The Popehat Forum

I'm going to be all over that action.

Are any of the usual suspect groups forming factions for the persistent multiplayer side? GwJ, GT, OO, Qt3 et al?

I'm getting it too. Perhaps I'll let you guys introduce me to RTS multiplayer in this game.

I read Qt3 as being fairly interested in this title, so I assume they'll have a group for sho.

According to what I'm reading at OO and Qt3, Gamestop broke the street date (which was originally tomorroW) on boxed copies of Demigod. Allegedly some Best Buys are following suit.

My money remains with Stardock, and I'm happy to wait until tomorrow to play. Its true that I have plenty on my plate right now. But also because I'm prefer to by from Stardock than Gamespot or best buy.

And anyway I celebrated the pending release last night with an interesting game of Sins.

Edit: hah. As I typed this an email arrived stating Stardock was making the game available (I think to preorders only?). Go Stardock.

Tom Chick like-a the Demigod: Wallet threat level: Red.

Ok, I don't havbe the slightest idea what is going on here. But this is wicked as hell.

Firstly, in a skirmish game it was 3v3 with me having 2 ai teammates. Istarted next to our citadel, where you can purchase "team buffs". Things that improve (all) structures, or the citadel, etc. This costs gold.

There's also an item where you can buiy items for your general(good guys)/Assassin(bad guys). You've got a helmet, chest armor, gloves, and boots slot as well as misc items and talismans. Talisman s allow you to summon minions. Ichose oak, and eventually was fielding 2 minotaur berserkers and two siege archers. Other gen erals had different troop allotments, it seemed.

Then there's the leveling. I leveled 5 times before an untimely death. I twice boosted my base damage, I twice upgraded my minion's base helath and regen, and I added a cool ability that gave +10% health and mana regen every time Oak killed someone. It affected minions too. Cool. There are lots of abilities. Oh, I also had some sort of shout attack. I think yhou start with a SP.

Then there's. . .some sort of prestiege points or something. I bought googles that gave +12 vision range (this is important) and let me see invisible creatures. There must have been 12 + options. There's lots of options for theEQ slots too.

The m,ap is basically territorial control. Capture flags with beneficial effects. The map was, more or less, a 3x3 grid. Each "back" row featured a network of towers that were defensive structures. The bad guy towers lead to my death before I decided to quit and come post. Ihad a 15s respawn time, and I couldn't view any activity on the map when it happened (I could hear things, tho). There are death penalities as I saw several abilities/items that reduced them. But I don't know what they are. I believe controlling towers also brings in resources. I saw one tower that gave +20% xp gain, but I get the nagging feeling I'm making gold too.

The combat is real time but deliberate. More like Sins or DoW than the typical RTs (but more like DoW than the exquisre grand scale presented in Sins). Leave you5r guys alone and they will fight. I don't know if there's any ability auto casting yet. I was a touch overwhelmed but also very intrigued.

I got it.

I've only played ont he map that was shown in all the previews - the large 3x3 grid over water with waterfalls all over the place.

As I said previously, the back two lines are sort of bases. The middle square has the citadel, item shop, a healing crystal, and extra defensive structures. Left and rigth have portals. Periodally, creatures enter the battle field to fight fot yhou. . . assuming you control the flag in that square. Every square, save the citadel, has a flag. This is really important. On this nmap, it's 2 portals versus 2 portals. If you capture an enemy portal. . .it's 3v 1. The spawned creatures are minion fodder, but it's still an advantage.

Particularly if you are upgrading your citadel. The basic spawn is a squad of soliders. Over time in my last game, the fgollowing were added:

Yeti( or maybe they were a minion of my AI buddy)
Priests of Light
Angels of Light
Archers

And there were several more upgrade options we never got to. Each spawn wave was thus actually formidable. A decent demigod + minions would take down a wave no problem. But oncve you start talking ab out demigod v demigod clashes, plus defensive placements in play, well things can get a bit hectic. And those spawned footsoldiers can make a difference.

The defensive structures are gone forever if killed. A number of citadel uypgrades appear to either beef up all structures or improve health regen., Still, a low to mid level demigod with a little determination can take down towers. It's not a quick thing, and other demigods/enemy spawn waves have a nasty habit of showing up and ruining your efforts.

