I see that there is an "intended level" field on world encounters - does the game use that when selecting a world encounter or does it just scale appropriately to the player level once an encounter is selected? If the game will only select level-appropriate encounters then I can maybe do something with that rather than by location as I had originally imagined. Alternatively, would it be possible to use the "prerequisites" field to do something like "player level is higher than X" before an encounter can trigger?
Thanks for letting me know about duplicating encounters! If all I need to do is that and give it a new ID then it's the same as creating new ones, as far as I can tell!
I've seen Apotheosis but I think for what I'm trying to do I'd cook up a simpler, more specific tool to do the work for me. When I said I hadn't tried any tools I meant more that I didn't download it to try it out (which I'll probably do at some point) but between screenshots, my previous modding experience (even with IE games) and the data format documentation I think I have a pretty good idea of what it does.