Dev Diary - Enemies that evolve, form grudges and lead armies

Four Ways the Enemies Comes for You

In many games, enemy difficulty often boils down to normal enemy and boss. Once you start steam rolling the normal enemies, all you need to worry about is the boss.

I wanted to take a different approach here. You and the big bad boss are not the only threat out there.

Think of it as a different tiers of threats. Here's how it stacks, from the bottom up.

Elites, Champions and Bosses — Random variants that turn normal battles on their side

At the bottom (above normal units) are the variants such as Elites, Champions and Bosses. Every so often that bandit raider stops being *a* bandit raider and becomes Elite Bandit Raider

As you progress you will find more of these variants and harder difficulties of them. They come in three flavors, and they don't just get a stat nudge:

Elites - Are about 1.5 times as strong as normal enemies plus have a single random bonus ability.

Champions - These are the unit killers. They as strong as almost three normal units and when they hit, they hit hard. They are guaranteed to drop an uncommon magical item when they fall. They also carry two random abilities instead of one.

Bosses are the squad hillers. Five times the health, double the attack and armor, a guaranteed rare item on the corpse — and, critically, they have some unique abilities that can turn the tide, such as calling in reinforcements when your back is against the wall.

So no enemy type is ever "solved." The roster you learned in your first ten hours keeps evolving into things that punch back.

Vendettas — The one who got away, and remembers

Now it gets personal.

Kill an enemy and it's gone. But let one survive — let it cut down one of your mercenaries and live, or slip off the field when the fight turns, be the one still standing when you order the retreat or you fire a lowly merc and they get mad and take it person — and something can happen. That enemy remembers. It gets a name, a rank, and a grudge, and it walks off the map as a Vendetta.

Vendettas are procedurally born from your actual battles, so they're always specific to your campaign. The game stitches them a name and title out of what they did — Captain Torren the Slayer, promoted from a lucky kill; a fleeing archer who comes back as something with "the Survivor" hung off its name.

And then they hunt you with their friends. They can ambush you on the road, crash your other fights and generally make your life miserable. Let them escape to another day and they can come back even stronger until ultimately you take them down or they wipe your company.

Warlords — When a faction stops sending patrols and starts sending armies

Above the personal threat sits the regional one.

Every hostile faction with a stronghold near you is quietly keeping score. There's an aggression meter climbing a little every day — and it climbs faster the stronger and more famous your company gets. Fame has a cost, and this is where you pay it.

When that meter hits a certain point, the faction doesn't send a patrol. It musters a war party — three to five warbands at once — and marches them at the nearest settlement. Often, a named Warlord is at the head of the column.

Then they lay siege. There's a five-day buildup while the settlement's security drains while you can break the siege or help hold the walls.

A sacked settlement is a genuine wound in your world. For around 20 days it's occupied: shops shuttered, recruits gone, the quest board empty, the militia disbanded. Then it spends even longer limping back with inflated prices. And the victorious host doesn't stop to celebrate — it can roll straight on to the next town on the map, chaining sackings if nobody stands in its way.

Warlords that win grow. Each successful siege stacks on more health and more attack, and their title escalates with their reputation once they've razed five settlements.

Arch-Villains — The eight names that were always there

And then, the apex, the end game threats.

There are eight Arch-Villains in the world, and unlike everything below them on the pyramid, they are not generated by your play — they were always on the map, hand-authored, waiting. Each commands a faction And each could kill you on their own.

What they don't have, at first, is a reason to care about you. Arch-Villains stay dormant until your company climbs to their level — somewhere around level six to eight. Cross that line and one stirs: you get word that a legend has, for the first time, taken notice of your little band. That notification is the whole thesis of this diary in a single line — you didn't unlock a harder difficulty. You became a big enough problem that the world's worst threats paid attention.

Once awake, an Arch-Villain lives on the map. It roams. It corrupts settlements it passes, turning the world's own towns hostile to you. It ambushes you when you stray too close. And when you finally corner one, the fight is a multi-phase battle, with the villain changing tactics and gaining power as its health drops.

They are also unforgiving of failure. Lose to an Arch-Villain, or retreat, and it doesn't just reset — it grows stronger from beating you and slips away to be hunted another day. But bring one down for good and the payoff matches the climb: a legendary relic off the corpse, and a genuine shift in the balance of the realm as factions rise and collapse into the vacuum the villain leaves behind. Killing one of the eight is a world event.

What it adds up to

Four tiers, and each tier has the same message - you are not the only threat out there.

A tougher enemy in a single fight. An enemy who survived that fight and now remembers your face. An army with your favorite town in its sights. A legend who finally considers you worth killing. Each one is the world responding, in proportion, to exactly how dangerous you've made yourself — and the response gets more personal the higher you climb.

That's the promise underneath all of it. Mercenary Brotherhood never runs out of harder things to throw at you.

Mercenary Brotherhood Coming to Steam as Early Access this Fall 2026.

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