I maxxed my demigod at level 20. He had considerable skills:
1) Leved 4ish "Ward of Something". I could maintain up to five of them on the battleifled. Any death inside the radious of the ward created spirit warriors to fight for me( and sucessive levels of the skills bolstered my spirit buddies).
2) Some sort of minion buff. Very nice, it added some small healing + speed/combat bonus. Great for turning the tide in a pitched engagement. I took a couple of levels.
3) The warcry attack. IT debuffs + does decent damage. Enoguh to kill a minion. Enough to piss off a demigod.
4) 3 weapon upgrades. He god decent extra damage (Oak us geared to close combat somewhat, I should note), and some other boosts from it. Imaxxed this skill line.
5) 4 or so points in the "after a kill" skill line. The first 3 levels gave +15 or +20% of max health to every minion + demigod whenever he killed. The next level gave a largish bonus to health, some naman, and a healing over time effecvt if he he killed a demigod. This was absolutely awesome. I had everal close heated engagements that turned because this basically refreshed my entire cadre of minions + my ailing demigod.
6) Some more points I'm forgetting. LEvel 20 is max.

The AI is sharp. One thing I really like about this is that if you want to shop, or upgrade the citadel. . .you'be got to go do it. Summoned minions spawn at the citadel but will come join you quickly. However, the demigod must be physically present to do these other functions. My AI buddy dutifully kept the citadel upgraded. I'd quibble with some of the choices - he ignored a number of the portal spawn boosts, but overall it was pretty good. I finally noticed at one point that even though we held but 4 of the 5 grids on the map (and me having just retaken one), we had more defensive structures still in place. His upgrades were part of the reason. He had also done a good job tactically targeting enemy defenses, wearing the bad guys down on the left side of the map.

I really like this game so far. It's got alot of Similarties with DoW2. This could prove to be a better game (and that's not to knock DoW 2).

Torch Bearer rules.

The DoW2 comparison is on, but Demigod strips away even the pretense of resource management. It plays more like Diablo, and that's a compliment.

Spot on. You've *got* to be out killing as much as possible since killing yields critical xp and just as ciritcal (if not moreso) gold. So there are resources in the classical gaming sense, but not really in the RTS sense. Of course, gold was never this important in Diablo. I compared it to that more recent D&D RTS over at OO. I only played the demo for that one (Stormreach?), but the hero-centric/minion assisted gameplay seems similar. Though this seems far more fleshed out than that game, particularly when you get into the upgrades.

I noticed for Oak that my equipment tended to fall into 2 broad categories: stuff that boosts me directly or stuff that helps me and the minions. There were some other interesting choices; one piece of armor offered a health boost anda small regen boost; another was a very sizeable armor boost.

And, I think I had ther Assassins(dark) Generals(light) things confused. Assassin = more direct combat oriented, general = more "balanced" (though it seemslike some of them might be more minion/buff/debuff focused than others).

I started a touyrnament and finished the first round Twas me, Torch Bearer, the chick who rides the cat, and I'm not even sure who the other was. A few interesting things happened:

1) I was really impressed with regulus. He was doing all sorts of weird stuff to me. Queen of Thorns I was uninpressed with, until she got to level 20. But then that leads me to. . .

2) I died too much though I was the early dominant demigod. Suddenly, the enemy demis all outleveled me by 3-4 levels. At the end I was about to hit 16 and they had all been at 20 for awhile. This was complicated. I coudl take one demigod, possibly, by myuself. But I kept bumping into 2-3 at a time. No chance for poor Oak. The good news was how we got here: all controllable portals were held by us, as was the vast majority of the map. And I spent some extra gold on the Citadel. We had soldiers, archers, priests, angels, and caltapulibeasts. I also purchased several upgrades that seemed to help the reinforcements (official term noted) immensely in terms of effectiveness. So with all those portals kicked in for our side, I think it really helped. The demigods of the enemies - and I was playing on hard - couldn't turn this onto a simple demigod on demigod conflict (my allies were all around my level too), because we were flooding the battlefield with a constant stream of reinforcements. We had quality and quantity. I had maxxed my spirit ward skill, which I Dropped near the citadel portals of the enemy. That helped too - those spirits are pretty bitching at that point I think.

