Once we had established what monsters we were going to use, we had to figure out how we were going to use them. Combat Staging In Icewind Dale and Heart of Winter, more than many CRPGs, the staging of combat has been very important. Since combat is such a staple of the Heart of Winter game play, we wanted to make sure it had the right balance of difficulty, variation, and general fun. Using this tactic, players could sneak through an area to reveal monsters, then creep forward to fight monsters one at a time. In the expansion, we fixed this problem by implementing a call for help feature that worked through the fog of war.
Many monsters now work in teams.
If one is attacked, it alerts the other members of the team who will then follow the character all over the map to execute their combat scripts. We had some problems with this feature slowing down the game, so we thinned out the ranks while beefing up the individual monsters. We also had some problems with play balance. Because some teams were very close to each other, players could sometimes accidentally alert three teams of a dozen enemies at once. The result was a horde of incredibly tough monsters that surrounded the party, leaving no way out.