This game doesn't need 14 demigods. 

If each demigod had at least 5 viable skill tree/favor/item combinations then it's going to be way better. I'm way behind frogboy on that. I think 10 - 12 is the most we need, and any more than that should be a very, very low priority. 

Also, the game has extremely good balance. That is, when equally skilled players play different demigod compositions the chance of winning is generally around 50%. There are exceptions to this, mostly a case of just a bad demigod lineup (DA/Reg/TB). 

The game has very, very poor internal balance. That is, the choices you are presented in-game (skills, item, and favor) all generally have 2-3 options that completely overshadow the remaining dozens you have. 

External balance =/= Internal balance

Ok thread got TL;DR except the first page.

I have spent alot of time with moba games, coming from dota --> demigod --> modding demigod --> currently playing LOL

If you were to work on demigod V1.5

alot of stuff on connectivity has already been said, as has map creation costs (ie too pretty for its own good).

So my wishlist apart from those 2 things would be (as a player):

(for custom games)

Remove:

Ingame stats on opposing team

Ability to see opposing teams lineup (make it blind pick)

Add:

ability to "invite friends" to your team

This would GREATLY enhance the ability to find a game. I personally left demigod due to difficulty in lobbies with getting games with friends. people would complain about a premade and imba and we would get kicked (regardless of real skill). BLIND PICK is the only way to go in a MOBA game.

(As a modder):

Auto download of mods when you join a custom game with mods enabled.

As Frogboy has already stated that V1.5 is less likely than V2.0 then my wishlist for the next game is substantially bigger.

For demigod 2 here are my recommendations:

1. Reduce the number of skills per hero -- alot of ppl complain about the limited number of heroes in demigod. Currently if you were to compare to LOL demigod actually has 40 heroes worth of skills on the 10 heroes, not everyone sees it that way. Limit the number of skills per hero and increase the number of heroes. That way team makeup will define how you fight as much as builds.

2. Substantially increase the number of purchasable items (favormod has a large number of new concepts and there were plenty more i was playing around with). Ingame items variety is VERY important imo. Item variety allows an individual to feel unique in the way that they play their hero of choice and makes for a different game every time you play.

3. Free to Play with micro transactions:

Purchasable:

Heros

Maps -- if enough can be released with the game to allow this to not segregate the community

4. Out of game customisability 

Pls PLS look at LOL runes and masteries (they are not unique to LOL, they are infact present in every RPG for the last 5 years). This could be added to micro-transactions. Keep favoritems as ingame customisablity as well but make prices EQUAL for all favoritems.

5. See stuff for V1.5

Maybe some more stuff when i think about it for a while.

Cheers Exx

I can live with the overall balance, but yeah - imagine dg released with solid connectivity and good matchmaking (like sc2 or even LoL).  *dreams* 

All these pages and not one mention of a dressing room for Demigods. It would be a side-game where you can have them try on different outfits and hats, have them pose for screenshots, act out different emotes, etc. Then as an addon you could have them build their own houses, apartments, condos. The amount of items and upgrades available to them are directly related to how well they do in the main part of the game. During the fighting part, they earn points that can be used to purchase new outfits, unlock poses, obtain housing parts and so on.

On a MUCH less serious note, what killed the game for me was the network issues and the community being populated by so many people that just wanted to jack the system to try to obtain some sort of internet godhood by having the most wins in Demigod. Not much you can do about the people that play the game, just make it so they can't jack the system.

Pretty much sums up how I feel.  If there is a Demigod 2, I'm not really stoked on the F2P idea.  Demigod could have been an epic game that rivaled some of the classics, but... well... you all know, Frogboy knows, and GPG... well... who knows what they learned from the whole fiasco.  Frogboy, can the Demigod license be purchased from them so Stardock can just keep it in house?

In a perfect world for me this is what happens:

1) Stardock purchases the IR for Demigod and the rights to make all upcoming sequels.

2) Demigod 2 is announced as a future Stardock production.

3) Demigod 1 is made free at the same time a patch is released to fix as many issues as possible which would hopefully drum up some interest in the upcoming sequel as well as showing any bitter former Demigod players that things will be different for Demigod 2.

4) The Monk will be hired as a connection consultant for DG2, Exxcentric will be a designer/programmer in DG2, and Miriyaka's job will be to stay close to Frogboy and slap some sense into him should the need arise.

Half of GPG like quit/got laid off since Demigod >.>

hehe.  That said, part of the "curse" of demigod is because of how good it looks.  I don't know all of the in's and outs, but I think granny 3d and perhaps licensing associated with that are the reason the community never received any map modding tools.  And I think it was pretty clear that if we ever had such a resource, we had folks in the community that would have very much taken advantage of it. 

