A few random thoughts on Beta 2D

Also, wasn't there a mention of improving Impulse so that you don't have to download a gigabyte each update?

"conditioning" is a word you should never use in any public relations post.

Other than that, I think the beta process has been flawless so far. Posts like these, devs that gladly chat or even ask for help on IRC, you actually participating in the forums a lot. So what if requested feature X doesn't make it in, or feature Y is causing a problem? That's what beta is for.

• I suggest tossing out Minions & Idols for Generals, as best described in"Yet Another Genrals Thread".
• Replace them with a General Shop.
• Mana should not be the source in which Generals summon their minions.
• Should emerge from someplace other than the General's location - like the Citadel or Shop. 
• Minions should gives buffs to the Generals, as the General should buff the Minions. Seems like a reasonable replacement for Equipment.
• Take away Summon Abilities for Generals all together from their skill trees. PLEASE!
• Yes, I still believe Generals should not wear equipment. Sue me, I will not let this go. 

Regulus Tracking Device:

• If we get an item to disarm it, we need a graphical object we can see on the Demigod which lets us know we're being tracked. Like a bright beaping red light stuck on us like a gummy grenade.  

 Overall Reinforcements

• All Reniforcements: Minotaurs, Archers, Priests, ect - should appear in far fewer numbers. I do not mean the rate in which they emerge from the portal. I mean they should just be in much smaller teams. In stead of four or five Minotaurs, it should be a party of two. Same goes across the board. This builds on the previous suggestion in the OP.  

 End Game Information: 

• When the game concludes, you should be able to view the history of a enemy or allies progression. This includes a total list of equipment they purchased throughout the game.

 Additional Rewards:

• Add an achievement for end of match which lets us know who purchased the most equipment.
• Add an achievement for end of match which lets us know who used the most items, and by most I mean different types. Not just greatest in number.

Game Stability

• Fix the lag! Stop making the game more and more laggy with each build. Optimize and smooth out so I can sustain 30fps+ please. 3fps even on Low settings won't cut it! Read thread: Extreme Lag

If you do this, generals will be far weaker early game.  Many people currently play generals without minions partially because the cost of minions is often prohibitive.  I usually have only level 1 minions unless the game last over 15 minutes, then I start to buy level 3 or 4 minion.

I think Generals need a ton more equipment to give buffs to their minions.  Also they could use more HP buff equipment, they are awful frial late game.

Trigeminal, why not have minions which provide buffs like Equipment?

ok I like the improvements listed very much and thanks for keeping us informed.

Please, please, do not make the default "forced latency" 350ms ...

-Drexion

The idea of linking minions to something other than mana is interesting and may allow minions to be more useful.  My biggest concern is they may become too costly if switched to the setup in this post.  Currently, I believe minions are already too costly.

Also can we please have minion stats displayed for us on the shop and inventory screen.  I like to know stats.  Is level 3 reall better than level 1?  Does it justify the cost?  I need numbers to place all the info in spreadsheets and run regression algorythms on.

It's all in the execution. Right now Minions can be popped up just about anywhere based on a timer and not resources. If you take a bunch of Mana potions you can make units just about anywhere at anytime. This really bothers, and I feel this is one of the key factors that makes Generals feel too much like Assassins. Their Minions are abilities, not a fundamental part of building an army which compliments a person's tactics and play style. Idols and Ability Summons are choking a General's true potential. -- In my opinion of course.

I hear your arguement, but even under the current setup, I am hemorrhaging gold compared to assassins.  While they are becoming invincible through speed, armor, and hp buffs, I am paying for minions.  In the current setup, at least I can recast them for free.  I would prefer the portal system discussed, but only if they cost much less!!!

Also I agree minion type should show up on the bar.  I came up wth an idea about 2 weeks ago which I think works great, but have been busy with a grant proposal.  I'll try to through it together quick and see what you all think.

P.S. It's MY BIRTHDAY!!!

P.P.S.  That is the largest post script ever!

I hope there is a cooldown for those instant cast health and invincibility.

LOL.

I don't think I agree with any of OrleanKnight's suggestions. 

As for lag, we don't create lag. Ping times depend on individual player networks. I think, however, that we should increase the tolerance to 350ms (at the expense of it being slightly less responsive).

Net_lag 350 sounds a bit high to me. 250 would still be nice but 350 would probably be pushing it a bit as far as competetive gaming goes.

TheBigOne usualy talk about an auto net_lag feature which automaticly changes the net lag to the best value. if you play with people with 350 ping then it would set the netlag to work with that, so 350 it would be.

And I have to say this solution sounds good to me as well.

Otherwise a great post Draginol, I especially like the idea of minions being fewer but more powerful, we got some exciting time ahead of us with beta3

YOu said  : Multplayer is set to a threshold of 200ms. Can we increase this to 350ms?

Cant it be automatic? will be a lot better if people inside have low ping and no laggin when with laggin people. Should be an easy algorythm that can do that...

EDIT: ops have'nt read sevenix post..

@Frogboy is there a possibilty that the skill trees get some major love or are they pretty much done? (balancing still to come of course)

Right now each demigod has about 2 (some  maybe even 3) ways to skill them and i do not think that this is enough. Some proposed more active skills than 4, I myself made a post about customisation of skills and i think there is an other post basicly saying the same (like you could have different kinds of hammer slam to choose from for example) also more synergies like QoT would be nice.

It is all about the possiblity of many different builds.

Links:

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/324594

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/329370

I'm pretty sure he meant visual lag, as in low frames-per-second, not network lag.

Who said it was Multiplayer Lag? This is System lag! 3fps when I play along against the AI on lowest settings is unacceptable, considering I was getting such great performance in previous builds on HIGH settings.

