Insane Difficulty: Big Fish - Viewing Profile - Insane Difficulty

I saw, I'm really, really looking forward to that. I think I also saw that you are un-nerfing neutrals, which will help as well. I love integrating new characters in to my army, even in later levels. Redesigning my units to take advantage of new guys is a big part of the fun, at least for me. I probably spend almost as much time on the army editing screen between battles as I do fighting battles, at least in the early going. So perhaps that will be enough to keep the end game engaging all by itself.

One thought I had was to level the optional stages normally, but then institute a level cap for the end game (if that's even possible). That keeps the game flowing, gets you to the new classes a stage or two earlier, and maintains end game difficulty, as you can't out level Diablo's army. It also works thematically that the last couple of stages would be battles between armies that were as powerful as they could possibly be.

Hmm. Trying to formulate a constructive suggestion here. Obviously there are a lot of interlocking considerations with the coding here that no one other than you is going to be able to fully appreciate. To put the issue in broader context, the game sort of bogs down after Muspelm and Organa for a couple of reasons. For one, by that point your army is pretty much in final form, so a lot of the fun recruiting and army building is done. Then, because you've in practical effect gotten two free levels for your army from Muspelm and Organa, and you now have Muses and other hit-all bangers and, most importantly, Monks coming on line, the difficulty drops off significantly. The hack is so fun, and so addictive, that I'm on my fourth run, but only once did I actually play past Shangri-la or so. This problem comes from the original game, not the hack, but once the army building is done and the challenge is reduced, the battles themselves are not enough to hold your interest.

Looking forward to it eagerly, this hack is fantastic. One of my all time favorites. One thought as you move to the mid-game - in 1.04b, the enemies in the sky islands don't advance a level like they do in the other stages. That leads to a weird difficulty drop off after the sky islands as your army is suddenly over leveled with respect to the enemies. Anybody playing this game thirty years later is going to the sky islands, in my mind they should be leveled like regular stages. That would lead to your army and the enemies being a bit higher level in the endgame, but that seems like a good thing, as it would allow a little more time to use the cool fourth tier units you are proposing.