An idea for a more "tidy" game

I don't get it.

If two people decide to uhh.. farm early game.. one of the two deciding to change their strategy won't benefit?
Huh?..

I feel stupid :$

He is stating that if the general has direct control over the creeps, he can harass the assassins easily, harass their base,etc. thus having a less "tidy" game-play.

At least, that was what I understood.

Let me explain a bit further.

innociv, Shadowgandor:
Concerning dota:
If two players decide to farm early game, which they have to, to begin with (who can jungle or heroekill at lvl1?) they must keep going until one of them is strong(lvl wise) enough to be able to harass/kill without having the downside of getting destroyed himself - may I remind you that creeps automatically attack enemy players who are attacking allied heroes, and keep attacking the heroes until they are further away from them than the nearest creep.
Furthermore, throughout the game, if me and Shadowgandor are opponents on the same lane, while we are both killing and denying creeps so that the creep-front is kept in the middle of the two lvl1 towers, his and mine (in the exact middle of the lane), then if either of us change tactics (I push more and stop denying, or Shadowgandor stops killing enemy creeps and starts only getting killing blows, or vice versa) then the creep front is going to move to his tower and get it down (negative for him) while I won't be able to attack his creeps effectively, fearing the tower (negative for me).

v3dran, about generals, if they have direct control over the creeps, they can do pretty much whatever they want, blowing off this deep but more subtle aspect of AoS-based games.

Ofcourse if the gameplay is vastly different, then it won't matter anyway..

Interesting fact: The film "Beautiful Mind" is about the mathematician who introduced this theory, John Nash.

Generals don't have control over creeps. They have control over their own minions only.

What innociv said is correct.. although theres a divider between generals/assassins. a general is just very similar to Furion, or Undying, with the ability to have their own minions. although you can still kill people. it just requires a different way about doing so then an assassin type would generally do it.

im just hoping they dont get too many controllable units, because an old dota trick, was to use visage's gargoyles and land them in the middle of the lane creating a wall..

this wall would then block in all the creeps who couldn't go around.. and eventually the enemy creeps would kill the 1st tower.. then come and put a hole in the wall.. and when all 5 heros would push with 150 creeps in the 1st few like 10 mins in the game.. be4 people get good aoe dmg.. the game would end. becuz they cant hold off 150 creeps + 5 heroes *(especially since whoever his opponent was never got any creep xp to begin with. while he sat at the tower gaining tons.)*

Black, you couldn't pull that off in 10 minutes. Nor in 20 minutes.

You could do it after 30, 40 minutes out in the game, while having a good team that will distract the enemy by concentrated harass. But even in this case, marching with the army of creeps (also, it could have been be Chen ) made it hard for the players to have a good micro due to the lack of space. And believe me, I've seen a match in which 2 russians managed to turn the balance and win, just because the other team tried the creep army strat and found themselves blocked within the massing creeps, because the other team used 2 heroes to block a ramp, while the other 2 team-mates took a lane each and brought down the rest of the towers + racks.

It's hard to effectively control your hero when there are a lot of creeps around you because of the erratic actions of the creeps when playing vs people that actually know some War3.

Most of the time when creep blocking happened in my games, the # of units in the map would slow the game to a crawl. Having several hundreds of creeps trying to path find their way down a crowded path was a nightmare. Of course, if your team had akasha, death prophet, lina, or even the old void, the AOE would clean up the creeps nicely and net a ton of gold/exp. In other words, creep blocking only worked about half the time (when the game didn't crash).

Yes, Odit, but don't forget that Demigod's pathfinding is 2008 code, while DotA's is modified War3, 2002 (it's been fixed though, latest versions, hasn't it?)
Creepblocking will hardly be a problem if the Generals can't mass their units and block or possible ways out.

It all goes down to the beta, which I won't have the chance to test because I'm getting my gaming PC in october, and I'm stuck with a very lousy laptop (pimped up with linux though )

Well enough time to get into the beta at that moment....

It had been said that every Demigod has a minimum of one AoE attack for crowd control.

This might have changed.

And they might not be able to spec the skill at the start of the game, like you said, however.

I highly agree. DotA has absolutely no "macromanagement aspect" and specifically refuses to change this fact because there is no hero that can build or train units; nor will there even be one. If Generals tend to make my gameplay ugly, I will resort to playing 4-player LAN games with no generals allowed; no big.

Either way if Generals are more like "heroes with abilities that buff creeps" and not "heroes that have direct control over creeps" it might clean up the gameplay flow a little more -- oh and not to mention make it even more similiar to DotA; thus losing yet another aspect that makes Demigod unique.

It seems the devs are going about this the right way, balancing the equation. I'll need to do more tests, and of course we need to wait for later betas where units will be balanced, but it could work out to be a new, albeit more complicated, equilibrium.