Demigod

[Chaos Machine]

It comes out tomorrow, aside from me who else will be picking this up? Also, I saw that frys has it on sale at their stores for $34.99 for those looking to save a lincon

[J Arcane]

I was just about to post a thread about this game, and how it's fucking awesome.

This is some of the most fun I've had in a PC game in a while.

[Goronmon]

I was just about to post a thread about this game, and how it's fucking awesome.

This is some of the most fun I've had in a PC game in a while.You in beta?

[J Arcane]

You in beta?
Nope, friend bought it yesterday at the Gamestop.

Been playing it since yesterday, after an initial snag wherein it takes like ten minutes after the opening cinematic ends to finally show me the damn menu.

[Goronmon]

How does it feel as far as long-term gameplay goes? Think it's something that will stay around for a while?

[J Arcane]

How does it feel as far as long-term gameplay goes? Think it's something that will stay around for a while?
I think as long as they continue updating it with new maps and demigods, it has the potential for some serious legs. As it stands now even, there's enough depth and different game types and play styles available that I can see pouring a lot of time into it.

Stardock's record with their games and the support they give them, combined with the legacy of the mod that spawned this game, seems to me to indicate it'll have some legs.

[Goronmon]

Apparently they are making the digital distribution available today due to Gamestop breaking the street date.

[Young Al Capone]

How is performance? I am a little worried about running it, though I do make the recommended settings.

[Voodoo]

Apparently they are making the digital distribution available today due to Gamestop breaking the street date.

This is great news. :)

[J Arcane]

How is performance? I am a little worried about running it, though I do make the recommended settings.
As long as you're not running it on like a 7300LE, you should be fine. ;) The manual makes a point of stating that as long as you're running Pixel Shader 3, and not some ancient or bargain basement card, it should be OK.

I'm playing it on a 9800GTX of course, and it runs mostly flawlessly, though every now and then it gets a hair bogged down when there's a lot of shit going on, and once the sound glitched and wasn't playing the sounds for the demigod's actions.

[Goronmon]

This is great news. :)So great I made a post about it in the news section, haha.

[Young Al Capone]

As long as you're not running it on like a 7300LE, you should be fine. ;) The manual makes a point of stating that as long as you're running Pixel Shader 3, and not some ancient or bargain basement card, it should be OK.

That is good, looks like I'll be picking up this and Drakensang thursday and then trying not tp pick up anything else until those two are completed.

[jpublic]

As long as they have adecent training/tutorial bit with it, I'll be happy. I was in the beta and couldn't figure it out.

[Voodoo]

So great I made a post about it in the news section, haha.

That is very good. :)

[SpacemanSpiff757]

I almost picked this up on Saturday (from Gamestop), but I was hesitant. I was waiting to hear some word of mouth about it before I took the jump. Is it strictly the arena style gameplay or is there something else I'm missing?

[Hotcod]

i may wait for a demo before i put money down on it. If i had more money it would be a no brainer but there are other things that require my cash at the moment

[J Arcane]

As long as they have adecent training/tutorial bit with it, I'll be happy. I was in the beta and couldn't figure it out.
There's no tutorial whatsoever beyond the hints that show up on the loading screens, but there is a rather amusing "crash course" sort of thing in the manual that's good enough to get you going.

I was confused at first, and I've still got a lot to learn about how all the Demigods play best, but I get the impression they intended part of the game to be learning how ever thing works.

[Goronmon]

Alright, this game is pretty badass.

[J Arcane]

Alright, this game is pretty badass.
See, I told you.

So who's your favorite so far? I'm pretty fond of the Unclean Beast.

[Telefrog]

See, I told you.

So who's your favorite so far? I'm pretty fond of the Unclean Beast.

I like the Vampire Lord. Upgraded minions are badass.

[J Arcane]

I like the Vampire Lord. Upgraded minions are badass.
I have yet to even try one of the Generals. My friend really likes Erebus as well though.

I kinda like just wading in and ripping shit up.

[Goronmon]

So who's your favorite so far? I'm pretty fond of the Unclean Beast.Don't remember the name as I only played one skirmish vs. the AI. The Ice/Fire caster guy. Took me a while to beat the Easy AI until I realized you had to shift forms to use the spells of the other type. Was so confused for the first 15-20 minutes, haha.

[Acidpoptart]

I also picked this one up. Had only a few minutes to play, but it has been pretty awesome so far.

[Libuke]

Broke down and bought it, downloading now.

[Chaos Machine]

personally i think gamestop broke the street date on purpose to lock into some quick revenue and fuck digital distribution sales, also its widely known that this game doesnt have any copywrite protection which no doubt is going to hurt the studio due to it being released only in gamestops early. I think its actually grounds for a lawsuit and i hope they sue the fuck out of gamestop.

If you dont want to see more draconian drm bullshit shoveled down your throat i urge you to get off the fence, this game is fantastic and steal at the price they are asking.

[Goronmon]

Played a quick skirmish against Normal AI with the Unclean Beast. I found him to be fairly useless. That winged angel guy was against me and he could almost kill me before I got into melee range. Which never actually happened because he just kited me anyways. Was lots fun playing a melee character who has to sit in the back with a thumb up his ass. I think that's the last time I'll ever play him, haha.

[Telefrog]

Okay, this game is epic. It's been a while since I felt this badass in a video game without a gun.

http://i42.tinypic.com/2gwutkl.jpg

[Ravenlock]

Alright, somebody walk me through this thing, because now I'm (1) interested, and (2) feeling really stupid for turning down the beta invitation I won from In Game Chat back when they were on the radio.

(2) has been true for awhile, but nevermind.

I've never played DOTA, but I've watched my brother in law be obsessed with it. I get that you have a hero unit, and that he's got minion dudes, but how does it control? Are you ordering guys around, or do they just follow you and do their thing? Do you build those units? Build bases or base parts? Paint me a picture here.

[J Arcane]

There are two god types: Assassins, and Generals.

Assassins are pure beat sticks. They get no troops to summon, just a lot of abilities for either brutally murdering other demigods and troops, or in the case of the Rook and Regulus, for creating a few defensive tools like additional turrets and mines.

Generals are the minion wielders. Each has three types of units available to them, and they can summon a group of each, and they will either follow it around, or can be given specific orders. In addition they also get some abilities of their own for whooping the piss out of other Demigods, but are generally less effective at getting in the thick of it than the Assassins.

There are no real bases to build, instead, you have a single base Citadel, for which upgrades can be bought with cash that buff the existing buildings capabilities, the capabilities of the NPC troops that pour out of the portals, XP gain, cash gain, and unlock new types of NPC units. The NPC troops are entirely independent, though they will sometimes tend to follow a Demigod if he's close by.

There are also shop buildings that can be used to buy gear for your Demigod, gold mines that when captured with a nearby flag will increase income, and of course various kinds of towers and turrets defending your side of the map.

The goal of the game depends on game type, some have you gunning for the enemy Citadel, others have you trying to capture or destroy points on the map like flags or fortresses, and there's even a deathmatch sort of game which is all about killing other Demigods.

[Zrikz]

oh god, I hate you all.. I'm going to have to break down and buy this, this week I'm sure. I just bought a new video card, might as well buy a new game while I'm at it.

[Libuke]

Just played two games against/with computer allies, barely one the first one I was playing the plant summoner lady and umm didn't know where to find idols, I didn't even find the shop, but somehow still one the game. Took a long time.

Second game realized what/where the shop was but only used it once. Played as the torch bearer. Decimated the AI, as him. Died once cause I chased a hero into a large number of tower, only time I was back at base all game, where I then proceeded to buy all the spawn upgrades for better units which then just over whelmed the other team (I had a lot of gold at this point). There was a healing tower near the front lines and I kept using that. He felt a lot like a Dota hero. Once I learn how the summoner heroes work proper they will probably be fun too.

Overall looks like it should be fun and as has been mentioned stardock should support this nicely so should be good for a long time.

My Impulse name thing is Libuke if you want to add me to maybe play some Demigod.

[itchyeyes]

This seems like mostly a MP game. Can anyone who's played it comment on whether or not it's worth picking up just for the SP?

[J Arcane]

This seems like mostly a MP game. Can anyone who's played it comment on whether or not it's worth picking up just for the SP?
The bots are a cake walk on Easy thanks to the handicap it gives them, but still fun because it turns the game into sort of a Diablo-y hack-and-slash thing.

On Normal they seems more than competent enough to put up a challenge, in fact, so far my attempts on that setting have resulted in me getting my ass kicked.

[SpacemanSpiff757]

personally i think gamestop broke the street date on purpose to lock into some quick revenue and fuck digital distribution sales, also its widely known that this game doesnt have any copywrite protection which no doubt is going to hurt the studio due to it being released only in gamestops early. I think its actually grounds for a lawsuit and i hope they sue the fuck out of gamestop.

I am by no means defending Gamestop because I work there (I think their practices are just as pathetic, but a job is a job, plus I only work there to help a friend out). But I checked the system when I was there and the game wasn't marked for a street date like they usually do when we do inventory searches so the fault could be somewhere internal. If we try to sell a game that is in fact street dated, we get a big pop-up message on the sales screen letting us know that it is street dated. ANYWAY, their fuck-up and I'd like to see a lawsuit come of this after how they've treated me and some friends.

I still want to pick up this game after what I've been reading on here. Guess I have to wait until the next paycheck :(

[Loki]

Oh how I hate you all. I got burnt spending $50 on Dawn of War 2 so I'm not wanting to spend another $50 on a multiplayer focused RTS. Is it available on Steam?

[Telefrog]

Oh how I hate you all. I got burnt spending $50 on Dawn of War 2 so I'm not wanting to spend another $50 on a multiplayer focused RTS. Is it available on Steam?

a) Stardock's game so Impulse only.

b) Good thing it's not $50. It retails for $39.99. :p

[J Arcane]

a) Stardock's game so Impulse only.

b) Good thing it's not $50. It retails for $39.99. :p
Actually, according to the Demigod site, the retail box is $50. The digital only purchase option is $40.

Of course, Gamestop sold the regular retail box for $40 anyway, and saved the $50 tag for the collector's edition.

[jpublic]

I used the plan summon chick for very good reasons. Two of them. Hypnotic, they were. :)

Hey, I also tend to play female avatars.

I'm not proud....or tired. :D

[Ten19]

This seems like mostly a MP game. Can anyone who's played it comment on whether or not it's worth picking up just for the SP?

I'm very much interested in this as well. There's no demo out yet, and I'm loath to drop dollars without a really good word of mouth or some hands-on experience.

[Goronmon]

It is a very multiplayer oriented game. No campaign mode to speak of, just Skirmish mode against bots.

[Telefrog]

It is a very multiplayer oriented game. No campaign mode to speak of, just Skirmish mode against bots.

There's a "Tournament" mode, but it's just a random series of eight bot matches with different win conditions. You could equate it to the normal singleplayer experience in Street Fighter.

Multiplayer is really where the game shines since you can upgrade your Demigod with persistent favor points you accumulate in the matches.

[Libuke]

I've found the AI really easy to beat on easy and normal going to try hard today but I am sure to really get the most of the game you will have to play multilayer in the long run.

