I'm a idiot when it comes to coding, but I have seen a youtube video showing different kinds of "maze finding AI" and maybe you could...take one of those and...reverse engineer it to find the shortest route to the player or something. I'm sure it doesn't work like that, but I figured I would suggest it anyways. Maybe if you could make the AI find shortest possible routes to the player that could also help. Again, I'm a idiot when it comes to coding so aside from ideas in extremely basic form I don't know if I can help much.
Oh, don’t worry about that. I already have the maze solving algorithm ready (technically most of my games involve mazes in some variant :D). I’m just a bit too lazy to apply it here. In the end I wanted to add a few “smart enemies” that would carefully plan their route unlike their numerous but dumb friends that would randomly wander around.
The problem here would be that the Player will actually have to kill all the enemies to survive - now the crowd is relatively manageable, and good maneuver can ensure the survival even when the player is overwhelmed with numbers. If the enemies will run directly into Player’s position, they’ll be quite efficient with that. But that’s all pretty goes down to balance - we can just introduce “not always follow the best route” with a chance that allows both a) keep the number of enemies on the map high (I like zombies :D) and b) keep them predictable and require actual skill to avoid even when mana is not enough to kill them all.