First Impressions / Bugs / Suggestions

from Demigod Forums

I’ve not seen any of the performance/client issues mentioned in this forum, though I have a top of the line rig which may be muscling past these issues. I’ve been enjoying Demigod so far even in its early state and look forward to the next update. Below is a list of bugs and suggestions, I’ve been recording while playing.

Bugs

·         Healing NPCs often stop pathing after attacking a target

o   I’ve seen all NPC types do this on occasion

·         Enemies on the edge of the fog of war are not drawn, but can be attacked and targeted with the mouse. (Especially noticeable with the Rook PC)

·         AI PCs tend to stand around near a fight but not participate even when they have ranged attacks available

·         Cannot view enemy/friendly PC equipment

·         Attack moves end after coming into range of your first target. You should continue to your attack move to your destination after your target is slain

·         Passive demigod AI will not move to attack enemies just out of range. This forces the player to force attack every enemy not actively within their characters attack range.

·         Passive demigod AI will not move to attack an enemy shooting them from range.

·         AI PCs will attempt to bolder roll across gaps in terrain

·         Passive demigod AI will not retarget away from a tower to attack incoming troops when the tower was never specifically targeted by the player. There seems to be no sense of target priority

·         Defensive towers have no collision

·         NPCs have no collision

·         PCs have no collision

·         Kill tracking / Score keeping does not exist

·         AI PCs tend to sit in the back of their base and wait for the game to end once their final defenses are under assault

·         Cannot view the demigod skill tree while dead

·         Equipment screen is blank while dead

·         Catapults rotate to face targets while frozen

·         Demigods team allegiance can only be discovered by mousing over them. There needs to be an easy way to tell which team a demigod is at a glance.

Suggestions

·         The vision field around both Demigods and NPC armies is very short. I feel as though I’m constantly being attacked by enemies I couldn’t see only a moment before. Suggest extending view distance.

·         AI PCs don’t pay enough attention to their health totals, and don’t tend to retreat to heal as often as they should. Suggest AI adjustments to be more cautious.

·         Health Pot drops from Demigod kills are too rewarding to the player. You are already receiving experience and money in addition to preventing to those your slain enemy for a time. The pots simply allow the player to plow forward at full speed with no slowdown. This is very unbalanced, suggest removing them.

·         Rook Archer tower range is nonexistent, this is just a melee buff in disguise and is fairly disappointing. Suggest making the archer a passive ranged attack

·         CC abilities feel as though they are available too often, suggest reexamining their cool down timers.

·         Power feels as though it is too readily available, and is a non issue when making choices about ability usage. Suggest reexamining power pools and power regeneration rate

·         Tower range feels too short, almost to the point of being useless, suggest doubling tower range

·         Level layout tends to lend itself to easy deactivation of enemy spawn points. NPC armies are not pathed to defend their own spawn points and are thus easily ignored. Suggest reevaluating level design / NPC pathing to improve base coverage.

·         Deactivating a spawn point for even a single wave will more than likely end a game. Suggest removing the ability to deactivate enemy spawns, the advantage of extra troop spawns due to owning more flags is enough of an edge.

·         Torch Bearer needs to be revaluated. Low survivability and long ability cast times force the Torch Bearer to stand in casting animations and die repeatedly. In addition to this the torch bearers abilities seem to do much less damage then the other demigods. This character is only fun until the novelty wears off. Suggest revaluating this demigod across the board

·         Rain of Fire and Rain of Ice damage is very inconsistent. Rain of ice does up to 300 total damage while rain of fire only deals 150. Why would a player want to use/spend points of rain of fire? Suggest rebalancing these abilities.

·         Currently each character seems to have one play style available to them. Suggest improving equipment variety to give characters more diversity and depth with aims to improve replay-ability.

1,085 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Demigod Forums Top

Very good remarks and suggestions.

 

I especially agree with the absence of collision which is really "cheap", and the strange behaviours of AI Demigods who sometimes are just frozen.

Also, same for me: the line of sight seems to me way too short.

+ the absence of mouse scrolls looks like a bug to me.

The balance observations may be right, they seem to make sense, but I prefer to wait before jumping to conclusion. Yet, anything that can improve variety (in equipment, skills, etc) will be crucial for the game to remain interesting.