[Camel]

Played it once so far, and I don't particularly know what I am doing. Is there any sort of tutorial mode that I am just missing? Still, I had a pretty good time, and everything started clicking towards the end of the match. I played as the Oak, who has an awesome ability to heal the units around him whenever he kills something.

EDIT: Ah, didn't read J Arcane's long post before. That explains a lot!

SUPER DOUBLE EDIT: After a few more matches, I'm still really digging the game. I was pretty confused at first, especially because I thought I would be managing all of the buildings and units I was producing, but once I played for a bit it all became clear. I played a few matches as the Unclean Beast (not my favorite, although I really like some of his abilities. You can spray poison all over the other demigod and then just walk away while it ticks off damage) and the Queen of Thorns (who is awesome, but somewhat fragile).

I love how the game has a constant tug-of-war feeling to it, where the enemy pushes you back a bit, then you push him back a little more, and then after a while you can successfully take down a tower without getting dominated and can push a little further into his territory, etc.

[Food Nipple]

Well, I was about to buy this, but Stardock's store is down. So I went to check their forums, which are also down.

When the forums came back up, it seems that they're filled with people complaining that the online matchmaking is broken. In fact, between the official forums, here, and neogaf I haven't read a single account by anyone who has gotten the matchmaking to work.

So does this game actually work?

[J Arcane]

As mentioned in the other thread, Stardock is having server infrastructure problems on account of Gamestop breaking release date. There's too many people piling on before they were ready for it. They've said they're working to move to a bigger server cluster.

[Bad Buddha]

So does this game actually work?

They've said they're working to move to a bigger server cluster.
Maybe it will be working tomorrow: The original release date.

"Hey Bob, You know those servers that are being prepped for the release date on Tuesday?"
"Yeah, We'll be going in on Monday, after Easter with our families, to finalize the config settings and optimize the level loading."
"Screw that! Hunt your damn eggs with your ankle-biters early and get in to the office and fire those puppies up!"
"Well, there's gonna be piss-poor performance until we get a chance to tune them up."
"Cry me a river. Go TP your local Gamestop!"

[Telefrog]

This is straight badass.

ffXO0Uonffk

[Lekon]

J Arcane's post is really handy of course. Some other tips to help newbies out:

All the shops have different tabs. Armor, gloves,headgear, etc. If you are playing a general, you'll find another tab at the bottom that has a star. This is the icon tab. You can buy one each of melee, ranged, and healer units, and they stay with you the whole match (Resummon as much as you like)

The items stack however you like. You can't have duplicates, but you can wear multiple armors. IE: You can have four different suits of armor equipped, but not the same suit twice. The Demigod manual is helpful. As long as you have the real game and have updated it, the manual is on your hard drive, in Demigod's Bin folder

Last other tip. You'll notice 3 useable item slots, and a fourth "favor" slot. This confused a lot of people. Click it to see two tabs. One for all gods, and one for the type of god you are (Assassin or general). These are special items that are tied to your account, not your character. The more favor you get (Winning battles) the more of these items you can buy. Some are incredibly handy. I highly suggest saving up for the one that lets you teleport. These items are permanent. Once you buy one, its stuck to your account.

[Crowe]

I have a 7800 GTX, 2 gig of Ram and a AMD Opteron processor. I know my comp is getting old but I can run Farcry 2, Fallout and Supreme Commander pretty well, but even on low settings this game chugs just a little too much.

Also going Godlike with Regulus is like taking candy from a baby.

[Telefrog]

I have a 7800 GTX, 2 gig of Ram and a AMD Opteron processor. I know my comp is getting old but I can run Farcry 2, Fallout and Supreme Commander pretty well, but even on low settings this game chugs just a little too much.

Some people with older soundcards or onboard sound have found that disabling "reverb" in the options has greatly improved the framerate.

The bottleneck on this game shouldn't be the graphics or the CPU from what I've observed on the official forums. As long as you have pixel shader 3.0, the visuals don't really stress the GPU too much.

[CappinCanuck]

I am up for some games if anyone wants to add me. Still fresh to it though, just grabbed it today.

[Sly Marbo]

I am up for some games if anyone wants to add me. Still fresh to it though, just grabbed it today.

I'll add you. It'll be fun.

[Food Nipple]

I was halfway through writing an enormous rant about how I hate everything about this game: the matchmaking, the friend list, the server browser, the controls, the graphics, the netcode. But all of that can be summarized with one sentence:

Everything Demigod does, DotA did better.

[Goronmon]

Everything Demigod does, DotA did better.Considering I'm enjoying Demigod quite a bit, that makes me want to try out DotA.

[Shjinta]

I was halfway through writing an enormous rant about how I hate everything about this game: the matchmaking, the friend list, the server browser, the controls, the graphics, the netcode. But all of that can be summarized with one sentence:

Everything Demigod does, DotA did better.

Hmmm.. except every game was filled with people who wouldn't shut the fuck up and whine and whine and whine and whine. The game is still unbalanced after how long? Yeah, you can argue they have like 90 something classes. Most of them are absolutely worthless. I loved the shit out of DOTA, but the online aspect of it killed it for me. So I play against bots. I find Demigod just so rich and fun. Also I hope you don't mean that DOTA graphics are better than Demigod..if so.. yeah get your eyes checked.

And for a final note, it took inspiration from DoTa. The games are different.

[Food Nipple]

Also I hope you don't mean that DOTA graphics are better than Demigod..if so.. yeah get your eyes checked.

And for a final note, it took inspiration from DoTa. The games are different.

The graphics comment is mostly aimed at stuff that obviously has missing effects. For example, teleport scrolls in DotA have a clear graphical effect that indicates that the player is teleporting. In Demigod, there is absolutely no spell effect, the guy just pops out of existence.

At first, I assumed that the guy had turned invisible, and I was trying to cast AOE spells to uncloak him, when that didn't work I assumed that AOE damage didn't uncloak enemies, so I started buying observer wards to detect invisible units. It wasn't until I actually bought a teleport scroll and used it myself that I realized that the game designers neglected to include any kind of spell effect for teleportation.

In both DotA and Demigod, you can cancel someone's teleport by using abilities that interrupt channeling spells. Not only does canceling someone's teleport effectively make them waste the 250 gold, but you force the other player to walk all the way back to the fountain, which costs them XP that they would otherwise be getting. Of course, in Demigod you can't tell if someone is teleporting, or using a healing potion, or most other channeling abilities because there's no spell effects in many cases, so that layer of strategy goes right out the window.


My other complaints about graphics are about similar things: The health bar over enemies is much too small to read, and there are no health bars over friendly creeps under your control, which means I have to constantly mouse over my creeps if I want to micromanage their health. Similarly, while it may be neat looking that your Citadel grows enormous, it occludes objects at the most crucial stage of the game, which is extremely frustrating.

With only 8 heroes in a 10 player game, you are ALWAYS going to have duplicate heroes, and the game makes no visual distinction between players who select the same hero, even across factions. I need to look at the minimap to see if the dude running at me is a friend or foe. There's also circumstances where two enemies may have the same character but different items, which can drastically affect how you engage them. There's no easy way for me to tell which is which from a distance, forcing me to mouse over them.

Yes, from a technical standpoint Demigod is pushing more polygons, but from a usability standpoint, I think DotA does a much better job conveying the information you need to know.

[Ravenlock]

Hrm. Well now in the absence of a demo for Demigod, you're making me just want to go grab the WC3 Battle Chest somewhere and try DotA. ;)

[Telefrog]

The graphics comment is mostly aimed at stuff that obviously has missing effects. For example, teleport scrolls in DotA have a clear graphical effect that indicates that the player is teleporting. In Demigod, there is absolutely no spell effect, the guy just pops out of existence.

What!? :confused: There's a clear pre-teleport effect in Demigod. When a demigod teleports there is a swirly blue corona that surrounds the player. Are you not seeing this?

[Food Nipple]

What!? :confused: There's a clear pre-teleport effect in Demigod. When a demigod teleports there is a swirly blue corona that surrounds the player. Are you not seeing this?

I just double checked, apparently you only get the blue glow if you're running high settings, medium and below is SOL. I also did notice that most character models do differentiate slightly in color depending on who controls them, but not the mage guy when he's in fire form.

[Shjinta]

Ahhh, Yes I get you now. I have the graphics cranked to the Max. I see what you mean. I just am enjoying Demigod because every DOTA game i've ever seen is who can attack and faster, or stun more often. In the high en dmatches it always ends up like that. It's worse if you play against the AI..I can't even beat a full team of Insane AI.

I think Demigod can work on your issues in sometime. The game just came out. DOta wasn't always as "accessible" as it is today. They had a long time to refine the game.. Thought I still think the game breaks down to Attacking insanely fast and Stun locking the shit out of your opponent to kill him.

I love what I see now. I guess we'll have to wait and see how the Dev team expands the game.

I didn't mean to "attack" you so don't hate meh :/

The graphics comment is mostly aimed at stuff that obviously has missing effects. For example, teleport scrolls in DotA have a clear graphical effect that indicates that the player is teleporting. In Demigod, there is absolutely no spell effect, the guy just pops out of existence.

At first, I assumed that the guy had turned invisible, and I was trying to cast AOE spells to uncloak him, when that didn't work I assumed that AOE damage didn't uncloak enemies, so I started buying observer wards to detect invisible units. It wasn't until I actually bought a teleport scroll and used it myself that I realized that the game designers neglected to include any kind of spell effect for teleportation.

In both DotA and Demigod, you can cancel someone's teleport by using abilities that interrupt channeling spells. Not only does canceling someone's teleport effectively make them waste the 250 gold, but you force the other player to walk all the way back to the fountain, which costs them XP that they would otherwise be getting. Of course, in Demigod you can't tell if someone is teleporting, or using a healing potion, or most other channeling abilities because there's no spell effects in many cases, so that layer of strategy goes right out the window.


My other complaints about graphics are about similar things: The health bar over enemies is much too small to read, and there are no health bars over friendly creeps under your control, which means I have to constantly mouse over my creeps if I want to micromanage their health. Similarly, while it may be neat looking that your Citadel grows enormous, it occludes objects at the most crucial stage of the game, which is extremely frustrating.

With only 8 heroes in a 10 player game, you are ALWAYS going to have duplicate heroes, and the game makes no visual distinction between players who select the same hero, even across factions. I need to look at the minimap to see if the dude running at me is a friend or foe. There's also circumstances where two enemies may have the same character but different items, which can drastically affect how you engage them. There's no easy way for me to tell which is which from a distance, forcing me to mouse over them.

Yes, from a technical standpoint Demigod is pushing more polygons, but from a usability standpoint, I think DotA does a much better job conveying the information you need to know.

[Telefrog]

I just double checked, apparently you only get the blue glow if you're running high settings, medium and below is SOL. I also did notice that most character models do differentiate slightly in color depending on who controls them, but not the mage guy when he's in fire form.

Ahh, gotcha. That sucks for mid-to-low end PCs, then. Cranked up, Demigod is awesome.

