Mass Heavy Cruisers. Mayy strike craft (fighters, as long as he is really only going Illums and doesn't have flak with them). Mass flak.

But you are right, the game has some balance issues. Let's hope SD / IC see multiplayer as a field to improve and not as "oh, only 2% of the people play it so we ignore it" thingy like it seems now.

Personally, I am very disappointed with the way the patches were handles so far. I expected some quick balance patches (not changing anything in terms of gameplay, just tweaking the unit stats a little) to help with the situation. But nothing is done in that field and they seem to work on the "big" 1.1 patch. Sadly, the consequence of that is that until 1.1 comes out nobody will be playing Sins online anymore.

Actually that is exactly the reason why I will not preorder Demigod. Seeing the really medicore multiplayer support SD/IC offer for Sins I do not have the confidence to pre-order a game that I will only ever play in multplayer and which will be totally ruined without very, very good game balance.

Damn edit button's gone lol, forgot to say yes i do agree with the original post that illums are very powerful, but theres lots of comparisons about, say TEC having their LRM frigates earlier, so theres the arguement get in and put pressure on them earlier, rather than giving em time to build up enough illums. But most games i play don't have advent tbh, i play mostly LAN games, and none of us like using advent much.

Well, both are developed in cooperation with StarDock and they are pulling some strings in both games. And I didn't say I'm not buying it - I am not pre-ordering it.

Singleplayer support for StarDock games has been fantastic and I really like that but Sins has shown that they don't care that much about multiplayer. In several interviews that also has been confirmed. From a strictly business point of view that is even reasonable: The multiplayer base is just too small to be worth the huge amount of work a company has to put into it in terms of monetary return it will produce in the short term.

The thing is that in my opinion the main payoff for the investment in multiplayer is long term. It builds a great community and it gives the company an extremely good image.

Now Demigod will be so focussed on multiplayer that even a small lack of multiplayer support will, in my opinion, be absolutely devastating for it. Just look at DotA (the warcraft funmap that Demigod got its idea from). It gets small content and balance fixes all the time. That's the kind of multiplayer support that has to be competed with and looking at Sins I have doubts that this will happen. And that is why I will most probably not pre-order and wait first and look if the game balance and balance patches for Demigod are really good.

Too be honest, had I known before how Sins multiplayer would be handled, I probably wouldn't have bought it. The reason I bought Sins was my trust in StarDock and their great support and while they kept that up for their singleplayer "newbie" fanbase, they didn't keep it for multiplayer and I really am disappointed there because a solution helping both groups would easily have been possible.

Sins was an awesome game for the first 1-2 weeks I played it. It was fun in sandbox and I had hopes for multiplayer to deliver long-term fun. But now multiplayer is dead, no long term fun anywhere in sight since the gamer base has been chased away by the bad patches (before 1.04) and really bad netcode and without enemies you simply can't play multiplayer. And the sandbox mode simply gets boring after a short while so no long-term fun there, either.

Right now I basically boxed Sins and stopped playing it. On the other hand I am still occasionally playing DotA, which I have been playing for years now. That is how multiplayer has to work. That is what StarDock / Ironclad were not able to deliver and that is why I will be very careful with a multiplayer-heavy game like Demigod.