I suck & Mass combat systems.

  Saturday night's game did not go as well as I had hoped, and I'm the only one to blame. For some reason the descriptive part of my brain just wasn't firing on all cylinders and it showed. The Death toll climbed thanks to particularly nasty random encounters(a group of four 1st level characters vs. a blind Bulette, and another encounter vs. a couple of Lizardmen).
  I know part of the issue was me not being decisive. Two people dropped out of the game due to RL issues, and another two showed up late and not bothering to tell me about until last minute. I was down 4 players out of 7 and for the first hour of the game I couldn't decide whether or not to call the game off for lack of players(heck, even they didn't know what they really wanted to do), but I really didn't feel like penalizing the people who did show up for the actions of those who didn't.
  That being said, what's done is done, and all I can do is suck it up and do everything in my power to do better at the next game in 2 weeks. 
  Thanks to the party's actions(pissing off the most powerful tribe of goblins in the local campaign area, as well as a decent sized kobold tribe, and possibly allying with a moderately influential bandit/mercenary band), I've been looking much more closely at which Mass Combat System I want to use.
  Though there are a fair number of stellar games out there, I'm going to use a modified War Machine from the Rules Cyclopedia. This is for 2 reasons, the first being that my move is going to keep me apart from the vast majority of my D&D books for a few months(and my bagspace for the plane is limited), and because I like the abstract nature of the system in general.
   For those not familiar with War Machine, you can learn more about it here. There are a few changes I want to make to the system to fit better with my interpretation of 2e, and I'll try to post them later.