As to differentiating the players, demigods on your team will have a greenish/blue circle under them. Enemies have a red one.

[Karak]

I think I will reinstall this in a couple months.
Really disapoointed, everything from the graphics to the gameplay seems pedestrian. I have everything maxed and am playing on my 27inch monitor but just don't think the graphics look that good but luckily I am not having any glitches(aside from multi player issues)

I see that Telefrog likes it and I think in the past we have liked the same games so I am a big enough man to think I am either wrong, or this one just doesn't grab me.
I am putting it back on my 2 month shelf and will revisit it.

[Libuke]

You can press tilde (~) and brings up a bunch of health bar mods one in which everything has a health bar over. No temp one I know of like DOTA though. As for obstructing the view I haven't had much of an issue since it is easy to swing the camera with Q or E by default.

I can see the swirls on my computer where graphics are set to medium so I am not sure why you cannot food.

I will agree that it is often to see and interrupt the channeling spells though, I think it will just take time until you know what you are looking for.

Edit: I want to add that I also like the way the engine looks, although SupCom was not very interesting to me, I would not mind seeing another game made with the engine.

[Goronmon]

Was able to get through the connection issues long enough to get in my first Pantheon game.

http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/game/138169/player/20062/

That Torchbearer guy is pretty decent. Max out that Ice Rain spell and you kill large groups of mobs in one shot. Max out the Fire Ball spell and you are nailing Demigods for solid damage from a decent range.

[Telefrog]

I see that Telefrog likes it and I think in the past we have liked the same games so I am a big enough man to think I am either wrong, or this one just doesn't grab me.
I am putting it back on my 2 month shelf and will revisit it.

Nah, I'm sure we were bound to differ on a game or two! :p

In all seriousness, I can definitely see that someone used to DotA would find Demigod lacking. Demigod does have a few issues ranging from the current connectivity problems to a lack of maps. (Of course, Dow II doesn't fare much better there either.)

As for the art style or graphical whiz-bangery, I think it looks gorgeous, but that's me.

[Telefrog]

BY the way, interesting post from Brad regarding Gamespot's 6.5 score of Demigod:

I'm a developer, not a reviewer. However, to me, part of the review process should be considering whether a given issue is transient or not. If it's transient, then the issue should be treated carefully. If it's not, then that's a different story.

I remember when Civilization IV shipped it had a problem with ATI cards due to the way it memory mapped its DLL into memory. I suspect any Firaxis developers here remember that.

Anyway, they had the problem solved and updated within a day or two and now few probably remember that. Should the game been marked down for that? I'd say no because that's a transient issue.

Now, next week if we're still talking about massive Demigod connection issues, then clearly it's not a transient issue and the review should pound on the game for that. But it's hard not to be upset that a game, 2 years in the making that is, by all accounts, an outstanding game, is going to be permanently marked down by one of the largest game sites because the connection servers during the first 18 hours of its street date were bogged down.

And it's especially maddening because the reason the connection servers are bogged down is because of the pounding those servers are getting from warez users and that the solution is fairly straight forward: Move the connection server away from anything that's affected by warez users.

[Food Nipple]

Not only do pirates hurt sales, now they lower review scores too!

[SilentScreams]

I don't know what all the people complaining about the graphics are on about. It's by far the best looking RTS I've ever played.

[Crittias]

I don't know what all the people complaining about the graphics are on about. It's by far the best looking RTS I've ever played.If you have all the bells and whistles on, I agree. I think the complaints are coming from people that are playing at medium settings.

[Telefrog]

Not only do pirates hurt sales, now they lower review scores too!

Well, I think he has a point. Ignore the review score bitching. He's not complaining about lost sales, he's telling everyone what one of the tangible costs to piracy are for this game. The warez copies hitting Impulse is costing Stardock/GPG real money in terms of manpower and server time. The Impulse servers have to suss out which hits are legit and which are from warez kiddies. Here's a followup from Brad:

When Sins of a Solar Empire launched (Gamespot score: 9.0), the multiplayer services of the game consisted of a single EXE (Ironclad Online) running from the Startup folder of ONE machine.

However, unlike with Demigod, Sins didn't instantly have 140,000 bumping into it. Instead, it had a few thousand. Over time, as the userbase grew, Ironclad continued to improve it and we were able to provide more infrastructure.

But with Demigod, the game's street date (18 hours ago now) was broken and while only a few thousand legitimate copies got out there, it turned out to be a favorite of pirates resulting in 120,000 (yesterday) connections at its peak.

Visit: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ and click on View Steam players per game to get a comparison. That means in a 24 hour period, our servers had to deal with more users than all the Counter-Strike servers combined had to deal with. Our system wasn't set up to handle 140,000 users. It was setup to handle a fraction of that.

Now, this isn't something that we can't address. We can slowly eliminate the pirates from using the resources but we have to do updates to do that and we have to make our NAT connector not so dependent on those resources. But it's not something we can do overnight, it may actually take a full 24 hours from the official street date to address.

One can only imagine what the fate of Sins of a Solar Empire would have been IF its launch day resulted with tens of thousands of users connecting at once rather than a few hundred at once and the review was a snapshot of that moment.

I think it's an interesting look at a real way that piracy can effect a game.

[Ancalagon]

BY the way, interesting post from Brad regarding Gamespot's 6.5 score of Demigod:

That'll show him - next time pay your "advertising bill", or your knee cups get it. Punk.

He must be well pissed though, I would be. But I havent even read the gamespot review despite knowing its available, I havent visited the site since the Kane and Lynch fiasco (literally). I think I'll break that just to see what all the fuss is about.

I can imagine the review being something like,

Pros
Good graphics
Addictive gameplay
well balanced
lots of variety
lots of replayability
Will dominate multiplayer gaming for a while
all your friends are playing it

Cons
Connection issues
They didnt pay their protection money.

Final score: 22/100

[CappinCanuck]

I thought stardock dropped the ball on the graphics as well until I turned things up. I was too excited to play so I just fixed the res, but man, after turning it on I am happy with it.

Meh on the piracy issue. Sure there will be some, but just because there is no DRM doesn't mean it's the wild kingdom where anything goes. Stardock is blocking accounts that have the pirated version starting this week, as per what a dev was saying in the channel last night. Apparently it's pretty easy for them to do so. And it's not login accounts, but stardock accounts heh.

I look forward to people with legitimate Stardock windows apps getting burned for pirating the game. (I uninstalled all my warez a week ago, including many Stardock apps lol) Oh the joys of going legit. Too bad there's more pain than joy. *looks at credit card bill* Vista, MS Office, some AV, couple games = ouch.

[Telefrog]

Hilarious update from Brad:

You can visit the pirates in their isolated channel now on #demigod on irc.stardock.com. That's where the old connection service puts those who use chat.

Be sure to drop in and thank all the assholes.

[Kryopsis]

I just noticed Telefrog on the Demigod forums and decided to drop in and see if there's a CoG group playing the game.

Personally I am enthralled with the game so far, torn between the brutal power of the Torchbearer and the finesse and mobility of Lord Erebus. My several hours with the game are probably insufficient to give quality feedback on Demigod and having never played DotA I never experienced anything akin to this game (other than the Beastmaster levels of Wacraft III: The Frozen Throne). The gameplay and presentation, however, are excellent and more than make up for the surprising lack of content and I'll certainly be playing it weeks from now (which I cannot state with such certainty regarding Dawn of War II).

CrispyGamer (http://www.crispygamer.com/gamereviews/2009-04-15/demigod-pc.aspx) posted a very positive review of the game, by the way.

[Libuke]

I just noticed Telefrog on the Demigod forums and decided to drop in and see if there's a CoG group playing the game.

Personally I am enthralled with the game so far, torn between the brutal power of the Torchbearer and the finesse and mobility of Lord Erebus. My several hours with the game are probably insufficient to give quality feedback on Demigod and having never played DotA I never experienced anything akin to this game (other than the Beastmaster levels of Wacraft III: The Frozen Throne). The gameplay and presentation, however, are excellent and more than make up for the surprising lack of content and I'll certainly be playing it weeks from now (which I cannot state with such certainty regarding Dawn of War II).

CrispyGamer (http://www.crispygamer.com/gamereviews/2009-04-15/demigod-pc.aspx) posted a very positive review of the game, by the way.

I am not sure how many people have it but feel free to add me as a stardock friend, Libuke.

I enjoy the torch bearer too, mostly in ice form. I've also been enjoying the oak, been mostly using him as an straight up fighting hero but if I was playing with people in a coordinated team I would try using him as a support as the invulnerable is nice just not many people to use it on, especially with AI.

Play a 2v2 today were I tore it up as him, started out with other team beating us as The Oak takes a while before he can shine but once I got to a higher level I was able to take both the other heroes by myself at the same time. Between him and Torch Bearer are about only ones I've played more then once or twice.

My brother enjoys the rook and is fun to watch but I do not like playing him that much, have not played him many times but for some reason just has not grown on me.

I will also add that the most recent patch has made getting into a game much easier as host (in custom games) can kick people who cannot connect and things just seemed a little more stable.

[Telefrog]

Add me if you already haven't. I'll be on tonight.

[Goronmon]

Same username under Impulse as well.

[Kryopsis]

Same here, my username is Kryopsis. I'll add you all once I get home.

[CappinCanuck]

Patch was out last night. Seemed to fix many of the connection issues. Some slowdowns were still there due to lack of server capacity. That's being updated now till 19:00 EDT.

[Deadend]

I uhh 'demo'ed the game. I think it's great, but not really for me. I think the art style is great. I like Lord Erebus the most, as he can be played a bit non general-ish due to his vampire bite ability, as it does some great direct damage, his main weakness is his shitty mana pool compared to the cooldowns on his active abilities.

I also enjoyed the Beast a bit. I liked it's ability to DOT-stack on guys. I think Remus is a fun character too, he just requires that someone find targets for him to Snipe for max damage.

I do think it's a bit better than DotA which is a big fucking mess of a game with TOO MUCH SHIT in it. Demigod feels closer to a fighter-RTS than RTS-RPG to me. My big complaint about the game is that it's hard to find a target when you get big clashes, as I think Demigods of the same side can stack on each other, as there are certain characters I go after first. Namely the girl from The Golden Compass followed by Sniper guy.

[H.Bogard]

LOL. People still read Gamespot reviews?

[Telefrog]

LOL. People still read Gamespot reviews?

Unfortunately, yes. Even worse, Metacritic weights Gamespot scores higher than many other sites. :(

[Harv]

This sounds cool, but I'm not sure how much I would be interested in it overall.

[OrangePulp]

I do think it's a bit better than DotA which is a big fucking mess of a game with TOO MUCH SHIT in it.

Dota is complex, and takes time to learn, for sure. However, I don't really think you can fault it for having "too much shit", because that's why it has so much replay value, and people play it for years, etc. I also, ah, demo'd Demigod, and it just doesn't have enough going on for me personally. Items are kinda bland, and there isn't much for hero selection, etc. It's DotA and League of Legends (which is kickass, by the way, other than the horrible acronym) for me.

[Harv]

Never played DotA. If it is like this I can see the appeal. I picked it up btw, seems cool even though my first game I nearly got my ass kicked on easy.