I think the main thing to see is a higher number of grunt NPC's that spawn from the portals...i enjoy seeing the mass carnage in battle

I do enjoy more carnage.  I think giving a smaller number of stronger creep creatures is an option, but let's not forget this should feel like an epic battle.  To me this means, I should see a lot of creep creatures on screen.

Yes regulus needs a voice change.  The current voice sounds like a B movie actor, and a bad/cheesy one at that.

I agree. I'd like to see many creeps. It gives the game a much more epic feel! That's what we're going for right?

I posted my suggestion on how we can list the number of minions in a general's control.  You can see it here.  I was going for a minimalist approach that avoided cluttering up the  screen by makign the UI any larger.

I try to suggest few units on the field. Don't get yourselves carried away guys. Lower end computers still need to play this game. More units, more carnage, more crap on the screen is not going to work if this game has to work for most everyone's CPUs and budgets.

the resent frame rate drop with the new beta has nothing to do with the number of minions, at least not in my case i always played with a fast spwan rate and had never such a huge drop.

for the most part I agree but a few things are rather bad Ideas I think.

first of all :

Netlag 350ms is on the one side to high and won't solve the underlying problem on the other hand.

Its too high because there are skills which have a cast time of 500ms, now if you have a netlag of 200ms that gives you 300ms to react meaning you can use items with instant cast, if we have a netlag of 350ms leaving you with 150ms to react its nearly impossible for most players to do this - and if you think that people shouldn't be able to counter a skill with 500ms cast time, replace it with a skill with 1 second cast time where the reaction time is decreased from 800ms to 650ms. Players with good reactions wouldn't suffer nearly as much as players without good reactions.

Besides of that 350ms is also a timespan where you already have a noticable delay from order --> execution which is rather annoying and will degrade the gaming experience. Demigod is not Supcom where it you control hundreds of units and have base building where it doesn't matter if the orders are executed a few hundred ms later and most people don't even really notice the delay, when you have a single Demigod and give them orders 350ms are very much noticable while 200ms or 250ms aren't.

Have you actually played a Demigod game with 350ms delay already? (for all who want to try : open the console with ~ (eng. layout) or strg+ö (german layout) and type net_lag 350. If you are playing a multiplayer game all have to do it to take effect.

It won't solve the problem because even 350ms is too low for europe - australia (usually 400 to 450) and sometimes for europe - south america (ranges from 300 to 450) as well. If we now assume that only 5% of the player population is from either australia or south america and 50% are from europe how big is the chance to have one of them in a automatch 5vs5? 1-(0.95^10)*1-(0.5^10) = about 40%. Exponentiation is a bitch. That is for random teams of course; arranged teams don't nearly suffer as much from this problem, at least when europeans don't team up with australians.

From that perspective you'd either need gateways, remove the random team option, ban australians from playing it or need to come up with a better idea than increasing net_lag to 350ms. 350 ms also isn't that good because the range 250ms to 350ms is nearly unoccupied - its either below 250 or higher than 350 mostly, at least for europe, I have no clue how its for north America. Its a very unpleasant topic but ignoring that issue won't help and it needs a good solution.

Dynamically setting the net_lag would be certainly an option, while I wouldn't want to play every game with 350ms net_lag I'd prefer it over stuttering and slowdowns when there is actually someone in the game with a high ping. Either automatically or just via an ingame option as it is done in starcraft: anyone can change it and it takes effect for all when only one changes it. I don't buy this "people will abuse it and grief with that feature", it works for starcraft why shouldn't it work for other games. Even abusers and griefers don't enjoy stuttering. A game lobby option would be useless for automated matches as there is no lobby (at least I guess there is no one). Have a low (200ms), medium (300ms) and high (400 or 450ms) delay setting in the connection menu (F11).

No matter what you decide definitely keep the manual override via console in.

You maybe should also consider setting the net_lag for singleplayer to 20ms. You might say that it is a bad idea because people will cry that multiplayer is less responsive than singleplayer but Blizzard uses a lower netlag for singleplayer than for LAN and a lower netlag for LAN than for Battle.net and when it comes to things like this I think you should just copy their approach instead of thinking that you know it better.

compared to that issue all other points are pretty minor:

maybe you forgot a zero at the end, because for 200 this item is crazy, it allows everyone to safely teleport back home without any chance to kill him. It also makes Oak a lot less unique and there is enough stuff which keeps you alive already in the game and having completely invulnerable enemy running over the maps all the time is  at least as annoying as  multi-stun. If you want a new defensive item it should be more special like : "Unit can't be hurt from normal weapons" or "all damage is capped at 50 per shot/effect" (Damage over time would still do 50 damage every tick then).

I like that "5 second invulnerable but you also get  5 second stunned" Trinket a lot, it doesn't allow to flee but it can get your cooldowns ready, heal you up a bit (especially as Sedna) or buy the 5 seconds your allies need to get you out of the mess.

speed is a very sensible matter, before 2C rook was at speed 6 when all others were at speed 7 which really made rook annoying to play especially as he is a melee character. In 2C all Demigods were speed 6 which obviously was bad. In 2D rook has speed 5.7 when all others have 6.0 as base value, which might be still a bit too fast but anything below 5.5 would probably make it really tough for rook to actually ever use his melee attack vs another Demigod (unless that other Demigod is melee and chooses to pick the fight). Having a lower base speed also means that speed items are less effective on him than on other Demigods, so if you lets say reduce his speed to 5.0 he would be outrun so badly in later game stages that he wouldn't be enjoyable anymore. He might be a walking castle but it is a magic walking castle.

Being slower for a melee character already means that he can't retreat without getting hits.