Comments on: Demigod v1.2: Demon Assassin

By: ck101

ck101 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:27:31 +0000

lols, I got this game the day it came out, and managed to play with about 10 friends for 3 months, then we quit to heroes of newerth and I haven’t played demigod in a good 4 months.. I see the patch came out, so I reinstalled it.. There were 0 games in lobby, so I made one, 10 minutes later we started finally.. 5 minutes into the game, one of the other teammates dropped and a desync error came up and kicked everyone from the game.

This is a fail game, and a fail devteam “supports” it. DO NOT BUY demigod!! The lied to their community and stardock games are full of bugs and no support.

By: Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:51:42 +0000

I knew someone would take the bait! Okay, here we go:

1) A hero in warcraft 3 has four abilities. The first three, “normal”, abilities can be leveled every other hero level. That is to say, at level 3 any given normal ability can be leveled to level 2. Every level-up improves the heroes attack speed, damage, damage absorption, max mana, max health, mana regen and health regen. It also equals one skill point to be put into any of these abilities. The fourth, by far the most powerful ability, is the ultimate. It can be bought at level 6 and has only one ability level. It has by far the highest cooldown and mana cost.

1a) A capital ship in Sins of a Solar Empire has four abilities. The first three, “normal”, abilities can be leveled every other capital ship level. That is to say, at level 3 any given normal ability can be level to level 2. Every capital ship level-up improves the capital ship’s attack speed, damage, damage absorption, max energy, max health, max shields, energy regen and shield/health regen. It also equals one skill point to be put into any of these abilities. The fourth, by far the most powerful ability, is the ultimate. It can be bought at level 6 and has only one ability level. It has by far the highest cooldown and mana cost.

2) The buildings you have access to in Warcraft 3 are: the altar, where you summon your hero, the barracks, where you build your low level troops, the research building (which sometimes doubles as wood dropoff point), your towers, your highlevel unit buildings, and with the expansion your shop. In the early game, the question is always how soon do you build your altar to summon your first hero, only that it’s not really a question since it’s always “right away”. Also, two of your races need to build a building on top of a gold mine in order to extract gold from that gold mine. These buildings are weak and vulnerable to harassment.

2a) The buildings you have access to in Sins of a Solar Empire are: your capital ship factory, where you construct your capital ship, your frigate factory, where you construct your other units, two research buildings, your towers and other stationary defenses, and an assortment of high level stuff that is rarely built in 1v1 matches (starbases, trading ports, etc). In the early game the question is how soon do you build your capital ship factory, only that it’s not really a question since the answer is always “right away”. Also, to extract resources from resource asteroids you have to build structures on them. These structures are weak and vulnerable to harassment.

3) The unit types you have available to you in Warcraft 3 include: a low level short range “backbone of the army” type of unit (except with NE), a fragile long range unit with enormous damage output (again, these roles are reversed for night elves, but they do have both these units), an offensive spellcaster, a defensive spellcaster, a hugely powerful meatshield unit, a very long range siege type unit, a main air unit and a dedicated anti-air unit, and typically one or two specialists per race filling a gap in the unit layout (raider/kodos for orc, steamtank / spellbreaker for human etc)

3a) The unit types you have available to you in Sins of a Solar Empire include: a scout (no equivalent in War3! Wee!), a short range “backbone of the army” type of unit (light frigate), a fragile long range unit with enormous damage output (light missile frigate), an offensive and a defensive support frigate, a hugely powerful meatshield unit (front-line cruiser), a very long range planetary bombardment unit, a carrier and a dedicated anti-carrier, and in the case of the Advent, a specialist type support frigate filling a gap in the lineup (Iconis Guardian).

Obviously, there is stuff that goes beyond War3 in SoaSE; it borrows the culture system and the settler and scout units from the Civilization games, upkeep is increased through research, not through buildings (but still there is an upkeep system that penalizes your resource income based on your army size, exactly like in Warcraft 3), there are planetary upgrades and artifacts, etc, but at its core it is a very faithful Warcraft 3 clone.

This is a good thing. It fails where it deviates from its obvious inspiration.

By: flowdschi

flowdschi — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:33:03 +0000

oh you have got to be kidding me..i had the DA thread open…i didnt even READ the demigod thing because i dont like the game …sorry … dunno why it landed here
delete plox..and sorry again -.-

By: flowdschi

flowdschi — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:29:18 +0000

Well i like the “no respeccing” thing..it kinda takes the cheap feeling off it and it really feels like my character is “growing” and not just a walking toolbox with interchangeable ..tools :P
Although it wouldve been nice to know WHAT im speccing exactly..and not trial-and-error :P

But i can also see the “omagad i dont want to play it 500 times to see every ability” argument :)

By: Anthony Damiani

Anthony Damiani — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:19:07 +0000

One new demigod, with the promise of another eventually.

By: dimitbeba

dimitbeba — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:52:45 +0000

It looks amazing!

By: bansama

bansama — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:23:17 +0000

Simply fire up an online (internet) game, select a bot if you don’t really want to play with anyone else, and it’ll unlock the character for offline play too.

By: Elusive Pastry

Elusive Pastry — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:10:53 +0000

Does the game still cause hard locks? I had to stop playing because of that.

By: Stromko

Stromko — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:58:26 +0000

Oh certainly. Then we’d have to pay another 20$ for this.

By: TotalBiscuit

TotalBiscuit — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:08:41 +0000

I’m sorry but SoaSE is nothing like Warcraft in space, it’s not even technically the same sub-genre.

By: Daniel Klein

Daniel Klein — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:04:29 +0000

Nah, not quite. SoaSE is played on a map representing one or more solar systems. Every planet’s or asteroid’s gravitational field is a distinct circular playing area. They are linked with phase lanes, and the existence or absence of these lanes is quite arbitrary. Basically it’s a series of tubes. Jumping from one well to another takes quite a while: first your ships have to travel to the proper edge of the well, then they have to spin up their jump drives, and then they actually have to travel through phase space. The positioning thing I mentioned is really quite minor and, at least in the games I have played, mostly irrelevant (except in the case of a heavily fortified gravitational well that you just want to travel through, where you want to make sure you position yourself so that you jump into the well farthest from the defenses). So basically every move across the map is made up of a series of jumps, and you wait for each jump and phase space journey, and it just gets quite dull.

By: Matthew Gallant

Matthew Gallant — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:37:12 +0000

I’d like to second Daniel Klein’s request for a Sins of a Solar Empire retrospective! At the very least in February when the Diplomacy micro-expansion comes out.