[J Arcane]

Erebus kicks insane amounts of ass. He's like an unstoppable plague, once he gets his nightwalker skills up there he can just stand in place and watch as his waves of neverending undead destroy the countryside.

It's pretty awesome.

[Deadend]

Dota is complex, and takes time to learn, for sure. However, I don't really think you can fault it for having "too much shit", because that's why it has so much replay value, and people play it for years, etc. I also, ah, demo'd Demigod, and it just doesn't have enough going on for me personally. Items are kinda bland, and there isn't much for hero selection, etc. It's DotA and League of Legends (which is kickass, by the way, other than the horrible acronym) for me.

It's possible to be complex without having tons and tons of different units when most of said units are also poorly balanced. It's like fighting games, if only 4 or 5 characters are top-tier, it doesn't matter how many other characters it has, as only 4 or 5 are worth using. It's why Starcraft 2 replaced units and not just added more, because more complex != better.

I think the 8 heroes cover nice broad playstyles where all of them play quite unique, and MAYBE balanced. I have no clue if they are, or what they are balanced for, as I don't think there is balance for 1v1 mode, but for 3v3.

I also expect to hear about new characters and maps being added in a few months.

The main difficulty in the game is removing the laser towers, right now I think The Rook is the best for taking out defense emplacements, which are the most important thing to winning I think, as once a tower falls, it doesn't come back ever, which does help with bringing an end to a match, but it makes it really hard for come back. Again, most of this is based on brief impressions and thinking.

I also think the game has the coolest maps, just due to the backgrounds, like the one with the giant demon frozen in ice under the level, fucking awesome.

[Crowe]

There is not one hero in DOTA that you cant go GODLIKE with. Sure some heroes are better than others, a lot of the time however it all comes down to how well you team works together and how well you go at the start. In comp play I'm sure there are Heroes that are never chosen, but in casual online play DOTA's huge selection of Heroes, no matter how imbalanced doesn't hurt the game. At least in my opinion.

I don't believe Demi needs to have more heroes though, for the moment there is just enough variety there. Especially combined with more maps and different game mechanics. I don't know if the "gank" will be the same in Demigod as it is in Dota, whether that is good or bad remains to be seen.

"CALL MISS FUCKHEAD...sigh"

[Camel]

I don't get all the Erebus love. Maybe I just picked the wrong skills when I played as him, or didn't really use him properly.

Personally, I still love the Oak, with the Queen of Thorns coming in second. I just played as the Torchbearer for the first time the other day as well. I LOVE his voice when he is in fire mode, as well as his ring of fire spell.

[SilentScreams]

Regulus is still the one I'm best with, but I enjoy playing as Queen of Thorns and Sedna more.

[Ravenlock]

It makes me very happy to see people liking a bunch of different heroes - tells me they did a good job designing strengths for all of them that will appeal to different players.

Anybody loving The Rook? That guy just looks badass. ;)

[jpublic]

The Rook is badass to watch, especially on extreme closeup.

I don't know how I feel about this game. I'm sort of leaning towards wanting my money back, because I don't see this one having any sort of lasting appeal for me.

[Lint of Death]

Oh, this IS that Gas Powered Games product I had been wondering about. Maybe I should get it :D

[Lon Lon Rabbit]

I'm interested to pick this up, but I'm not gonna be near a gaming PC for a few more months; am I going to be completely crushed trying to start playing this in a few months time? I don't have a lot of RTS experience and I've only played a tiny bit of DOTA at LANs, so I'm worried that the skill curve (particularly with the lack of tutorial) will be a bit too harsh if I join the community when it's been playing and practicing for months.

Also, I haven't really followed stardock stuff at all, are they firmly rooted into their own digital distribution system or is there a chance this game may pop up on steam somewhere down the road?

[Telefrog]

I'm interested to pick this up, but I'm not gonna be near a gaming PC for a few more months; am I going to be completely crushed trying to start playing this in a few months time? I don't have a lot of RTS experience and I've only played a tiny bit of DOTA at LANs, so I'm worried that the skill curve (particularly with the lack of tutorial) will be a bit too harsh if I join the community when it's been playing and practicing for months.

Also, I haven't really followed stardock stuff at all, are they firmly rooted into their own digital distribution system or is there a chance this game may pop up on steam somewhere down the road?

a) There's really not much of a skill curve. Unlike DotA, there's no secret formulas to memorize and the small amount of Demigods means that it's pretty easy to anticipate what to expect.

b) Sorry. It's a Stardock published game, so unless they go out of business, I don't think you'll ever see it on Steam or whatever. The design is pretty closely integrated with Impulse Reactor.

[Lon Lon Rabbit]

a) There's really not much of a skill curve. Unlike DotA, there's no secret formulas to memorize and the small amount of Demigods means that it's pretty easy to anticipate what to expect.

b) Sorry. It's a Stardock published game, so unless they go out of business, I don't think you'll ever see it on Steam or whatever. The design is pretty closely integrated with Impulse Reactor.

Thanks.

One last question; I'm not gonna be home for a few more years, but I'd love to play this with some mates back in Australia. A 200ms ping in an FPS is playable but will put you at an obvious disadvantage, and I'm probably looking at pings of 200-300 playing with people back home. I'm assuming (hoping) that latency isn't as much of an issue in this sort of game compared to an online FPS?

[Libuke]

Thanks.

One last question; I'm not gonna be home for a few more years, but I'd love to play this with some mates back in Australia. A 200ms ping in an FPS is playable but will put you at an obvious disadvantage, and I'm probably looking at pings of 200-300 playing with people back home. I'm assuming (hoping) that latency isn't as much of an issue in this sort of game compared to an online FPS?

It is set up totally as peer-to-peer (not one person host it); which has been causing a lot of the problems in multiplayer you may be reading about. However, it means that pings seem to be between 100-200 no matter how far away the people you are playing with. I played a game with some people from France or Spain (Cannot remember) and the ping/lag was perfectly fine. So as long as you can get everything configured properly if should work good. I found with my new router I have not had to worry about it but if I was still using my old one I would of had to do port forwarding etc.

[Lon Lon Rabbit]

Awesome, thanks for the replies.

This will probably be the first game I pick up once I'm back on a proper gaming machine.

[Deadend]

I think I would have bought this game if it wasn't a RTS.
As using my mouse to command a single unit feels stupid.
If the game played like Overlord crossed with Dynasty Warriors with direct Hero control and using the right stick on a controller (or whatever on a M/K) for minion control and direct player input.. I think it would have been much more enjoyable to me.

[Goronmon]

If the game played like Overlord crossed with Dynasty Warriors with direct Hero control and using the right stick on a controller (or whatever on a M/K) for minion control and direct player input.. I think it would have been much more enjoyable to me.While that would be awesome, it would make the networking end a nightmare.

[Clark]

MAN.

I'm so on the fence with this one. I've been excited about it for a long time. I love DOTA. Now I'm worried about it. It doesn't sound like the DOTA crowd is too into it.

One thing I really love about DOTA is that there are two seperate sides of heroes and that each hero can only be taken once. It adds a lot of character to the fights. You get to "know" who is playing the dwarf sniper on the other side.

This would be an instant purchase for me if it had these features.

[Telefrog]

Awesome, thanks for the replies.

This will probably be the first game I pick up once I'm back on a proper gaming machine.

By the time that happens, there will probably be a demo for you to try out. :D

[J Arcane]

I think I would have bought this game if it wasn't a RTS.
As using my mouse to command a single unit feels stupid.
If the game played like Overlord crossed with Dynasty Warriors with direct Hero control and using the right stick on a controller (or whatever on a M/K) for minion control and direct player input.. I think it would have been much more enjoyable to me.
So you won't play Diablo either?

Because that's basically what playing an Assassin is like.

For Generals, it's not a single unit, but several actually, so RTS makes sense there.

[Camel]

Anybody loving The Rook? That guy just looks badass. ;)
Played a few games as the Rook today. It is awesome to walk up to enemy towers and then heal yourself while destroying them in the process. I also love how you can get archers and a trebuchet on top of the rook to shoot at enemies. It looks cool, plus it helps with retreating demigods because the Rook is SLOW. I think he might be my favorite Assassin-type demigod now.

One thing I love about this game is that it is awesome to play in spurts while doing other things, since games don't take ridiculously long to finish.

[Kryopsis]

I haven't touched games other than Demigod since its release date on April 14th. After believing myself being top dog by dominating in 2v2 skirmish with Hard AI on Cataract, I found that playing against the Unclean Beast + Sedna on Crucible is quite tough.
I'd gladly try the game online and see if the problems at launch persist, however I can't stop playing Skirmish... Online will have to wait until I believe myself to have a satisfactory grasp of characters and maps.

Curiously there are not characters in Demigod that I dislike. While some characters I play less than others (Rook, Sedna, Unclean Beast, Regulus), they all have their uses and excel at certain situations. This said, the Torchbearer remains to be my favourite, so far, with the second place shared equally among Lord Erebus, Oak and the Queen of Thorns.

I can't blame reviewers for rating Demigod so low if the connection problems are as prevalent as they claim, however I believe that as soon as Stardock fixes these issues, the game will be a must-buy for anyone even remotely interested in RPG-RTS titles. Among Warcraft III, Dawn of War II and Spellforce, Demigod is the game to play. This just goes to show that Metacritic is not everything.

[Hotcod]

Ok i just played my first game and i don't have a clue what the heck is going on... but in a good way... the problem is i'm a little drunk and it's nearly 5am so i think i'll go to bed and have another crack at it tomorrow. From what little i played it seems rather cool and even if i don't play it as much as i've played sins it should be worth it even if it wasn't supporting stardock who are simply awesome

[Ravenlock]

I also picked it up tonight, and have so far played single player rounds as The Rook and The Unclean Beast. Of those two, I liked The Rook a lot more, but I think I just didn't have the hang of the Unclean Beast yet, because the enemy team had another Beast and they were playing him much better than I was.

Happy with it so far. :)

[IIntrude]

Impulsed it just yesterday and I must say it is quite good. Can't wait to graduate from AI to real people. I have only used the Rook so far, I love the annimations and the sounds of his groans as he moves about.

[Deadend]

So you won't play Diablo either?

Because that's basically what playing an Assassin is like.

For Generals, it's not a single unit, but several actually, so RTS makes sense there.

Diablo 2 has slightly different controls. And the camera is locked to the character, using the mouse acts like a stick most of the time as I tended to do the hold to move and not click move. But yes, I would love for D3 to have support for controllers. Too Human almost had the controls right, it just put too little focus on using special abilities that had too long of cool-down timers.

[Ten19]

Really on the fence about picking this up. Pretty disappointed they're going to put a demo out a month AFTER release, and while I understand their reasoning, they're potentially losing my $40 because I want to be sure before plopping down the cash. And I'm not concerned about connectivity issues, etc, as those will get worked out, I'm talking about the core gameplay elements.

[Lon Lon Rabbit]

Ok so turns out I'm going to have access to a much better laptop than mine for the next month and a bit.

