Teachings presented herein offer reduced and stable computational complexity for symbol block detection using multi-stage assistance, and also provide for the generation of soft bit values. A demodulator generates these soft bit values by forming from a set of candidate symbol combinations, for each group of symbols in a symbol block, a subset of candidate symbol combinations for that group. The demodulator selects from the set the most likely combination, at least one combination that has a complementary bit value for a respective bit v value in the most likely combination, and as many of the next most likely combinations not already selected as are needed for the size of the subset to conform to a pre-determined size. The demodulator generates soft bit values by limiting the candidate combinations of symbols considered for a symbol block according to the subsets formed for the groups of symbols in that symbol block.