I'd add that the game needs a more varied soundtrack, looping several different tracks, or enable custom playlist.

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

CC abilities feel as though they are available too often, suggest reexamining their cool down timers.
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Definitely agree here. Diminishing returns might fix it, too.

Tower range feels too short, almost to the point of being useless, suggest doubling tower range
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Not sure about this one. Maybe a small buff, but archer towers with double the range would be ridiculous.

Level layout tends to lend itself to easy deactivation of enemy spawn points. NPC armies are not pathed to defend their own spawn points and are thus easily ignored. Suggest reevaluating level design / NPC pathing to improve base coverage.
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This map, anyway. For all we know, this one is build for small, fast, decisive games. It takes a long time as it is to capture one of those flags, and capture stops when there's an enemy demigod in the area--I think the fact that it's so easy to deactivate a spawn is a function of the AI at the moment.

Deactivating a spawn point for even a single wave will more than likely end a game. Suggest removing the ability to deactivate enemy spawns, the advantage of extra troop spawns due to owning more flags is enough of an edge.
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I think I could get behind this.

Torch Bearer needs to be revaluated. Low survivability and long ability cast times force the Torch Bearer to stand in casting animations and die repeatedly. In addition to this the torch bearers abilities seem to do much less damage then the other demigods. This character is only fun until the novelty wears off. Suggest revaluating this demigod across the board.
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Complete disagreement. Torchbearer is /very/ powerful against enemy creeps, and has enough in the way of stuns to keep enemies in place for the much more damaging fire abilities. Regulus needs to be looked at (for playstyle, if nothing else) far more than Torchbearer.

Rain of Fire and Rain of Ice damage is very inconsistent. Rain of ice does up to 300 total damage while rain of fire only deals 150. Why would a player want to use/spend points of rain of fire? Suggest rebalancing these abilities.
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Rain of Ice is the only fast-recharging damage skill Ice has, while all of the fire skills do damage of some kind. I suppose RoF isn't a wise investment if you plan on spending more of your time in ice than fire, but if you spend a lot of time in fire it's your only ranged AoE.

Currently each character seems to have one play style available to them. Suggest improving equipment variety to give characters more diversity and depth with aims to improve replay-ability.
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True enough.

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Reply #3 from Demigod Forums Top

Rather than changing equipment, I'd rather see an expansion of of the skills.  Even within the current skillset, you can have options that change how you use a character.  Take the Rooks hammer smash for instance.  Say that you could have two upgrade paths for it: one gives a large increase to the damage done at the impact point, and only a small (or none) increase in splash.  The other path would obviously give you a large increase in splash damage while only a minor increase in damage at the point of impact.  These two paths give you the option to make your rook a crowd crusher or a true demigod assasin based on who you're playing against.  Now, I've only played as rook so far, but it seems that these kind of options could be expanded to the other demigods.  Thoughts?

Reply #4 from Demigod Forums Top

I just tried the beta this morning. Love it. The limited fog of war ranges and the slighty clunky controls (!) at first made me srcatch my head, but damn is there an engaging little game in there! Thumbs up guys! And for a beta, this code seems pretty solid on my machine.

The skills of the demigods *are* the game... limiting their usage will slow the pace of play down and kind of thwart the role of human controllers, in my opinion. I want more, not different, at this point in time.

Pretty cool. It even kind of reminds me of Majesty, one of my all-time favourite game experiences. Thumbs up; money well-spent for me.

Reply #5 from Demigod Forums Top

-the rooks passive ability which increases his damage by 200% is extremly inbalanced because it works on items too, i just played a game where my rook did 1k+ damage per hit thanks to two items. (compare that to the torch-barer which deals hardly any damage at all in late game)

Suggestions: either lower the percentage or make it an fixed amount of extra damage or exclude items (and buff the torch bearer, but this in an other story) OR: make items that increase spell damage (or let +dmg items effect spell damage two, not just auto attack)

-it don´t like it that you can equipp more then one item of the same category (i.e. two helmets)

Suggestions: well make it so that only one item of each category is usable (if you want to equipp a new helmet then the old one should be sold automatically)