Advice for running combat encounters?
So I consider myself semi experienced with 3e now (35 sessions into my campaign and counting), and its been a good deal of fun to GM. Combat has however been something I've struggled heavily with making feel interesting. For context I am running for a party of 5 players at PL10. I generally like to have fewer enemies than there are players just for the interest of time, which then means I have to make the villains a couple PLs higher (highest ive currently gone is 15, and on average ive gone for 12)
What typically happens is that in combats where the villain(s) lose the initiative to the party, they get overwhwlmed heavily by action economy before they even get a turn. My players have a lot of functions covered between them, having various control afflictions, good damaging attacks and supporting effects for each other, so if they get to act first they can generally steamroll the villain quite hard. If the villain wins initiative, they at most deal a little bit of damage to somebody and then proceed to get steamrolled due to action economy.
In the times I've run a PL15 enemy against them, the villain was able to survive a couple rounds thanks to just having better stats, but they also hit so hard that the players could also just get one tapped at the whims of the dice so it didnt nessecarily feel that fair. That being said action economy and teamwork won out in the end in those fights too.
All in all im left quite unsure of how to make a villain threatening but fair. The players having more turns to act than them is frankly too strong of an advantage for me to wrap my head around it. An Idea ive pondered is to frankly just give villains a bunch of reaction attacks so that they effectivly have as many actions as the party does, but that feels like cheating.
Combat design has been something ive historically performed poorly at in all my history of GMing ttrpgs. MnM feels even tougher to work with though since the kinds of powers the characters can have are so diverse.