I'm not very techy, so do you think this machine will run the game decently enough? I don't need flashy graphics, just playability.

Info copied from a dxdiag:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs)
2014MB RAM
(I can't read the GFX card stuff very well as it's all in Chinese...)NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M Integrated RAMDAC 512MB

Not sure if that's even right, but the machine runs TF2 quite well so I'm hopeful it'll run this game in a satisfactory manner on low settings.

[Kryopsis]

Diablo 2 has slightly different controls. And the camera is locked to the character, using the mouse acts like a stick most of the time as I tended to do the hold to move and not click move.

You can press 'T' to stick the camera to your Demigod, if it helps.

Also, if you are trying to target the enemy character in a huge melee, hold down CTRL to have the cursor target only Demigods.

Ok so turns out I'm going to have access to a much better laptop than mine for the next month and a bit.

I'm not very techy, so do you think this machine will run the game decently enough? I don't need flashy graphics, just playability.

Info copied from a dxdiag:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs)
2014MB RAM
(I can't read the GFX card stuff very well as it's all in Chinese...)NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M Integrated RAMDAC 512MB

Not sure if that's even right, but the machine runs TF2 quite well so I'm hopeful it'll run this game in a satisfactory manner on low settings.

I am running Demigod on Low at work (but in 1680x1050) and it still looks very good. The requirements for the game are not high and while I am unfamiliar with NVidia's Quadro cards (the laptops I used had a stripped-down GeForce 8800), if you can run Team Fortress 2, you should do fine. Of course a demo would've helped to get a more accurate assessment of your computer's capabilities...

By the way, there is a new update (http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467) on the state of the game from Brad Wardell. It's refreshing to see a company take responsibility rather than blame it all on somebody else.

[Crittias]

Also, if you are trying to target the enemy character in a huge melee, hold down CTRL to have the cursor target only DemigodsUseful! Where did you find this? I don't see it on the control list in the manual...

[Kryopsis]

I do not remember if it is listed in the manual but I found it in the Controls menu option.

[Food Nipple]

Ok so turns out I'm going to have access to a much better laptop than mine for the next month and a bit.

I'm not very techy, so do you think this machine will run the game decently enough? I don't need flashy graphics, just playability.

Info copied from a dxdiag:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs)
2014MB RAM
(I can't read the GFX card stuff very well as it's all in Chinese...)NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M Integrated RAMDAC 512MB

Not sure if that's even right, but the machine runs TF2 quite well so I'm hopeful it'll run this game in a satisfactory manner on low settings.

I personally don't need the game to be flashy eye candy, but I was annoyed that I wasn't given any visual indication that some abilities were being used unless I had the settings cranked to "high."

[Stoke]

Ok so turns out I'm going to have access to a much better laptop than mine for the next month and a bit.

I'm not very techy, so do you think this machine will run the game decently enough? I don't need flashy graphics, just playability.

Info copied from a dxdiag:

Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz (2 CPUs)
2014MB RAM
(I can't read the GFX card stuff very well as it's all in Chinese...)NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M Integrated RAMDAC 512MB

Not sure if that's even right, but the machine runs TF2 quite well so I'm hopeful it'll run this game in a satisfactory manner on low settings.

I have a 8400GS in my laptop, rated much lower than your Quadro so you'll be able to run it. I do have a lot of slow down though on the lowest settings at 1024x768 though. Haven't even bothered with the multiplayer for that reason.

[Crittias]

I've been playing a ton of the Tournament mode, and finding it quite challenging on Hard. A few quick things I've learned the hard way:

Read the skill and item descriptions carefully! The game encourages quick action, so early on I felt rushed to pick a skill or pick and item without thoroughly reading the fine print.

For instance, Heart of Life is a great item...provided you use it correctly. It'll regenerate health and mana for you, but it can be interrupted by ANYTHING, so it's important that you retreat to a safe place before you activate it. I was treating it like a health pot, and clearly not getting much out of it.

I also didn't truly understand that Erebus' primary attack, Bite, not only does damage, but (much like a true vampire bite) also returns health. So, it should NOT be the first thing you spam when you run in to attack a DG. You should wait until you've taken a bit of damage, and then Bite to get the most out of the skill.

Just a few quick examples of poor play by me that was quickly remedied by more careful reading.

[Chaos Machine]

i found a bug where as a general you can summon the creatures, sell the idol and the creatures dont die, meaning you can buy all 3 types of clerics, summon them, and sell back the idols to have 6 clerics healing you at once. the same can be done with every idol creature type, its pretty gamebreaking if someone takes the time to get that force out

[Crittias]

i found a bug where as a general you can summon the creatures, sell the idol and the creatures dont die, meaning you can buy all 3 types of clerics, summon them, and sell back the idols to have 6 clerics healing you at once. the same can be done with every idol creature type, its pretty gamebreaking if someone takes the time to get that force outOver on the official forums this has been discussed quite a bit. Most people think that it's counterable by targeting the minions instead of the DG, and once the DG loses those minions, they don't get them back (b/c they've sold the idols), so it's a pretty expensive proposition.

I've tried the strategy, and found it didn't help very much. But that might've just been me.

[Hotcod]

won the single player tournament on easy with the rook, it was.... simple... to say the lest but it's a good way to get used to the game since you can take the time to read all the powers and such things. I need to try one of type of gods now i think

[Kryopsis]

Crittias:
Ah, Lord Erebus's infamous Bite attack. It's the bread-and-butter of every build, with players opting to max it out as soon as possible and is probably the Vampire Lord's only skill that everybody agrees on. It heals you at the same time as it damages the enemy, slows him down and reduces his armour. Not to mention the cooldown is low so you can spam it.

Personally I am a Mist user. Some people claim it becomes useless in end-game but there is nothing like Mist to give you an instant army in a dire situation. It may be sub-optimal against Demigods (on its own) but when fully maxed out, it gives great health regeneration to all allies within and boosts their hitpoints by 500 and it appears that even the lowly Minotaur is capable of heroics with double the life pool... Anyway, it's a matter of opinion: personally I can't manage my mana well enough when using Bat Swarm and Mass Charm is too specific.

I've been keeping an eye out on the forum to see if anybody is being overly vocal about game balance and was pleasantly surprised when it turned out that all but Sedna needs to be nerfed (by popular opinion). Silly mortals. But we, Vampire Lords, know the truth, eh Crittia?

[J Arcane]

Mist at high levels, combined with maxed out Night Walker summoing skills, is an almost unstoppable defensive combination.

Your only limit is how much mana you have, and that can easily be taken care of with the right gear and artifacts.

[Stoke]

Something I've been wondering about, what level are you guys getting to by the end of the game? So far I don't think I've ever gotten past 19 and I'm mostly around 13 when I finish a skirmish, but I'm limited to smaller games because of my computer. I never seem to have enough time to reach my full potential it seems and I'm starting to wonder if it's just because of the type of games I play.

Edit: Also my games never last more than 20 minutes if I'm not trying a new character or build.

[SilentScreams]

5v5 on The Brothers or whatever it's called, I'll usually hit level 20 by the end unless we completely dominate and get into their base early.
Most other maps are over before that though. Usually the 13-15 mark.

[Ten19]

Well I broke down and picked it up, and am really enjoying it thus far! I've only played single-player skirmishes so far, and only with about half the demi-gods, but it's proving to have quite a lot of depth. The single-player definitely could use more meat to it, but I think it will do a good job of prepping for human multiplay.

I just hope they release an SDK or map editor, that will really give this game some legs.

[Ravenlock]

Something I've been wondering about, what level are you guys getting to by the end of the game? So far I don't think I've ever gotten past 19 and I'm mostly around 13 when I finish a skirmish, but I'm limited to smaller games because of my computer. I never seem to have enough time to reach my full potential it seems and I'm starting to wonder if it's just because of the type of games I play.

Edit: Also my games never last more than 20 minutes if I'm not trying a new character or build.

I hit L20 last night in one of the single-player tournament maps I was playing, but it's the only time it's happened so far for me. It was also the first time I've played a map where I needed to take out all the fortresses rather than the citadel, that may have had something to do with it.

[Kryopsis]

I generally always end the game at level 20.

[Telefrog]

I've hit 20 on a few of my online games. Oddly enough, it seems to happen in Prison, the smallest map available, instead of one of the bigger ones!

[Crittias]

Something I've been wondering about, what level are you guys getting to by the end of the game?It depends a lot on game type and map. If it's "Destroy the Fortress" mode, and there are 5 fortresses to destroy, then yeah, sometimes I make it to 20. On other modes and maps, I've finished a game at level 8 before (on Tournament, on Hard).

[Stoke]

Well, I'm glad my experience seems to be within the norm. After a month of nothing but Gal Civ 2 and Sins it feels unnatural to end a game in under an hour. :p

[Telefrog]

Brad's latest update (http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/348096/Demigod_Monday):

Now right now, Demigod, as a game, is awesome. Demigod, as an on-line service, however, sucks ass. It works fine for what I dare say most people but for others, it's just awful. Our job is to make sure it works fine for everyone.

Talk about being babes in the woods. Sins of a Solar Empire’s network “infrastructure” to this day involves 1 server. Demigod’s involves dozens of servers now because of so many people using it. I guess it turns out most people playing Sins of a Solar Empire were playing it single player.

I love reading Brad's posts just for the transparency he provides into Stardock's process.

[Hotcod]

I'm trying my luck at hard, i don't really want to head online until i'm not getting my ass kicked by the AI on hard... and dear god am i getting my ass kicked, it's almost too painful

edit

just managed to win the prison as the rook on hard. Took about half an hour and there was a lot of back and forward but i think i'm starting to get a build order for the rook that isn't gimped which is nice.

[CappinCanuck]

To be honest, just jump into online play. You'll lose a couple games at first but that's the way to learn the quickest. It took me about 4 games till I started winning. Plus, does it really matter if you win or lose? Something will always come up, someone will drop here or there, so you can't take it too seriously heh.

[Hotcod]

i don't mind losing at all i just like to have a better understanding of what i'm doing before i jump in online is all :) i'll never be fantastic at the game i don't think but i've started to get a handle on exactly what i should be doing, may have a game or two online tonight before i go bed. I'll be sure to post reports of my ass being kicked :)

well that went up in flames... firstly got placed in a game, on my own vs what seemed to be 5 AI.... then spent for ever trying to get a game going even custom ones... did get a game going and it was going well enough, likely would have ended up losing but could and been better and i get booted from the game (after some one else had been to) so i finished up quickly vs the AI. I know it's meant to be a mess but being on at a none peek time seems pointless at the moment

[CappinCanuck]

i don't mind losing at all i just like to have a better understanding of what i'm doing before i jump in online is all :) i'll never be fantastic at the game i don't think but i've started to get a handle on exactly what i should be doing, may have a game or two online tonight before i go bed. I'll be sure to post reports of my ass being kicked :)

well that went up in flames... firstly got placed in a game, on my own vs what seemed to be 5 AI.... then spent for ever trying to get a game going even custom ones... did get a game going and it was going well enough, likely would have ended up losing but could and been better and i get booted from the game (after some one else had been to) so i finished up quickly vs the AI. I know it's meant to be a mess but being on at a none peek time seems pointless at the moment

Heh, yeah, it can be tough. It gets easier when you know exactly how to read the connection info but even then. I am hoping their new patch will fix the issue. I have had games where I click connect and it jumps in, no disconnections, within 10 seconds. If they make that true for all games, it would be great. As for now, I suggest using Pantheon. Click Pantheon, click launch... easy as pie -- no joining, refreshing, failed attempts to connect heh. None of the actual pantheon games really count yet anyway.

