My Necropolitans campaign is, I imagine, quickly approaching a confrontation between the PCs and another of their (many, many) enemy factions. Naturally, as the GM, I want to prepare properly for this. Suitable ranks of lowly mooks must be arrayed to hurl at them in futile battle, and Named NPCs must be properly conceptualised and characterised.
This being a Pathfinder game with 16th-level characters, I naturally also need to do the mechanical work of building a significant number of high-level adversaries to face off against the PCs, and - one of my great weaknesses - work out how the hell they are supposed to work together to present any kind of meaningful opposition, given that high-level PCs can fling around massive AoE spells that take out entire platoons of foes, lock down powerful individuals with a single ability (we have agreed an embargo on the use of action-denial bestow curse and similar after they rendered a significant fight pathetically trivial, but there are plenty of other options), counter almost any ability the opposition use, simply not engage at all with any foe who can't fly at high speed, kill most creatures in a single round of melee combat, and largely choose where and when a fight occurs.
The latter is an enormous problem for high-level play, because unless the PCs specifically need to retrieve X from location Y, it's very unlikely that less-superhuman adversaries can use any kind of fortifications, planned defences, traps, etc. to counterbalance their overwhelming advantage. It's also very difficult to force them to engage in more than a single battle on any given day - they can fly, teleport, etc. away to plan and rest - so the 5-minute adventuring day and corresponding nova tactics kick in even more than at lower levels.
But right now I have a more pragmatic issue, which is maps. There are games where you don't need maps, and I love theatre of the mind, but Pathfinder is very much not one of them. Especially not high-level Pathfinder where there are significant numbers of creatures moving around, lots of long-lasting area effects, and players really care exactly where everybody is to determine how they can place their abilities, how many targets they can charge and murder in a single round of combat, who is flanking whom, who has cover from whom else, and so on and so forth.
But we're also dealing with a situation where I do not know where the fight is likely to take place. Will the PCs just find out where the main opposition is located and jump them? Likely. They might also wait for them to go inside, perhaps sleep, and try to ambush them there. They might launch an attack and then withdraw, refusing to engage in frontal battle. They might start a fight and then decide to use their array of high-speed movement abilities to travel a long way away, launching spells from 500 feet away, possibly from several different directions.
Maps, however, are normally small. About 40 squares (200 feet) is common, which is just over one a full turn of sprinting from a typical PC. And as it's in a city, it has lots of features, which I can't handwave as easily as I might in a desert or swamp. There are people to be at least vaguely attended to - what are all the citizens doing? Do guards attempt to intervene? Does anyone else attempt to intervene? There's a whole academy of wizards at the other end of the city, who might object to a Marvel-style onslaught happening in their town (and we just dealt with an invasion of extraplanar monstrosities).
Online play (as we're in several different cities) allows me to drop various lovely maps, some of which I painstakingly crafted myself, others borrowed from all over the internet. On the other hand, those are not very adaptable when you get dragged away from the original location. A huge blank screen with a few crude lines scribbled on it is in some ways superior, because you can easily sketch in new things. I suppose if this does happen I'll have to drop them into a blank map and just start sketching on it.
In short, I'm not really sure how to prepare for this event, but it's definitely coming along.
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