I was glad to see that we could overcome the level disadvantage. One thing that killed us was that same steady stream was sort of leveling fodder for the other guys. And I wasn't trying to coordinate with my buddy AI, something I needed to be doing. The AI was vicious when it was double teaming me. The irst game I treied I did a 2 on 2. This was 4v4. What a glorious experience.

I noticed Queen of Thorns had some interesting abilities that were really good for dealing with minions/reinforcements.

3) The rook is really cool looking. He handed my ass to me way too often.

Note that you don't have to make kills happen in order to get experience. You just have to be in the area of the kill. I figured that out playing as the Vampire Lord, going up against Rook. Rook at low levels will shred the Vampire or any general in a one on one fight, so I just built up my minion-making skills, and let them do the work.

Also, a patch was released overnight.

My continued insistant of wading Oak into melee killed me last night. I should have let him do some generaling with his considerable minions, and picked up experience to level the gap like that (and in the process flesh out some of his buff/debuff powers). But the map ended before I could put that tacitcal shift in place.

Apparently the patch today (I kicked off the download this morning) is supposed to help punch pirates in the balls. Yay, and stuff.

Played a bit last night and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'd defintely be up for some multiplayer.

Impulse name is noxiousdog of course.

Despite my complete lack of any RTS skillz (as the kids say..), which Nox can attest to (I think he is still laughing at my attempts to play the orignial DoW) all this talk is definitely getting me interested. It doesn't help that my new job is a block away from a Gamestop. I just don't see this ending well for me...

Please tell me the single player (which would be my main interest) is awful, and I shouldn't pick this game up.

Single player does not have a campaign, and the game has very little backstory. The All-Father has died, demigods compete to replace him.

Single player is run through tournaments, competing in arenas against AI bots. From what I saw, the bots have decent AI and I expect that to improve due to Stardock's involvement (Wardell writes the best bot AI, period). In other words, it's like Single Player Unreal Tournament, exactly the same as the multiplayer game with good bots. There is limited character progression over time, in that you earn "favor points" from match to match, which allow you to buy persistent and more powerful artifacts that enhance your character (you can only use one in a given match, but all are available once unlocked).

Since the bots are good, I can see myself playing this in single player as much as multiplayer. Also, "micro'ing" is there but it's nothing compared to, say, Warcraft III, as you directly control only one unit.

Tournaments offer some fascinating variety, honestly.

It/s an 8 round match with you randomly being paired with 3 other AI in a 4v4 match. I played a hard torunament and it looks like I am going to go down. Basically, you accumulate a score each round and it goes into a runnign talley.

Matches were:
1) Conquest
2) Domination
3) Fortress
4) domination
5) Conquest
6) "Kill people"
7) Domination
Dunno what 8 will be.

Conquest = kill the other team;s citadel in the head.
Domination = cumulative team score, not sure how it is calculated.
Fortress = kill all of the other team's forts
"Kill People" is bascially first to X (mine was 10, maybe they all are) Demigod kills.

I've seen every map now, and different maps sort of lend themselves to different strategies. Smaller maps aren't going to give you a lot of time to build up, e.g. (especially when it's "kill people"). We kicked ass in the first match. And then promptly got trounced in the next three. Badly, horribly, trounced. We made ita game in #4 though, and then won 5. 6 went poorly, I can't figure out what went wrong but I blinked and we were down 5-1 (after getting first blood!). 7 was a heated affair but a rash of untimely deaths gave them a 800 point lead (first to 7000) we couldn't overcome.

Tournament talley right now has Erebus at 480 or so, I'm second with 400. Awful showings in 2, 3, and 6 really hurting me here. Hard AI is pesky, no doubt about it. AIs will attempt to retreat in many situatuons, which is something I've had a problem with (being on the verge of a number of kills only to lose the demigod. It's costly, because you'll get no big xp/gold reward. And then if the enemy has another demigod flank you. . .).

The "there's no micromanagement" thing can't be stated enough. This is not a micromanagement game. It's a game where you look at the big picture and act accordingly, doing your part. You can play 1v1 skirmishes (the smallest map defaults to 2v2 but you can change that as you like), but that's kind of missing the point too. The point is to have buddies and to take the fight to other demigods with your buddies, "good guy" demigods complimenting each other.