[Hotcod]

ya what i meant was since i was trying to play off peek the pantheon was empty so my own real choice was custom games. I've worked out the connection info and the like it's just a pain in the ass trying to find a game loby that works and so on. Shall play a bit more some time today.

[Ancalagon]

Brad's latest update (http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/348096/Demigod_Monday):



I love reading Brad's posts just for the transparency he provides into Stardock's process.

He didnt even blame it on other people or claim "most people have no problems with DemiGod, there is no problem". His PR department obviously isnt good enough, I mean customers these days expect to be lied to, we get disappointed when we get honest and factual statements from developers.

[Harv]

So far this game has been really fun even just doing skirmish and tournament. I'll try multiplayer when it settles down a bit more, but honestly I really don't like playing multiplayer with people I don't know at all.

[Hotcod]

once things are better we are clearly going to need a demigod night :D

[Acidpoptart]

once things are better we are clearly going to need a demigod night :D

Absolutely. Until the connectivity stuff gets sorted out, I will just practice against AI. But once that update finally hits, I would love to join in some big ol' 5 v 5 games.

[Clark]

Well I broke down and picked it up, and am really enjoying it thus far! I've only played single-player skirmishes so far, and only with about half the demi-gods, but it's proving to have quite a lot of depth. The single-player definitely could use more meat to it, but I think it will do a good job of prepping for human multiplay.

I just hope they release an SDK or map editor, that will really give this game some legs.

Damn it. I actually told myself "If Ten19 buys it and likes it, I'll give it a go."

You think I'm rich, man?

[Harv]

I'm finding that The Torch Bearer is a beast in tournament mode at least up to normal difficulty. Upgrade his fire mode and he just annihilates mass quantities of guys and gains levels really quickly. He is also a terrific assassin. Between Nova and Fireball it's almost too easy.

[jpublic]

Anyone have a good strategy for Queen of Thorns? I've been building up her Shamblers and then working on minion health. Then I run back and get all the minion idols I can afford, and go nuking.

[Daytime_Lantern]

I'm having a lot of fun so far.. I'm bouncing back and forth between this and DOTA and I may end up sticking on this.

It's kind of weird though. In every online game I get, I don't think I meet anyone that chats

[CappinCanuck]

Anyone have a good strategy for Queen of Thorns? I've been building up her Shamblers and then working on minion health. Then I run back and get all the minion idols I can afford, and go nuking.

There is a 'Demigod Strategies' sub-forum on the Demigod site. It has some pretty good general strats and specific DG ones. Have a look, it did wonders for my Sedna.

[Telefrog]

It's kind of weird though. In every online game I get, I don't think I meet anyone that chats

Right now, everyone has to use an outside voicechat solution. Brad has said that voice support will be in the next update for Impulse.

In the meantime, yeah, it is pretty silent during matches. :p

[CappinCanuck]

yeah, voice chat and the friends list is clogging up the servers. They'll re-enable them in the next patch. According to the guys in #impulse. So that's also why no one is ever online either.


Edit: Or rather why the reporting/chat is spotty. Sometimes one person comes on here and there, but there could be 5 on all the time and you'd never know it.

[Ten19]

A very illuminating video from Brad "Frogboy" Wardell, President of Stardock, was just posted.

http://ve3d.ign.com/videos/45501/PC/Demigod/Trailer/Brad-Wardells-Day-7-Status-Update

Brad talks to a few employees at Stardock about what part of Demigod's current problems they're working on, and always, Brad is happy to take responsibility for things under their control, and is doing what they can to address them ASAP.

Really wish you saw this level of transparency at other game developers and publishers.

[Hotcod]

very cool video it's really refreshing to see them being so open.

[Ancalagon]

Good forum post by Brad Wardell. Nay, an excellent post:



If I wrote a post saying that Demigod sales were far below what we had hoped for and I said that the reason was due to piracy and that the answer was that we should have put some nasty copy protection on those DVDs to have prevented early piracy what do you think people would say?

I know what my answer to that would be. I would say that Stardock couldn’t blame poor sales on piracy but rather the fact that the game’s built-in multiplayer match-making was totally broken for the first day of release due to its underestimation of network resources that a mainstream game would take and even when that got addressed, the multiplayer match-making for two weeks and counting has been incredibly flakey which affected reviews and word of mouth. That’s what I would say.

And yet…

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23381\

Demigod debuts at #3 for top selling PC games at retail – bearing in mind that that was a partial week and that the majority of units sold were digital sales which weren’t counted.

But…but…what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.

The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don’t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary – our customers.

As Ars Technica quoted over a year ago:

"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."

Even Demigod, a game that shipped with no copy protection on the DVD, was massively pirated, and has had, to put it mildly severe launch issues with its multiplayer match-making which has had a negative impact on its Metacritic score has still managed to debut at the top of retail sales charts (not counting our digital sales).

Why is that? At that point I can only speculate but the first reason is pretty straight forward: Demigod is an awesome game. Second, while the multiplayer matchmaking that comes with the game currently sucks, our customers know it will get fixed. Part of that is the demographic of Stardock customers. They’re more experienced, they know that some of the issues with the MP matchmaking aren’t due to rushing the game out or negligence but rather the fact that complicated systems sometimes don’t scale well and there is no substitute for time when it comes to fix them.

I think there are many lessons to be learned from Demigod. For example, if I had to do it over again, I would be inclined to require a valid user account to play LAN even if it only has to be validated one time. That way, we could also make it a lot easier for a legal user to have a LAN party with a single license. Anyone who has played Demigod on Game Ranger probably knows what and why I'm bringing that up.

When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than fighting pirates, you end up with more sales. It seems common sense to me but then again, I’m just an engineer.


Source: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/349758

[Telefrog]

As always, Brad's points are excellent.

[Ravenlock]

That is a really good post.

I actually hopped into my first internet game yesterday and had no problems matchmaking and no lag at all. Unfortunately my "teammate" spent the whole time being pissed off at being stuck with a "noob" and berating me for not knowing all the nuances of the game (hey, turns out the normal-level AI, which I can beat just fine, is still less complicated than playing against a human. I guess the way you learn to do better is by playing and losing some against humans!), but what did I expect? It's the internet. ;)

EDIT: Speaking of circumventing the dark corners of the internet, I'm Ravenlock on Impulse as well and would be happy to have some COGgers on my friends list. Hint hint. :)

[Ancalagon]

People who get irate with noobs are just stupid. Really, everyone starts that way.

[SilentScreams]

The first time somebody started having a go at me for being a "noob" I just spent the whole game randomly sniping harmless minions from my own base as Regulus to spite him.

When he asked why I wasn't trying I replied "I'm doing my best, but I'm just a lowly noob."

[Ravenlock]

I ended up being somewhat spiteful myself, actually, which I'm not proud of. By the end of the game I was definitely walking The Rook deliberately to his death just to annoy my ally. :p

Bottom line, obviously, is I should be playing with you guys instead.

[Goronmon]

So, let me get this straight...you were accused of being a "noob" so you made deliberate attempts to convince your teammate that "noobs" really are worthless and suck to play with.

Sounds productive... ;)

[SilentScreams]

Not really. He knew I was being deliberately crap, and I made sure he knew why.
My hope is that next time he may think twice before calling somebody a "noob", but deep down I doubt it.
Sure made me feel better though.

[Ravenlock]

So, let me get this straight...you were accused of being a "noob" so you made deliberate attempts to convince your teammate that "noobs" really are worthless and suck to play with.

Sounds productive... ;)

*Shrug* He's right. At this point I am pretty worthless, and I'm not claiming that I don't deserve the label of "noob". I accepted it - and actually told him even before he started whining about it that it was my first game online, and at that moment it was probably clear that our team didn't have a good chance of winning. I knew that going in.

At which point he could choose to be helpful or be a prick. He chose prick, after which point I didn't feel bad about getting MY enjoyment from annoying him.

Either you help build the skill level of the online community, or you just bitch about how it isn't high enough without doing anything about it. If someone's going to choose the latter, that's not somebody whose respect I'm looking to gain or whose opinion I care about changing.

[Harv]

This is why I hate playing online with people I don't know, because a good percentage of game players are childish assholes. When the barrier for entry was high people were generally helpful because they could count on the people coming in to be rational human beings with some level of intelligence. Now it's all a crapshoot.

[ShivaX]

This is why I hate playing online with people I don't know, because a good percentage of game players are childish assholes. When the barrier for entry was high people were generally helpful because they could count on the people coming in to be rational human beings with some level of intelligence. Now it's all a crapshoot.

You have to consider the communities as well. Demigod is getting a ton of Warcraft3/battle.net players because of what it is. Of all the people that play online games they're among the worst.

[Ravenlock]

Yeah, I think the very strong DoTA tie-in for this game may be hurting its online community as a whole. A large part of this game's built-in audience has been playing the prototype OF this game for years now (whereas people like me who are new to the game have never played DoTA at all), are already very entrenched in the game mechanics, and have zero patience for folks who aren't yet part of their little club.

Which serves only to keep their little club little.

I still want to play it multiplayer, but I certainly don't want to play it multiplayer with folks like that.

[Libuke]

Yeah, I think the very strong DoTA tie-in for this game may be hurting its online community as a whole. A large part of this game's built-in audience has been playing the prototype OF this game for years now (whereas people like me who are new to the game have never played DoTA at all), are already very entrenched in the game mechanics, and have zero patience for folks who aren't yet part of their little club.

Which serves only to keep their little club little.

I still want to play it multiplayer, but I certainly don't want to play it multiplayer with folks like that.

I'd offer to play with you but... I hate noobs. (/plum)

Seriously though I am moving cities this weekend for a summer job and do not know when I will have regular internet so I cannot offer to play with you to help you learn some of the nuances of the game.

Experience would probably be the best teacher in this case but like you said it can be hard with inconsiderate people out there. One major thing to remember in games like this is it is often better to run early then risk dying.

[Hotcod]

we need to set up a thread in matchmaking and start a CoG demigod night the better we get the less like noobs we seem all while enjoying the game in the way your meant to

[Crittias]

we need to set up a thread in matchmaking and start a CoG demigod night the better we get the less like noobs we seem all while enjoying the game in the way your meant toI'd very much like to set up a CoG Demigod night.

[Hotcod]

i've not really played it very much, been a bit busy but uni is all but done so i'd be more than up for one night a week of hot god on god action. It's a shame impulse isn't as fully featured as steam for this kind of stuff just yet but shouldn't be to hard to pick a night and throw up a passworded server

[Sly Marbo]

CoG Demigod night sounds awesome. I'm down.

