I am going to try it possibly next week. first i broke down the enemies to what was important.


Name Movement (squares) HP MDC
Tribe leader 5 Normal Normal
High priest 4 Normal Normal
Priestess 4 Normal Normal
Royal Guards (4) 4 Normal 80
Normal Soldiers (20) 3 1 40
Secret flank Soldiers (3) 3 1 40

From this I had fix movement for each and so did the players I figured this out uy using the speed factor and MPH to determine how far a player can travel per melee action. i draw my maps with each square or hex being 12'.

I might have to increase my hexes to 24 or 48 feet to have larger battles.

The point of it was though normal soldiers have kinda low stats that can be easily killed with one ore 2 hits for the most part. The royal guards were a bit tougher taking about 4 hits or 1 really good hit. Then the 3 main enemies had normal stats i had prerolled along with a list of 2 or 3 long range attacks short range attacks and a hand to hand type attacks.
For the priest and priestess i also include a couple of defensive attacks.

How this could translate is pretty easy for a battle of a full battalion.
Company A
500 men
Company B
500 men

lets say they have a tank regiment of 20 tanks
and mechanized division of 100 mechs (your pick).

Obviously the group will not have to usually face them all by themselves.
I would line up how many I thought the team could handle
lets say there was 5 members of the group i would maybe pick
50 men
5 mechs
and maybe 1 or 2 tanks (depending on how much punishment i want to give them)

I would face them off 5 on 5 or maybe 7 on 5 first. then i would add in a mech or tank once they killed off one or 2 of the men then i would continue to rotate in men and mechs or tanks till all was dead. Now since the odds are really not in there favor I use Nightmasters references in this topic. usually I have predetermined the winner in my head though sometimes a retreat is what the players need to bring there ego's back to earth though.