It's a really fascinating game. Also, I hate Erebus.

My Impulse account is unimaginatively: Grandy Peace

I will definately be up for some multi later this week.

I'm on Impulse as SuperHiro. It'll be hard to pull me away from the tender loving cluthes of DoW2. But I'm down for some stomping.

I'm trying to determine what my impulse name is. I changed it last night to the usual online name, Tareeq, but it may still be the old name, which I used before even Gone Gold.

Only Charles, our new blogger, would have any idea what the old name means.

Uh. . .. dunno. Have you poked around in Community -> account? Ben Sones at Qt3 was saying he changed his name and had problems because he was an old TG.Net customer, so he had to switch back. But he couldn't load the game or something, which you would obviously recognize.

I can't believe how addicting the tournament is. I', in the middle of an epic tourney right now. Ireally hope down the road they insitute a 4x2 coop tourney, too.

I still don't understand how this game is supposed to be played, but I'm nothing if not a bandwagon jumper. I think I may need to pick it up.

Grady Peace did not exist. Peacedog did, as did Tareeq.

It's not an RTs. Patrick's diablo comparison is apt.

Firstly, there are skirmishes and tournaments. The latter are a series of skirmishes, teams randomized, "total standings" kept (based on points earned in mission, and victories matter alot). Winner succeeds Odin.

Roughly put, these are the different game mode. All types can feature from 1v1 to 5v5. Touranments are always 4v4.

1. COnquest - COOOOOOOOOOOOOOONQUEST- kill the other team's citadel, dead. The citadel is a hugely important structure in this game. More important than any other save perhaps the item shop. We'll discuss it in more depth in a second, but you can purchase team upgrades here. Citadels tend to have defensive towers and forts in the nearby areas. There's also a healing crystal, item shop, and usually a couple of portals right by it. All of these things remain in control of the citadel's side no matter what (more on control later).

2. Fortress - take out the other guy's forts before he does yours. Forts are stout - 15k hp base. I think they have a very very very modest ranged attack, but can be upgraded at the citadel. I think this only takes place on a certain map. Most of the forst are behind enemy lines.

3. Kill the other demigods, dead. First one to 10 wins, 1 demigod death opn the other team = 1 point.

4. Domination - capture territory. The more you hold, the more points you get. First to 7k wins (at leas on the maps I played).

5) WAit, I think that's it? Or am I forgetting something? Well we can come back to it later.

Ok, so inside each of these goals, the game plays the same way (it's just that different goals will change your tactics someehat. COnquest - you can wear the other guy down, of course. Kill other demigods, you must be oh so careful). By that I mean: each map is more or less a series of zones, connected in artsy fashion (spectacularly so). Outside of the citadel zones, every zone has a flag. T^hat flag, if captured, gives control of the zone. It also confers a bonus: +15% health to your team, -15% cooldown time to powers, etc.

There may be other things in the zone.

- DEfensive structures are always under the control of the side they started on. Every map has a series of archer (light damage, fast attack, multi target) and light (moderate damage, especially when networked with other light towers I Think, single target) towers. It's predetermined. You can buff them in the Citadel, but they're there and once dead they are gone (one buff includes health increase/health regen. But towers are transient things, ultimately just more fodder for the stars of the show).
-Gold mines: you gain gold per second into your personal account.
- A special artifact shop.
- Portals. These last are important.

It's you versus them. Both sides start with several portals. "reinforcements" spawn from portals at set intervals. And then they run and attack the enemy. They sort of follow a pattenr - a given portal will send reinforcements along a set path, more or less. They'll attack any enemy they meet along the way, until someone dies. They're the ultimate fodder. . . but the citadel has many upgrades for them.

Even on, say, the "kill demigods" game territorial control is important. It's not overridingly so, but territory = better resources. There aren't many mines. YOu make your money killing the other guy, really. The buffs can help. Additonal reinforcement spawns can be *huge*. In real time, this all plays out as you decide what you want to do. The portals will spawn and the reinfofcements will sound their charge regardless of what you do.