[Harv]

Yeah, lets get together and try this out multiplayer. Anyone up for some tonight? Around 6:30pm or so?

I'm a little tired of beating on the computer, but we can do a comp stomp if people want to, I'm not against that.

[Harv]

Well, that's annoying. I just tried joining a custom game and the thing crashes on me. Great.

[Hotcod]

sorry man couldn't do it last night but i'm up for some demigod goodnes tonight... in fact i may use the steamgroup to set up an event

[Harv]

sorry man couldn't do it last night but i'm up for some demigod goodnes tonight... in fact i may use the steamgroup to set up an event

What's the steamgroup?

I can probably do something tonight. Assuming the damned thing doesn't crash when I try to join a multiplayer game. :mad:

[Harv]

Can anyone who has played multiplayer describe some of the differences in strategy playing against humans versus playing against the AI?

[Hotcod]

check out the matchmaking forum, we have a GoG group on steam which you can set up events and the like

[CappinCanuck]

Big patch Thursday btw. They're finally adding direct connect. They also mentioned that they are working on ways to better play with friends/contacts. Right now you basically have to meet in a custom game and that's about it heh. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

[Harv]

check out the matchmaking forum, we have a GoG group on steam which you can set up events and the like

I'll have to see about getting an invite. I'll check my steam account when I get home.

[Telefrog]

A number of posts from Brad Wardell:

The Demigod launch is definitely really bringing up to roost the sad state of networking affairs on the PC.

In Supreme Commander, GPGNet was used and what it did was NAT traversal between players. Players who couldn't be connected would show up with yellow or red pings in the SupCom lobby and the host would have to decide to kick them out.

It wasn't a huge deal in SupCom because most people didn't play MP and those who did, were technical enough to open up their ports.

With Demigod, the difference is that the player has to connect to everyone already in the lobby, not just the host in order to get into the lobby. That means, if there is 1 user in the lobby who can't connect to more than a couple of people (for a variety of reasons) they can keep everyone else out.

The false assumption in Demigod was that a person who could connect to 1 person could connect to 8 other people and that's just not the case. That edge case wasn't identified.

The next false assumption is that because there were few complaints about Company of Heroes or SupCom, that the NAT system in Demigod would work fine. But CoH and SupCom are mostly played single player by the more casual part of the base. By contrast, Demigod is mostly played multiplayer.

As a result, a lot of people who normally wouldn't even be trying an RTS MP are now in that mix which aggravated the first false assumption.

It particularly aggravates it because for Demigod, a new type of "Super NAT traversal" was made. For those who have opened ports and such, it works like every other game. But for those who don't have normal network configurations, it apparently does a lot more but the result is that it uses a LOT of server resources to do it. As a result, what worked fine for a random sample of say 500 people fell apart at 5000 people and you still end up with edge cases that can thwart everyone.

Here's an example edge case: Some ISPs we believe are limiting the # of peer connections they allow a user to make somehow. That person connects to host of a game fine, gets in. But then, nobody else can connect to them and he blocks everyone from getting into the game.

This was figured out quite quickly. But the solution isn't something that can be engineered overnight.

Here's basically how the solution works:

1. You have to let people get into the lobby even if they're not connected to everyone else.

2. Once in the lobby you try to direct connect or NAT connect to each other. If that fails, we try to use proxy servers to connect them. if that fails, they will appear with a yellow ping and the host will have to decide whether to kick t hem.

This is non-trivial to implement because, as some people know, Stardock didn't develop Demigod. GPG did, including the networking. The networking in Demigod works fine as a unit test just like the connection servers work fine as a unit test. But integrating the two without requiring a lot of changes to Demigod is a significant task.

It is my hope that it will be solved tomorrow.

Now, that said, and this is depressing, in the last 2 weeks I've talked to enough people in the industry off the record to realize that in terms of RTS's, what Demigod is experiencing isn't atypical. It's just that Demigod's *multiplayer* userbase is a different demographic than the multiplayer user base of say a Supreme Commander or a Company of Heroes.

But regardless, it has to be made bullet proof and THEN once it is made bullet proof, Stardock will have to put in extra effort to make sure the MP community stays large through contests with prizes, coupons, you name it.


Client/Server games:
Descent 3
Valve Left4Dead
Valve Counterstrike
Stardock The Political Machine
Stardock Entrepreneur
Stardock Sins of a Solar Empire

Peer-to-Peer games:
THQ Company of Heroes
Microsoft Rise of Legends
THQ Supreme Commander
Stardock Demigod

Each system has its strengths and weaknesses.

What happened last week is that Stardock assigned the Impulse team to re-do it for Demigod to make it quasi-client/server.

If they don't have major progress this week then I think the MP game in Demigod is pretty much screwed.

Well my feeling is, if Stardock/GPG can't solve the MP issue this week then Demigod deserves to go down in flames.

And before someone reading this thinks I'm trolling, I'm the CEO of Stardock (I have gotten flamed on our forums for "attacking" Stardock and Demigod).

I don't CARE what the technical issues are. I know what they are -- against my will I know them. But I don't care and neither do gamers. The damn MP just needs to freaking work for the vast majority of users. Period. End of story.

If I wasn't on the inside, I'd be screaming "how the hell did the MP in this game get released?!" Except in beta, it worked really well. We had 10 player MP games online routinely.

Long story short: ANY MP centric game must have a very large free PUBLIC beta test. Period. As in, 10s of thousands of players.

[Harv]

Well, at least they recognize the problem. It's unfortunate that they weren't able to identify the problem until it got out among the masses, but that's software development for you. As he notes a large scale beta test probably would have immediately made this all apparent. Wonder why they didn't do a public beta.

[Chaos Machine]

what it boils down to though is that they went cheap and chose p2p instead of client/server. its biting them in the ass now, though at least they are willing to fix it.

[Goronmon]

what it boils down to though is that they went cheap and chose p2p instead of client/server. its biting them in the ass now, though at least they are willing to fix it.Well, I think that theoretically, P2P can improve network performance under certain conditions since it removes the server in the middle and players connect directly. Obviously though, maintaining multiple connections between multiple players is a lot more complicated than maintaining a single connection for each player.

[thomas]

I give this game 0 out of 10. With each point given directly relates to how many multiplayer games I have successfully gotten into (since launch).

[Food Nipple]

what it boils down to though is that they went cheap and chose p2p instead of client/server. its biting them in the ass now, though at least they are willing to fix it.

There's nothing "cheaper" about p2p over client/server, if anything, this whole debacle has shown how much harder is it to implement a reliable p2p system.

[Telefrog]

what it boils down to though is that they went cheap and chose p2p instead of client/server. its biting them in the ass now, though at least they are willing to fix it.

As Brad pointed out, a crapload of well-respected RTS games are P2P.

[Ten19]

They're beta testing an update right now, shooting for Monday.

Fixes:

What’s new in this beta:

* Massive connectivity optimizations and updates
* Favor Items fixed
* Favor points fixed
* Major optimizations to audio on low fidelity settings
* Fixed bug that occured if you used an ability after issuing an attack command. This is the "won't chase the demigod I clicked" bug.
* Achievements properly vaulting on Impulse
* Sending deltas for partially completed achievements.
* Each player now saves their own achievements and favor items
* Fixed partial Achievement saves bug.
* Fixed a bug that occurred if you accomplished an achievement in game.
* Fixed a bug in disconnect dialog that would try to update it even if we had determined we did not want to show it.
* Fixed sound performance issue (for users who were having to run without sound)
* Changed resample rate to 24k in Low settings
* Delayed FMOD initialization until audio LOD is set via options
* Disabled hitbox interference from announcer messages.
* Life's Child no longer removes Inner Grace (Sedna fix)

http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/351222/Demigod_W00t

You can opt-in to try the beta, but they're shooting for Monday.

Could this be it?

[Harv]

Well, an update was waiting this morning. We'll see if this gets more people online.

[Loki]

So can I buy it yet?

[CappinCanuck]

The proxies go up tomorrow. That's when you should buy it. Friday to be safe for a patch patch :P

[Ancalagon]

I remember Supreme Commander having endless issues with its sound engine. Many people had to disable sound completely get any sort of playable gameplay. Pity the bug persisted even into Demigod (which is based on the same engine).

Does sound like quite a good update though.

[Telefrog]

I remember Supreme Commander having endless issues with its sound engine. Many people had to disable sound completely get any sort of playable gameplay. Pity the bug persisted even into Demigod (which is based on the same engine).

Does sound like quite a good update though.

The sound issue has been defeated with this workaround!

Hello Brad,

I'm sure you are very stressed with Demigod so I will try to keep it as short and precise as possible.

I am one of the people who cannot play Demigod with sound as that causes terrible performance drops (I played with /nosound).

I have a personal dislike of those developer/publisher videos you have to click away after every start of practically any game... So I thought about "handling" them (simply renaming the movie folder worked for Galciv 2 and games from other companies, I don't remember right now if Impulse tries to redownload them though).

Then I remembered something. A somewhat similar problem occurred with another game for me. The Demo of Grand Ages Rome had 5 second freezes every few seconds for me and deleting the movie folder helped solving that issue. [According to the developrs] it is an issue (on a noticable percentage of machines) with the FMOD sound system and the bink player (both also used by Demigod).

So I renamed the movie folder in the hope that Demigod will start anyway and lo and behold the problem is gone.

I'm aware that the connectivity issue is of much greater importance to Demigod as an MP game right now (and rightly so), I'd just thought I give you a pointer as for the possible causes and approaches to that very annoying problem.

Many Demigod users have reported that this works.

[Telefrog]

Just an update to last night's patch. The trick with the opening movies apparently works well enough that Stardock is making it official by adding a "/skipintro" command line to bypass the intro movies.

[Telefrog]

A very interesting breakdown of the Demigod launch and subsequent drama. So what the hell happened? (http://forums.demigodthegame.com/352561) There's a lot of good stuff here, especially if you're interested in getting into the PC game business.

For the rest of us there's this:

Q: When will more Demigods be released?

A: 2 Demigods are in development. I will have a better idea later this week when I meet with GPG on that.

Q: What about modding?

A: We have discussed this issue with GPG and I can’t make promises on this but I can tell you that what we would like to allow is for people to mod AI players (LUA) and then submit them online and let them compete to see how they do. This would encourage good AI modding. We would also like to support mod support in Demigod proper where the Pantheon would support players downloading officially “blessed” mods and be able to play them in game. I don’t have any ETA on this yet.

And a summary...

Q: What is your honest outlook for Demigod?

A: You know the expected marketing answer. But my view is, the difficult launch definitely hurt the game. There’s no way around it. Besides upsetting a lot of people anxious for a good multiplayer game, you also have the fact that those early negative reviews are going to linger. 1UP promised to re-review the game when this mess is straightened out and so I’ll be talking to them this week about that. But still, Gamespot (6.5) and IGN (7.5) are going to linger. That’s the breaks. One could argue we released a game that wasn’t done (we thought it was done) and that’s what you get.

Now, that said, I do think long-term the game is in good shape. First, we will be putting a lot of effort to build the online community. Scheduled games, strong team and clan support, pro tournaments, matchmaker filtering (let people filter out people they don’t want to play) are all coming sooner rather than later. Those things will help immensely.

