I'm DMing for a campaign where the player characters will sometimes face small squads of creatures, most recently six ground troops and two archers helping out. In this setting, these creatures dominate the land the PCs are in and have an organised military, hence squads of enemies.
Combat tends to go quite slowly, however. Eight enemies and three players means the players spend a lot of time waiting between their turns!
Without reducing the number of enemies in the encounter, how can I speed up combat when the players are fighting many enemies?
Best Answer
I've had similar issues, and been experimenting. Here are some of my findings:
ALWAYS have strategies in mind. A squad has two, maybe three pre-determined strategies and the ever-available "every man for himself" panicking. They engage with one strat, move to the other if the situation calls for it, and break ranks when appropriate. This keeps me active instead of trying to think of their actions each round. It's the middle of a battle, folks don't have time to make the optimal choices; they'll stick to their training.
Surrender. Soldiers don't want to die. PCs can force a bloodied NPC to surrender with Intimidate, but a soldier who's just seen three of his buddies get fried by divine fire probably doesn't need to be explicitly told to give up. It's possible to cut fight time in half this way, though it still doesn't make the wait between turns any shorter each round.
Giving NPCs immediate actions and "start of PC's turn" effects instead of a lot to do on the NPC's own turn helps speed things up considerably.
The more NPCs I have, the simpler I make them. If I'm going to have more than three copies of a given NPC, I don't want that stat block to have more than three or four actions or things to keep track of.
In line with the above, minions. I use them very rarely because they encourage metagaming, but they remove damage calculation entirely which speeds up combat a lot. Conscripted soldiers are likely to drop and play dead the first time they're hit, so that's a justification for minions in your scenario. Give your minions an on-death effect like grab or difficult terrain; it makes minion-popping require more strategy than "bust out your AoEs."
Often I "cheat" and make my non-minion NPCs deal set average damage without die rolls.