Comparing a newer game to a past game and assessing their similarities and dissimilarities is not opinion, I'm sorry you don't understand that.

Its okay, I know you need to convince everyone else of your truthful opinions to deal with your insecurities. That you cannot accept that people like certain things and don't like others.

Good boy, keep up the random assumptions that do nothing but make you look like a pretentious prick, bravo!

I'm not trying to prove opinions, it isn't my opinion that certain staples of a genre are universal to said genre. In a first person shooter there are certain qualities that are universal to the FPS. They have guns, held from the first person. You shoot enemies trying to shoot at you. More oft than not, you have regenerating health and shields. There are usually nice shoddy campaigns and rather fleshed out multiplayer suites. Is this my opinion? No....it is fact.

Just like the conventions of the Dota clone are what I've listed already, its just fact, end of story....

I'm sorry. You're right and I'm wrong.

You made one good point sanman:

That's something I can get behind 100%. I tried LoL but the last-hitting really took the fun out of the game for me. Microing the creep kills isn't something I want to do in every single game. It's like reclaiming rocks by hand in FA: busywork you have to do but which really doesn't add any fun or depth.

On Cataract, the middle flag was +20% experience (+ control over the artifact shop), the flags on the side in the middle were +20% health and +20% Mana. All three are important, but since health stacking is generally more viable or at least for most Demigods, the health flag was generally more important than the mana flag.

On Leviathan, one of the middle flags was -20% damage received from the enemy team. The other ones were portals. The 4th one was just to take control over the Artifact shop, which only got important in late game.

The flags nearer the bases on Cataract are: control Portal and Gold mines, control a Gold mine, +15% Attack Speed (or was it 20%?) and +30% creep health.

Thanks, couldn't find that anywhere. More substantial than I thought. So they are major buffs for the whole team...global runes on steroids, oye.

Taking and holding certain flags during early and midgame is key to winning the match, especially on Cataract. If you can hold the HP flag and capture the enemies gold flag from time to time you will have a much easier time. That's why the playing the dark forces on Cataract is considered easier: the HP flag and the enemies gold flag are in the same lane.

Almost sounds like they are as important as runes and monster buffs......

If Demigod 2 wants to be relevant in the Dota genre, they should follow the basic formulas associated with Dota.

Work on an optimum multiplayer and team-based gameplay experience.

The Dota genre has a ready market.
S2 Games and Valve Corporation knows this.

Gas Powered should redeem itself.

Yea sanman it is interesting that you wrote so much about what you thought of the game and yet you knew very little about THE most important game play mechanic of the game, which was the flags. The flags was really what separated the game from DOTA, not just because of the large buffs but because the main objective of the game was to hold as many flags as possible so that you could get more powerful creeps than your opponent 1st. In most competitive games it was difficult to get kills so this is how you won.

The way XP and gold attainment worked was fine without that annoyance known as last hitting.

Also the game play of the small maps was much better than the game play on the large maps. Ever try having a competitive game on Mandala? I am guessing no.

Not necessarily true IMO. The gameplay on Mandala can be a lot more strategic than on Cataract. You have to plan ahead, if you get caught out in the open there is no save place close by to run to. Team support and teleports are more important and going back to the crystal or shop requires good timing.

The obvious problems with Mandala were to get a lag free match going and to have two equal teams. Many players had little or no experience on the map and many matches were rather one-sided once the battle for the portals began. Still, I enjoyed playing on Mandala a lot and I would love to have it back in DG2.

The one thing that needs fixing for the large maps is the lobby: There has to be a way to determine if the connections of all players are stable and if their gaming rig can take a large map with 10 players. We had to rehost Mandala almost every time because some player was lagging. I don't blame them, GPG and Stardock should have implemented a benchmark.

Yea mgmetal13 it is interesting that you think flags are the most important gameplay mechanic of the game, which wasn't the flags.

Please do tell sanman, what is the most important mechanic in Demigod because I was under the impression it were the flags. But it seems I haven been doing it wrong in over 300 online games then...

Uh, like every other competitive game, player skill. Out playing the opponent is how you win, and outplaying them and capturing the flags is just one part of that concept. Thought that was pretty obvious.

And wow, 300 online games, I'm impressed, you obviously must be right because you threw that number out there, I am in awe.

300 isn't much, mgmetal13 has a few games more under his belt - there are players with at least 5 times that number. However, the only 'sanman' the search turned up has exactly 0 online matches:
http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/games/player/53423/

But that can't possibly be your player account, can it? Because a player with zero online experience wouldn't behave like he knew everything about the game and lecture well known, experienced and good players like Polynomial, right?

For sake of completeness, here is the link to my stats:
http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/games/player/11000/

Maybe cause that isn't my name for that game? Not that anybody needs to play every single competitive game at an even decent level to realize that out playing the enemy is how you win in the most general sense. *shrug*

Good research though.

Demigod's most important mechanic is its netcode. -_-

I couldn't stand it anymore, which is why I gave up on the game. GPG gave up on it to, so what was the point of playing it more?

Stardock is the Publisher. The money for "not giving up" on Demigod would have to come from them, not GPG on their own.

We both know there's plenty of blame to be thrown around. Its not one sides fault.

The customers get the short end of the stick here. Which is why I feel GPG really does owe us a sequel. I will buy a well done sequel.

Ok I admit I did not play Mandela much, because of the lag. Yea The netcode was what killed the game.. So a demigod 2 with decent netcode would be awesome.

Just play Demigod over Lan and use Hamatchi to connect to people. Once Impulse is out of the picture the netcode works fine.

Says the man who wrote the netcode?

You are correct though, once the game was facilitated successfully it was pretty stable. The problem with the netcode was the decision to use p2p. Everybody's speed depends on the player with the weakest connection and PC. That's fine for SupCom but made it really hard to get games on 4v4 and 5v5 maps going. Reconnecting a lost connection is next to impossible, a desync kills the game for all players, the required bandwidth grows exponentially...

LoL and HoN show that a client-server type network solution is preferable for DotA-like games imo.

I reinstalled demigod just the other day and had some fun playing against the bots. Took me a game or two to shake the rust off, but it was fun, until the crash....Anyway I'd love to see a sequel. There's no guarantee that I'd buy it, but I'd certainly keep my eye on it and hope for the best.

Just wanted to point something out. Dota created a new genre of games. HoN and LoL are Dota clones but do deviant from dota in areas, Demigod is not a Dota clone, but does fall under the same genre. Don't know why there was so much confusion about that earlier. You wouldn't call Duke Nukem a Doom clone, you call it another FPS.

I wonder if GPG could afford to run DG2 on servers instead of p2p. That would certainly improve things if they could.

I also agree that they should tone the graphics down quite a bit to make it easier to churn updates out. However, I am not in favor of them going cartoon or anything.

Oh and flags are nothing like runes except for them giving buffs, flags give global buffs whenever they are held which influences the entire team a lot more than 1 guy getting the mana buff so he can spam spells a bit more.

Also generals really are nothing like minion heroes. As generals would end up controlling large numbers of units that generally had different abilities and such while minion heroes have 1 super temp super creep that all do the exact same thing in terms of creeps, take more damage than a normal creep and deal a bit more damage than a normal creep.

Please switch publishers for Demigod 2 and include full Steamworks integration. Stardock not releasing games on Steam is understandable, but also annoying. I don't want to split my DD game purchases over multiple platforms, so I stick with Steam only.