Hi!

So, we know a battle can be a fairly broad term, even if it's essentially two or more large groups of people fighting each other for some reason or another. For huge groups and out of the heroes scope events, it seems obvious to me to use the battles rules. But for smaller events, I wasn't so sure as how to deal with it.

Two exemples from my last session (the first had me as the GM, the second had another player take the role of GM, since we like to switch GM so that everyone gets to be a PC).

#1 : The Tavern Ambush
On one side, twenty armed guards of Satarla are waiting in a deserted tavern that contains a secret way inside the Skyboats' Fortress. On the other, the PCs, one of which is a pirate captain with a crew of ten on his side, treated as rabble except for three NPCs treated as Toughs.

I decided to use the battle rules while the PCs fought they're own fights during the larger battle, but what happened was that, even though it helped make things more fluid as I didn't have to roll for anything except against PCs (instead of rolling against myself for all the NPCs, which would be boring), but eventually the party finished the last of the guards at around 5/8, so the battle in itself could have taken much more longer. It was also the longest combat we had since using BoL (Legendary before, Mythic for the first time this time).

#2 Two Boats, a Hundred Bandits
It's the overused cliché of the bandits attacking boats down the river and trying to secure loot off from it. Except this time, we (I was a PC) were with the bandits and trying to seize a convoy of healing herbs to redistribute to the people (at a fair price) of Satarla to help them fight off the plague (that may or may not be an indirect consequence of us destroying the skyhawk, thus weakening greatly a Jewel of Lemuria that already lost its hedge a campaign ago when we built our own city protected by the only pirate to ever own a sky-boat (it seems every time we play BoL, someone makes a pirate and somehow the story revolves around them, yarrr).

Anyway, this time, the GM that wasn't me didn't use the battles rule as he hadn't read them yet, so we fought against one Villain, eight elite guards tough, eleven tyrus longbowmen toughs (yes) and around twenty rabbles. It was a hard fight, but we eventually won. But it was a long fight, mostly because the GM is new at GMing and we had a few problems communicating, which made things even slower. Even without that, it was long because of the sheer number of our enemies.

So the question here is, at which point does a fight become a battle? What are your thoughts on my two exemples, did you run into the same issue running either Mythic or H+H (or any BoL game while using this rule)?