Which brings us to you. Your demigod has two resources it needs: experience (gained from killing the bad people) and gold (a very small some trickles in from owned mines. More trickles in as you kill enemyes. Alot comes from slaying demigods. Assisted slays - here it's just "did you hurt it? Did you deliver the killing blow?" to determine whether you are the killer or just assisted - confcer a lesser but still noteworthy prize. The higher level the demigod, the more gold you get).

Experience upgrades your Demigod - each level from 1 to 20 gives 1 skill point to invest in the skill trees. Assassins (there are 4) are geared to combat. Generals (4 here too) have minions, and rely on them to a degree.

You've got 5 eq slots, 3 item quick slots, and each Demigod has 4 castable powers (if you invest in the skills, of course). You buy eq and items at shops. If yhou are a general, you can also buy totems. There are 3 troop types, each has 4 upgrades. Minions are an important and wise investment, as the generals get a goodly number of powers that boost minions.

There is a lot of eq. There are a number of consumeable items (and some activatable/cooldown items). These things get progressively more expensive (but awesome). There are, loosely put, 4 tiers of each piece of eq. The first 3 always offer 2 items, the last just 1. The choices will depend on strategy and play style, but they offer you different ways to kit your demigod. One tier 2 armor offers health + significant minion boosts. The other offers higher bonuses to the demigod only. That kind of thing (it's not all that simple, though. E.g. tier 2 boots offer either dodge/movement speed bonus or health + mana bonus).

But you can also spend that hard earned cash at the citadel. Upgrades cover a veyr wide variety of things. Increased gold income. Reinforcement boosts. Building durability boosts. Defensive structure offensive boosts. Health bonuses to demis. Xp bonuses to demis. And reinforcement spawns - the expensive but rather awesome branch. You can add troop types to a spawn wave - priests, angels, giants, catapultbeasts, and something else I've never seen.

Again, how you build the demigod and how you spend is dictated in part by the particular game.

You walk around and fight, and gather resources, and try to win. It's not an RTS, thouhg it looks like one at a glance. It's not an RTS because all you worry about, ultimately, is you. It's not that your partners are irrelevant. And you'ld be wise to coordinate with them. But you don't control them or worry about what they are doing in a philosophical sense. You don't baby sit the other guy's units (and babysitting your own minions is trivial, so much so that you'll stop noticing you do it). You look at the map and decide where it makes sense to fight your fight. And the pointy end goes into the other man.

You can spend all that gold on you, and make your demigod the kind of demigod who carries a wallet that says bad motherfucker. The best eq upgrades are *awesome* and expensive. And there's cool misic items (eq = armor, helmet, boots, gloves, misc. But you aren't restricted to one of each type I don't thing). And the artifact shop has even more exotic, and expensive4, stuff for sale.

Or spend it on your team. I won my first hard skirmish because we managed to control 4 of the map's 6 portals most of the time, and I made sure we spent money ont he citadel. We had thesoldiers, archers, angels, catapultibeasts. We had several damage buffs for them. Waves would spawn and head towards the enemy, and Oak and his minions would coordinate. And my AI buddies hit from other angels, all angels. And even though the four enemy demigods were level 20, and we were ~level 15, they couldn't stop us. We took control of the whole map and annihilated them, because we held more portals early and buffed those spawns.

A recent tournament game was domination. I went for a more up close and personal version of Oak, intending to kill early and often. I bought tier I minotaurs and tier I siege archers (standard; the other minions are priests, more expensive but great) as I always do. I spent my first point in the attack/debuff, the seocnd in spirits, and focused on those (a point in kill/heal at level 5 or so). And I went on a Godzilla like ramapge. I followed one buddy to the right side and after two engagements with no kills, managed to take down that Titan who makes other titans look small: Rook. And then we took down my personal Nemisis: Erebus. I got both killing blows. I assisted on a third demigod. I was suddenly sitting on like 3.5k gold (there were plenty of reinforcement killings during this, too). And we were controlling 2/3s of the map. We opened up a 700 point lead (around 2.1k to 1.3k, going to 7). I teleported home, bought a few more telport scrolls, added tier 4 priests and a helmet that confers +1k mana and +10 mana regen per second. Oak doesn't get alot of mana, see, and you have *got* to get him both an expanded pool and some mana regen if you expect to fire his abilities alot. And I teleported back in. And I started killing demigods with a reckless abandon that it pains me to speak of. I pushed spirits, attack/debuff, and then added a couple of direct damage boosts. I returned home again and upgraded all minions to tier 4, and added some bitching gloves that not only boosted weapon damage, but had some sort of proc effect. I threw on some armor just because I could. And I teleported back to the front lines and killed rook a zillion times, and we had a 3k lead and were within 1k of winning. A minute or two later and it was all over. And now I'm ready for round 5 of this tournament, 20 points behind the leader.

