Enemy Progression

The Problem with Level Scaling

Tim Cain opens by distinguishing enemy scaling from enemy progression. He dislikes level scaling — the practice of automatically adjusting enemy stats to match the player's level. The classic absurdity: a bandit carrying 40,000 gold worth of weapons and armor, still mugging people on the road. "Shouldn't he be retiring somewhere? Hasn't he bandited enough?"

Instead, Cain prefers designing enemies that get naturally harder through deliberate progression systems.

The Two Axes of Enemy Progression

Enemy progression consists of exactly two things:

• More enemies — increasing the number of hostiles in an encounter
• More variety — expanding what individual enemies can do, or mixing different enemy types together

The Bandit Example

Cain walks through a concrete progression using bandits:

1. One lone bandit with a dagger — "give me your money"
2. Two bandits that try to flank you, or one uses a bow while the other uses a sword
3. Three to five bandits with various weapons
4. Same number of bandits, plus trained attack wolves — introducing a new enemy type into the mix

Each step naturally increases difficulty without touching a single stat number.

Attack Variation

Melee Attacks

The baseline. Enemies run up and hit you. These can be parried, blocked with shields, and are good candidates for flanking behavior. The player uses their close-combat skills.

Ranged Attacks

Enemies that stay at distance — bows in low-tech settings, guns in high-tech. This demands an entirely different set of tactics and defenses from the player.

AoE (Area of Effect) Attacks

A step up from basic ranged attacks. AoE hits explode to damage an area, which is effective against the player and their companions. Crucially, AoE attacks can get around corners and behind cover — grenades in a tech setting, fire breath or acid in a fantasy one.

Better Equipment (Within Reason)

Enemies can progress from knife → sword → two-handed sword, and from no armor → cloth → leather → chain → plate. But Cain emphasizes this must stay narratively believable. If it doesn't make sense for a bandit to have plate armor, they shouldn't have it.

Limited-Use Weapons

A clever way to force attack variation within a single unit: give enemies weapons with limited ammo or long reload times. A bandit might open with a rocket launcher (one shot), then switch to a bow or sword. This creates dynamic mid-fight behavior changes that keep players adapting.

Movement Variation

Movement is a powerful axis for difficulty progression:

• Fast movers — enemies that sprint or naturally move quickly
• Jumpers — Cain cites The Outer Worlds, where they had a robot that would jump into melee range
• Hovering units — enemies that go airborne and attack from above, requiring ranged responses or waiting for them to descend
• Flying units — full flight capability, which is "super fun" but Cain warns: keep in mind this is very hard on melee-only player characters. Flying enemies should have to land occasionally (e.g., for their big attack) so melee builds have counterplay

Summons

Enemies that bring in reinforcements mid-fight:

• Magic summons — a wizard casts a spell, a portal opens, enemies pour out
• Tech summons — pulling an alarm, triggering a claxon, guards flooding into the room
• Birthing — creatures that physically spawn smaller enemies from their bodies

Summoned units are particularly interesting because they feed into charge-based player abilities — if the player has attacks that charge up by hitting or killing things, the extra units become a resource as well as a threat.

The Wizard-Bandit Combo

Cain's favorite example of group variety: bandits accompanied by a wizard who summons undead. The undead require different tactics (magic weapons, holy water) than the bandits themselves. Just adding one wizard unit to a bandit group dramatically increases encounter complexity.

Environmental Use and Creation

Enemies that interact with the environment add another layer of difficulty:

• Trap-setters — bandits placing bear traps and trip wires around their camp
• Cover users — enemies ducking behind tables and chairs to avoid ranged fire
• Hazard creators — attacks that leave persistent environmental effects:
  • Fire breath that ignites objects, dealing damage to nearby players
  • Acid attacks that leave pools on the ground — bad to walk through, worse to stand in
  • Hazards can be temporary (introductory version) or last the whole combat (advanced version)

Putting It All Together

The complete framework for enemy progression:

1. Increase enemy count — straightforward, more is harder
2. Increase individual variety — what each enemy can do (attack types, movement, environmental interaction)
3. Increase group variety — mixing different enemy types (bandits + wolves, bandits + wizards + undead, bandits + guards)

Each new capability layer demands new player tactics. The result is encounters that feel progressively harder and more interesting, without ever needing to inflate hit points or strap ridiculous gear onto low-level enemy archetypes.

Source: Tim Cain — "Enemy Progression"