Just to put my .02 in -
Let's start at the beginning. Ignore the castle, the towers, the grunts, and the demigods for a moment and just picture two rivers. Each river flows from its origin until it hits the other river's current. When the rivers meet they negate each other.
------->I<-------
Windowdressing aside, that is all Demigod is about. Two rivers of mobile units or "grunts," one dark current and one light, flowing from their respective wellspring to meet in the middle of the map. All things being equal they will cancel each other out forever.
This is where you come in. Ideally, your Demigod uses its abilities and vast power to shift the balance of power until the enemy citadel is crushed. It can do this in several ways.
- kill enemy grunts so that your grunts can run past them and attack the main barriers to victory - the towers and forts. Whaling on the towers and forts will help your grunts to their main objective - the Citadel. This is your ultimate objective and when it collapses you have won.
- upgrade your grunt streams in both power and type at your Citadel. Note that in order to do this you need to control flags scattered around the map. Flags have three benefits - they offer a direct buff like +15% hitpoints or +15% experience, they bring experience for capturing them, and they increase your war rank. War Rank ties into Citadel upgrades, so if you don't have the requisite rank you can't yet buy the upgrade, even if you have the gold.
- buy items and gain levels to make your Demigod powerful enough to crush the Citadel without help. You gain experience from capping flags, killing enemy units, and killing enemy Demigods. You gain gold by killing units and Demigods and also destroying buildings.
*Of course, the enemy is trying to do exactly the same things with their Demigod, so it is important to strike a balance between attacking their river and defending your own.
On Demigods - Each of the 8 Demigods has a different set of skills and stats. Rook, for example, is generally powerful, but slow. Regulus has good range and attack speed but low damage per hit and low health and armor. Mess around with the different Demigods until you find one that suits your style.
Basics -
Each of the demigods has a set of spells they can unlock by levelling up. The spells are shown on the lower left side of the interface, and clicking the + symbol next to your portrait will allow you to chose which spells, abilities, and passive buffs you want access to. You have access to more powerful spells and can upgrade them as you reach higher levels.
You can select a spell by using the hotkey or clicking it with the cursor and then selecting a target. The slots to the right of your portrait are for activateable items bought at the item shop (building near citadel in your base) and the farthest right is for unlockable persistent Favor items which can be bought on the favor menu. You can pull that menu up by clicking of the Favor Item slot.
The favor menu and the item shop menu are tabbed on the left side. Click on a tab with the cursor to access a new page of items. The first page of the item menu deals with consumable items that will be used up after one use. Lower pages feature items you can buy as equipment for your Demigod. Some of these items are activatable like spells and will appear in your item slots to the right of your portrait , but most are passive and provide buffs to one or two of your stats. For example, if I buy 5 items which buff my armor then normal attacks will do much less damage. On the other hand, if my opponent is using spells to hurt me I might invest in +life items since armor doesn't mitigate spell damage.
Generally, you will win most effectively by controlling all or most of the flags, killing enemy Demigods without letting them kill you, destroy their towers and kill their units, and balance spending at the citadel with spending at the item shop so that your Demigod can win fights but your river is still stronger than theirs.
Does that help?