It's a glorious game. Like an RPG where someone tells you that you have to play on this chessboard, where different squares mean different things. The action is constant but not overwhelming.

Where Sins leaves RTS-dom behind with exceptionally intelligent pacing and scale , this does the same thing just at the other end of the spectrum. There is no base building. The resource gathering is really what you get from breaking your foot off in some other demigod's rear end. You don't have to fret over what your troops are doing. It's easy to get an idea of what's going on "big piucture". The mini map is very helpful but you can scroll out and just examine the world from on high, the fog of war will tell you everytying you need to know in terms of who controls what territory. An unobtrusive and helpful display in the top right indicates progress towards winning the game. You look at the board, and send your guy into the breach based on what you see. Enemy attacking an important portal? You'd better go back the Unclean Beast up, as he's outnumbered 2 demis to one.

It's very simple. It's got elegant depth (it's not super deep, but it need not be).

Impulse has long been a superior product for purposes of buying games (Steam somewhat leveled the playing field with last fall's shopping cart update). But for the community/friends aspect, Impulse needs work.

I ordered it this morning, and it should be done downloading by the time I get home. I believe my impulse ID is MNGwinn.

A couple of additional notes for you:

1) Patrick said it once (thrice actually, I think) before but it bears repeating: dying is bad. Immediately, you don't respawn for X amount of time. All summons are dead, but this is a non issue (minions are replaced by recasting the idols; since you spawn at your healing crystal, mana is immediately regained. Getting back spirits, or the things Erebus gets killing people, comes quickly I'll note). But, the other guy gets gold for killing you. He also has a chance ot pick up a special potion or scroll that every demigod drops on death. It's just a mana/health boost.

But the gold is big. If Rook and Erebus kill me and I'm level 13, they're probably getting 1800|1200 and 900|600 or so gold each (the person who lands the killing blow gets more). The money goes up and down as you level, of course. Dying is bad.

2) The citadel is upgraded with gold, but also restricted based on your war level or something. The announcer will ocassional explain your war level has gone up (in the cheerful and bombastic way he explains everything). I don't know what makes it go up, I assumed general mayhem inflicted. It won't bother you that much. But some upgrades are thus tiered. you can't purchase priest spawns for replacements until you have warlevel 2 or 3, e.g.

"Grandy Peace" did. I am not a good speller.

Anyway... I have some BBQ planning to do this evening, then I'm going to try to jump on and play some Demigod.

I'm still devastated by my last hard tournament. A slight lead on Regulus in Match 7, my team is up 5k to 3.5k in domination. . . and it all unraveled. We won the last match but he and I were teamed and I couldn't make up the ground.

There's some fascinating discussion about piracy and this game over at Qt3 and elsewheres, courtesy of Brad Wardall. Brad's always taken a sensible stance on piracy and that hasn't changed here (pirated Copy != lost sale). But the pirated copies in play here - being estimated at 100k - have caused some of the initial multiplayer problems because certain game related services were being overloaded. I don't know the calculus involved in him getting to his 100k figure, but Brad's stance has alwasy been decidedly un "nuke them from orbit" and I've never seen him get hyperbolic about this stuff.

Were I a game developer, I'd share Brad's stance on pirating on my games. But I don't care for this crowd, because of the particular brand of shit they try to pass off as logic is offensive. As much as I hate seeing this hamper a game I like, and hope this doesn't cause any trouble for Stardock/the devs in terms of lost sales, it's sort of a "you fuckers are douche bags" salute to that particular pirating crowd.

I still don't really understand this game, but I think I like it.

