[Brody]

This is an excellent question.

Just last night on OtherSpace, we had a massive space battle between 24 NPC Phyrrian carrier vessels (and their hundreds of automated sappers and fighters) vs. the PC-occupied Regreb Bay destroyer and 50 other NPC Allied fleet ships.

It was an epic fight, involving about a half-dozen PCs and lasting about five hours of real time.

And it was pretty streamlined.

The Phyrrian warships are pretty much unstoppable on paper - - and, by all rights, would have been a player's nightmare, wiping out the entire Allied fleet in short order.

So, I struck a balance between the sense of risking life and limb against wanting players to have a good time. I scaled down the sappers and fighters, let the Allied fleet lay three waves of mines to stop as many of those sappers as possible, and taking out an uber-armored Phyrrian carrier was as simple as getting a gunnery skill roll high enough to penetrate the carrier's armor one time.

By the end of the battle, all the Phyrrian carriers were destroyed, but so was the Regreb Bay (the ship carrying the PCs - the players decided to use it as a giant missile against a Phyrrian carrier as its dying act), the Indefatigable (Sivad's Royal Naval Service flagship), and a bunch of other NPC Allied ships.

Players won the day, but with a pretty big in-character cost. Had this been a war between player factions ... it would have been a lot more complicated. Luckily, I set up those NPC Phyrrian bowling pins with the intent to have them knocked down at some point.

And the war's still ongoing. But I think our approach is a pretty good one that could be emulated elsewhere in similar circumstances. Give your players a chance to emerge victorious against a superior NPC force, but make it dangerous enough so that they get a sense that they could have died in that conflict.

In a player faction vs. player faction situation, I'd save the big hero NPC types for really hopeless situations vs. other NPCs. But you might find it useful, similarly, to allow players on both sides to have proxy NPCs to fight for them initially. If the Phyrrians were still a player race on OS, I'd let them have a certain number of counters for their fighter squadrons, sapper clouds, and carriers. The Allied players would get a certain number of counters for their own fleet vessels. We'd roll player proxies against each other until one group of NPCs emerged victorious. At that point, we'd probably say the outcome of the battle has been determined and the team on the losing side gets to A) fight a last-ditch battle to the death, accepting death as a possible outcome or B) retreats to fight another day.

The only code this should require would be the ability to roll dice or, in a MUSH, to use rand(20) or however many sides you want the virtual dice to have.