One of Demon’s more annoying design bugs for awhile now has been the lack of control I had given myself over how enemy encounters behave in in the game. The most obvious example of this is when you run into to ridiculously large groups of enemies (actually two or more groups that happened to randomly find each other and stick together), but it also manifested in other problems: the extra large… and largely empty… levels I asked the game to create to try and minimize that problem, and the resulting easiness of “chase me” captureables and near impossibility without a Trouble Chime of “kill X other guys” captureables that this not fix caused.

I’ve been quietly working on a real fix to the original problem, and, I think it is almost ready to deploy.

The main, immediately visible results should be:
* Much, much smaller tower levels. (If current testing continues to bear out my current parameter choices, tower levels would contain about 75% less playable space and occupy a 60% smaller grid.
* Virtually no more initially double encounters…
* …but there will be more frequent mid-encounter intrusions, particularly during longer battles.
* Enemies are somewhat much less willing to expend resources aiding other enemy groups. This will be most noticeable with healers and buffers: they will rarely use their limited resources on enemies on other groups, preferring to save their efforts for their actual friends.

The main result of these change I’m hoping for, as a whole? A much leaner exploration experience, encounters that are overall fairer while still challenging (you will almost never run into two groups at once anymore, but extra groups joining a long fight in progress will be more common), more challenging “chase me” and (to a lesser extent) “wait” captureables, and fairer “kill X in Y turns” captureables.

Early testing has been going well, if that continues to be the case, this next build might be released very soon indeed. I’ll keep you posted.

(Note: I should stress that this, however, is not the remaining part of the captureable review that is still in progress. Further changes are coming on that front, including direct fixes to some of the issues with “kill X in Y turns” captureables. )