I played three single player skirmishes on "normal" yesterday, and went 0-2. I tried the Rook, the archer dude and vampire guy, and there are major, major differences between them that are kind of fun.

The Rook's way too slow, but I built him up to be a mobile beachhead - tower raising, drawing health from structures, automated weapons. Once I figured out how that worked, I liked him.

I don't really get the archer guy. His range is far shorter than I expected it to be.

The vampire was fun. I went for a mist and stalker-heavy build. Zip in with the bat flight, turn into mist, kill all the reinforcements and raise them as minions. Repeat. That doesn't work well against other demigods, but I could take several fully-upgraded portal spawns at once without breaking a sweat.

Controlling the minions is a little too fiddly for me, and I'm already confused enough, so I tend to just let them run behind me and attack indiscriminately. I think this means I shouldn't try to play generals.

Regulus's (the archer) snipe ability has exceptional range. Regulus can upgrade his bow range by "12" through one skill line, but I'm not sure how much that really helps. The snips is pretty awesome, especially after you get the -movement speed debuff. If you can hurt an enemy enough, and they try to withdraw on foot. ..*pop*.

At least in singleplayer on Hard, I have mastered Oak. I'm not perfect with him, and still struggle a bit in some earlyg ames (we lost one slaughter map, won the other 9, I scored 1075, 400+ more than Regulus).Spirits + minion buff skills are super powerful. I usually compliment with his attack debuff, a point or two in the skill that heals his army when he kills someone, and sometimes weapon damage (but I'm not as keen on that any more). The attack/buff skill is good too but I didn't use it at all in the last tournament. It was quite thrilling, as I'd come close in two hard tournaments previously but failed to get it done.

I'm getting used to minion control, but I Think we're missing a needed hotjey.

'm' selects all minions, which you can then direct. 'n' selects gbeneral + minions. I need a key to select general only. Sometgimes you want to send the minions in and hang back, though. At least with oak, often it's good to just wade in, but it also depends on what you are doing. Earlish, I might whittle down a tower with minhions but leave Oak out of it.

Favor items really help. There's an 800 health, +5 health regen per second item that's nice to take out of the game if you think you'll be damaged alot.

Ok, so I gleaned some of this from the wiki and some from playing.

Regulus can be played as a straight up damage dealer using his normal attack. A downsidxe of this is that armor reduces that damage (armordoes not reduce special ability damage). A second downside is that this is a very "mature" build. You need quite a few resources to make it work, upgrading base damage and attack speed as much as possiuble (maim is a good idea, I also like his wing-thingy skills) The upside? It works really well. Not in a slaughter game, maybe (I just lost one 10-8, on hard, part of a tourney). At the end of match #2, a fort match, I was hitting for 450-500 on most things. 300-400 on most demigods, 250 or so on the unclean beast (who seemed especially armored). And that's me attacking very fast (my attack rating was .89 iirc). Maim is a good compliment because it slows dowwn the other demigods and crimps escape plans. Range is important because you start dealing damage fast, and if you can do it at range it's even more effective. Also, at the first range upgrade you can snipe towers without fear of getting hit. I also took track (for 20seconds everyone can see where that demigod is). I boosted his stats 3 times (bottom skill tree). I boosted the wing skill 4 times.

The wing skill gives you wings (uh, heh). I think they're entirely cosmetic. IT also adds damage to your base attack. At level 1 you add 40 damage for 25 mana. At level 4, it's 100 damage but still 25 mana per shot. I found with one of the tier 2 mana helmets (I like the helm that adds less to mana but +11 mana per second), I never ran out of mana (ifg you select the +800 mana, +12 weapon damage item as your favor item, you'll also be able to use this for long stretches out of the gate). Oh, and it makes your shots explode - really effective on minions. You do have to spend a good portion of the early game sniping minions. I think in multi this build would work well in tandem with someone else. You could keep the enemy from effectively running for someone like Rook or Oak.

Snipe is an interesting skill, but it's very expensive in terms of mana cost. The range really is absurd, though. Regulus also has a skill that damages and marks an enemy. If they use any powers while the mark is acctive (10s duration I think?), they and all minions take 400 damage or something. In playing around witn him in a skirmish, this didn't seem as cool as I had hoped.