My recent test-battles against three mercenaries was a bit tight! Though, given that they hit the hardest with gun-attacks, I'm fairly satisfied with these results for now.

The next test is getting into encounters in-game. Enemies can come in groups of two or three, with the chances supposedly favoring groups of two. So, making sure that it actually favors the two-group encounters is what I'm gonna be looking at.

Also, I've thought a bit about when the game's difficulty should go up. The obvious way is to link it to how far along players are in the story, and link equipment availability to story-progress. Another way is to link it to how many missions players have completed, and link equipment availability to that. There is also the alternative of basing it on the total assets owned by the player. This wouldn't be just a simple check for credits on-hand. It would check the value of current equipment, the base value of whatever is in cargo (Not what players bought it for, mind. Trying to keep track of that would just be... UUUUGGGGGGH!), and any extra equipment that is not equipped. The exact processing of how to do this would be something I would have to research, no doubt.

As glorious as the net worth idea could be in theory, I'm heavily inclined to linking difficulty (and equipment availability) to total number of missions complete. Though, the question to ask would be how many missions would I expect players to do? I can probably count on players doing the story-missions, but, I'm very, very, largely assuming players are doing non-story-missions along side of story-missions. I suppose what I could do, is set mostly-arbitrary difficulty-breakpoints for the demo-copy, and ask my playtesters for feedback on how badly I guessed it works out for them.