Other things - there's no official word on whether or not Stardock is looking to just buy the IP and develop Demigod themselves, if they would be looking to engage GPG in a sequel, or if there is some other company they'd look to work with if they obtained the rights. 

Now, I don't know a substantial amount about game engines and network code, but is it even possible to revamp something like the supcom engine to a stable client server model?  And if that's not something that could be done, then it sounds like a different game engine would be required.  Like I said, though, I really don't know and certainly can't speak to that point.

With regards to free to play, I don't necessarily think they would end up going this route.  I like the f2p model in that we get continued support for quite some time, a larger player base etc, but the potential issues with the scope of something like that might be a bit over the top to manage if handled by SD alone.  They'd have to get increased staffing, the payday for the game wouldn't come in the same way they normally generate revenue, if it was client/server - well, just consider the volume of folks that will try a game for free.  Anyway, I personally doubt it will be a f2p game just based on that. 

Anyway, its been said by me and others - good networking/matchmaking is the most critical thing for a successful sequel.  Gameplay is already great.  Build on that and its a winner.

I agree that refining and even increasing the skill trees would be huge.  Even today (albeit the variety isn't exactly huge after >3k games played), I'm still trying out different skill choices on different dgs with diff favor items.  That said, there is so much room to make things even better.  I don't think it would be exceptionally difficult to come up with more varied/useful skill trees, though.  We can pretty easily tell you what doesn't work well at the very least. 

In a nutshell, no.  I'm not aware of any retail game that has ever made the transition from P2P to client-server, or vice versa, and for good reason.

100% of the UI and sim interaction depends on the P2P model, even in a single-player skirmish.  While it might be possible (with immense effort) to re-write that part of the engine to work with a server-arbitrated simulation, it would also require a complete re-write of how the game's render engine interprets sim data, a total re-write of most of the UI lua and some sim lua, and a complete re-envisioning of the gameplay model itself (the number of active objects in game would have to be greatly reduced - basically, there are totally game design different considerations you need to make with a client-server multiplayer model).

P2P-Lockstep 101:

In a P2P multiplayer game, every client runs their own identical copy of the sim, and independently simulates every single unit, projectile, etc in the game, creates a hash of the total sim state every tick, and communicates that with every other client it's connected to.  If it matches, the game continues on.  If it doesn't, you get a desync and the game is over, because the differences between sim states will exponentially compound into the tens of thousands within seconds.

This sounds like a really inefficient way to handle a multiplayer game, until you realize just what it's capable of that a client-server game isn't - for example, Supreme Commander 2 can have tens of thousands of projectiles simulated and in flight at any given time, without changing the size of the hash state that is communicated between clients, because each client simulates those projectiles identically and independently.  If you tried to simulate a fraction of that number in a client-server game where the server is authoritative and simply pushes the simulation data to all clients, even with a slower tickrate (moho's being 10 ticks per second, most client-server games being 30+ ticks per second), the network traffic would balloon into the hundreds of kilobytes per second per client, and the game would be unplayable.

While the engine does have a certain amount of 'base' lag present even in an offline game due to the sim/UI separation, the lag in an actual multiplayer game with ~100-200 ping isn't much worse, and everyone experiences the same amount of lag.  While this is obviously terrible when one person's computer or connection is slow, it allows a much more complex game with no serious lag fluctuations when everyone is up to spec.

So the advantages of this model for a big strategy game like SupCom are pretty evident, but its disadvantages are maybe more significant yet for a fast-paced MOBA like Demigod.

Sequel(or an extension of the Demigod franchise:

I'd give it a multi-tiered level of gameplay. It would still primarily be played as it is, RTS-style but imprint that into a larger-scale dynamic world RPG. Something similar to Mount & Blade.

Instead of arenas with endless swarms of minions, campaign related battlemaps with a variety of terrain with a set army for either side. Again, impacting on an overarching world map with its own geo-political influences...which are of course, ultimately under the strings of The Pantheon...and the Demigods on that earth are like pawns as Achilles and so forth were to Olympus in the Illiad.

So - what we'd ideally need in dg2 would be to still have p2p... just a different engine?  Or perhaps a substantial reduction of "moving parts" with the current version?

flag's get captured, yo.    So.... there. 

I'm all for ideas (and inexpensive ones - methinks we might find a sympathetic ear at SD).

That said - off topic moment.

Saw you had a game up monk.  Sorry I missed you.  Looked up your stats.

How do you do that   heh