Enemy Archetypes

What it is. A role vocabulary for enemies, not a bestiary. Five roles cover almost every action game: tank (soaks, blocks lanes), skirmisher (fast, flanks, punishes greed), artillery (ranged, forces you to close or break line of sight), swarm (individually trivial, dangerous in numbers), support (buffs/heals/shields others — the priority target). The alphabet is small on purpose: a player learns five answers, then every fight is a sentence of them.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. Recognition, then adaptation. Seeing an artillery unit behind a tank behind a swarm is a puzzle you read at a glance — the fun is choosing the order to solve it. FUN.md §4’s whole claim is “readable combat”; archetypes are how a fight becomes readable before it becomes hard.

When to use / when NOT

Use it when	Skip it when
Combat has ≥3 enemy types and you want them to combine	A single-enemy game (one boss, one rival) — design that fight directly
You need difficulty from composition, not stat inflation	Puzzle “enemies” that are really rules (`genre-grid-puzzle`, §12)
The player should learn one answer per role	Pure horde where the enemy is count itself — one type, superlinear spawn (§6)

Variants

The five roles and what each demands:

Role	Job in the fight	Player answer	Signature knob
Tank	control space, absorb, block a lane	reposition or burst; don’t trade	HP + a lane it denies
Skirmisher	punish overextension, flank	spacing, patience, don’t chase	speed > player, low HP
Artillery	force movement, deny camping	close the gap or break LoS	range + a telegraph (`system-telegraphs`)
Swarm	overwhelm, chip, cover others	AoE, funnels, kiting arcs (§6)	trivial each, superlinear count
Support	multiply everyone else	kill it first — it’s the priority	a buff radius you can see

Compositions are where the alphabet earns its keep:

Pair	Emergent problem
Tank + artillery	the tank buys the artillery time; you’re pressured while you dig
Support + swarm	the swarm won’t die until the support does — inverts your target order
Skirmisher + tank	the tank pins you where the skirmisher wants you
Artillery + skirmisher	ranged forces motion, flanker punishes it — a positioning vice

Tuning levers

Lever	Effect	Watch for
Role stat ratios (HP/speed/range)	how sharply a role reads	roles that overlap muddy the read — keep silhouettes distinct
Threat priority (support first)	the target-order puzzle	if killing in any order works, the roles aren’t interacting
Count per role	swarm-ness vs. elite-ness	one “swarm” unit is just a weak melee foe
Telegraph length by role	reaction budget	artillery needs the longest tell; skirmishers the shortest

How it wires to Hayao

An archetype is data: a stat block in world.state (hp, speed, range, role) driving the shared behaviors from system-enemy-ai. Same brain, different numbers — a tank is a seeker with high HP and a wide body; a kiter is the ranged archetype.
Spawning by role rides the director: WaveDef.spawn takes a weighted set, so pollDirector(waves, state, world.time, world.rng) (grep docs/API.md) can roll “2 swarm + 1 support” per firing, deterministically. See src/content/dsl.ts.
Silhouette & palette carry the read — distinct shapes and Regalia-palette hues per role (world-aesthetic-direction, JUDGE). The player must name the role from the silhouette alone.
Roster legibility shares the design of system-unit-rosters — the enemy roster is a roster with the same “one glance, one role” bar.

Fails when…

Stat-only enemies. Five foes that differ only in HP are one enemy with a slider. Roles must demand different answers, not different patience.
No priority target. Without support (or an equivalent “kill this first”), every fight is a spray — order stops mattering.
Illegible silhouettes. If you can’t tell artillery from tank at a glance, the read collapses (pattern-readability, JUDGE).
Swarm that isn’t a swarm. Too few, too tanky, and it’s just chip damage with extra steps — swarm fun is many trivial (§6).

Verify

Each role beatable with its answer: kiting-bot telemetry per archetype — 0 deaths, hp floor ≥ comfortable (FUN.md §4).
Composition, not inflation: assert a skill delta — the correct target order clears far faster than a naive one (FUN.md law 2). If order doesn’t matter, the roles don’t interact.
Swarm pressure holds: peak alive ≥ N so the horde feel can’t silently regress (FUN.md §6).
Readability gate: telegraph-before-hitbox in src/verify/gates.ts.

Composes with

system-enemy-ai — the shared brain each archetype re-skins with stats.
system-encounter-design — archetypes are letters; encounters are the words.
system-counter-systems — roles imply near-hard counters (AoE vs. swarm).
system-unit-rosters — the same legibility discipline, player-side.
system-boss-design — a boss is often a super-archetype with phases.