[Stoke]

Like Telefrog posted in the Deals forum, the Demigod 50% off coupons went out. So if you're looking for one you should make it known :p

[Harv]

My friends who want to play the game don't have a PC that can run it and the friends that have a PC that can run it don't want to play it. :(

[Hotcod]

i really should try playing this more now... i think if we can get a cog night going in some way it would get me playing

[boratika]

Like Telefrog posted in the Deals forum, the Demigod 50% off coupons went out. So if you're looking for one you should make it known :p

I am definately looking for one of these. I have money in my bank account and that clearly needs to be rectified.

[kyrieee]

I would definitely be up for a coupon if someone really doesn't have anyone better to give it to

[Camel]

If my roommate doesn't want the game then I'll give it away here. Stay posted!

[Deadend]

I played a bit of the pirate edition at a LAN, enjoyed the hell out of it.

I am willing to give Stardock $20 for the game, or $30, anyone got a coupon left?

[Crittias]

I will give my coupon code to the first person that sends me a private message requesting it.

[Clark]

Thanks to Camel for hooking me up!

Now that I'm one of you............

Are the multiplayer problems fixed???

[Clark]

Awesome game.

Multiplayer is not happening for me, however. It's a mess still.

[iHap]

Awesome game.

Multiplayer is not happening for me, however. It's a mess still.

What problems were you running into? I have had no problems at all with playing multiplayer.

[CappinCanuck]

What problems were you running into? I have had no problems at all with playing multiplayer.

Ditto, there are no problems. For people that can't get through their routers/security, you can use the proxies.

[boratika]

A relatively large up goes out to Darken Skye for providing me with a coupon.

Downloaderising now.

My impulse ID is "boratika" (for a change...) if anyone needs to extend their friends list.

[Clark]

Ditto, there are no problems. For people that can't get through their routers/security, you can use the proxies.

This is very good to hear! It must be on my end then.


edit: I am not alone. Multiplayer is still a hit or miss thing with this game. It sounds like the peer-to-peer connections are causing trouble for many. I'm going to have to figure out how to use proxies.

[iHap]

A relatively large up goes out to Darken Skye for providing me with a coupon.

Downloaderising now.

My impulse ID is "boratika" (for a change...) if anyone needs to extend their friends list.

Cool, i'll add you to my impulse friends list. I'm using "JokersTheory" for my name on Impulse.

[CappinCanuck]

This is very good to hear! It must be on my end then.


edit: I am not alone. Multiplayer is still a hit or miss thing with this game. It sounds like the peer-to-peer connections are causing trouble for many. I'm going to have to figure out how to use proxies.

Yeah, some routers are actually overly protective. Even if you open up the routher ports, it still stealths them instead of opening them as opposed to closed ports. I had the same issue. It could just be random people with the problem, but why bother? Don't launch demigod through Impulse, make a shortcut like the good old days. In the shortcut add the following commands /noAI, /skipintro, /serverproxyonly. The last two are self explanatory for the most part, /noAI means you dont want AI players filling spots in matchmaking. You obviously have an issue with your security settings, I would just go with the dedicated proxies and bypass it. Adding that command should fix everything, if it doesn't, then something is really wrong.

[Codicier]

I've got Demigod now. Added my Impulse id to the sig (Hooray for originality!), add me and hopefully we can all get some games in together.

Thanks to Goronmon for the 50% off coupon. :D

[CappinCanuck]

Trading coupon code for your first-born. Send PM if interested. Serious offers only! And don't try to pass off a second-born, I'll know.

Edit: This means I have a coupon for you. There's only 2 days left to use it!

[Clark]

Yeah, some routers are actually overly protective. Even if you open up the routher ports, it still stealths them instead of opening them as opposed to closed ports. I had the same issue. It could just be random people with the problem, but why bother? Don't launch demigod through Impulse, make a shortcut like the good old days. In the shortcut add the following commands /noAI, /skipintro, /serverproxyonly. The last two are self explanatory for the most part, /noAI means you dont want AI players filling spots in matchmaking. You obviously have an issue with your security settings, I would just go with the dedicated proxies and bypass it. Adding that command should fix everything, if it doesn't, then something is really wrong.

This was fantastic advice. I'm CLOSER to being able to play online with the /serverproxyonly command. I am now able to connect to most players, but sadly not all.

I'm being told to "forward ports 6100-6200."

I'm sure that once I get a moment to do some research on this I'll figure it out, but I'm crazy busy right now. It blows that this ONE game in the many I play online is giving me trouble. I'm eager for some mulitplayer.

[CappinCanuck]

This was fantastic advice. I'm CLOSER to being able to play online with the /serverproxyonly command. I am now able to connect to most players, but sadly not all.

I'm being told to "forward ports 6100-6200."

I'm sure that once I get a moment to do some research on this I'll figure it out, but I'm crazy busy right now. It blows that this ONE game in the many I play online is giving me trouble. I'm eager for some mulitplayer.

And 6073 for the hosting port. Then go into program files/stardock games/demigod/bin/impulsereactoroptions or something like that. Then set the port range you are using, 6100-6200.

[Clark]

Wow.

The first "how-to" I read on port forwarding made my brain hurt.

[Stoke]

Wow.

The first "how-to" I read on port forwarding made my brain hurt.

The guide probably made it sound harder then it really is. What type of router/firewall are you trying to get through?

[Clark]

The router is a Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateway. I use an AVG firewall.

[Harv]

I'm just happy that they patched the thing so that single player skirmishes can be paused.

[Lint of Death]

I want this game but I don't think I can justify making yet another purchase :(

[CappinCanuck]

I want this game but I don't think I can justify making yet another purchase :(

:( You should have used the 50%... at 20$, this was a steal.

[Telefrog]

Arise, thread! I command thee!

Notes for the next patch are up (http://forums.demigodthegame.com/360013), and it looks like they are adding a lot of good stuff, especially mod support!

For version 1.2 itself our list is:

* Replays (managed)
* Rematches
* Additional items & balancing
* New Demigod #1 (may be released separately)
* New Demigod #2 (may be released separately)
* Squelch (silence users in game) /squelch frogboy (right from SupCom)
* Option to turn off Arena background
* Various Bug fixes
* More AI improvements (if anyone in the community wants to make LUA suggestions I’ll forward them on)
* New AI options (on death)
o 1. Gold/ XP: High (= to what it is today)
o 2. Gold/ XP: Normal (= 50% what killing a human player would be worth) [default]
o 3. Gold/ XP: Low (=25% of what killing a human player would be worth)
* New AI option:
o 1. Hitpoints: Very High (2X what they are today)
o 2. Hitpoints: High (1.5 what they are today) [Default]
o 3. Hitpoints: Normal (1.0 what they are today)
o 4. Hitpoints: Low (0.75 what they are today)
* Modding Support:
o 1. Quickie SDK that explains how to make maps
o 2. Quickie SDK that explains how to make demigods
o 3. Quickie SDK that explains how to make items
* New Option: Use Mods (allows mods to be used in single player)
* Hosts would select which mods to use.
* We would begin including mods submitted in updated builds.
* If a player does not have a mod, then it’s not used.
* More robust Pantheon and Skirmish handling (slot time to work with us to make this system work better).
* Connection Info would display a player’s rank/experience to better balance custom games

[Hotcod]

might get me back playing this a bit if the new gods come out

[Telefrog]

I've been playing it and things have gotten a lot better in the last month or so. Unfortunately, I suspect the improvement has more to do with the attrition of early adopters than it does any real network code improvements on GPG's part, but I'll take what I can get.

Add a couple more Demigods and some user maps and I'll gladly play this for years.

[total]

I bought this game and have yet to play it. I should get on that.

[Hotcod]

I do enjoy it when i play it but i don't know i've just got so many damn games that i want to play thank to steam and the evilnes that is the weekend deal that something new and exciting is always there to eat up most of my play time

[Telefrog]

Preview of one of the new Demigods (http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/361225/Demigod_Preview_The_Demon_Assassin):

http://www.draginol.com/images2009/DemigodPreviewTheDemonAssassin_B04F/clip_image002.jpg

Demon Assassin is a Melee Assassin fighting for the Forces of Darkness. He wields a sword and a knife in battle, the sword being his primary weapon.

The Demon Assassin is a highly mobile character who can quickly close the gap between himself and his opponent though the use of warp attacks. His Shadow Swap ability allows him to change positions with an enemy Demigod, throwing them back into their foes. His melee attacks are fast and have a passive chance to critically strike.

[Ravenlock]

As I mentioned way back here (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/showpost.php?p=246412&postcount=152) in April, my first online experience with the game was just so utterly shitty due to the asshole I was playing with, and reports I've read and heard from others about the abysmal quality of the community have been so negative, that I haven't really even wanted to play it online since then.

I've still messed around with single player occasionally, but the online learning cliff to get up to the level of the people who have been playing it since launch (and DOTA since long before that) is so steep, and the people I'd be joining such dicks anyhow, that it doesn't seem worth it.

That said, it sounds like there are some other folks on here with minimal experience and who are probably not wastes of life, so if you guys want to hop online and play, I could probably be convinced to do that. I just wish I had known before purchasing that the user base for the game was already so entrenched and uninterested in accommodating new players. I hope League of Legends, when it comes out, is a little friendlier to new folks.

[Food Nipple]

The Demon Assassin is a highly mobile character who can quickly close the gap between himself and his opponent though the use of warp attacks. His Shadow Swap ability allows him to change positions with an enemy Demigod, throwing them back into their foes. His melee attacks are fast and have a passive chance to critically strike.

Nice, now you'll be able to do the same shenanigans you could do in DotA with Vengeful Spirit/Techies. Get Regulus to drop his mines all in one spot, and then this dude swaps places with the enemy while standing on the mines.

[Ghostbear]

While the demon assassin looks pretty cool, I wish they would give the forces of darkness a "tank" character. The forces of light have Oak and Rook.

[Count Elmdor]

I just picked this game up in Impulse's Labor Day sale for $20.

I played my first single-player game, a 3 on 3 on Cataract, playing as the Rook. It was a fucking blast! At first I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I learned enough as the game went on to be able to contribute to a win! I also learned that the Unclean Beast is a motherfucker.

By the time I hit level 20 and started taking over the enemy reinforcement portals, I knew I would be getting my $20 out of this game. So if anyone is having a game online and needs another newb to fuck things up, send me a message through Steam or COG.

[Panthera]

I picked it up for the sale, too - been having a great time with it. I'm more interested in single player and co-op than competitive play, but it's been a lot of fun still.

[Harv]

Just got an email that the 1.2 update is out adding the Demon Assassin to the game.

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/369856

I tried playing the game co-op with a friend (pre-1.2 patch) and we kept getting disconnected over and over again. We tried everything to get it to stay connected and I think the longest we stayed up was 20 minutes or so. Really tough to love a multiplayer game that still doesn't have working network code after umpteen patches.

I still think the game is well done overall, but really wish the networking was up to snuff. Hopefully this latest update fixes the issues we were having.