Sometimes when you host a game, you will be "Hosting on port 0" or somesuch, which means something has bugged out and nobody can connect. My house mate and I have tentataively found that using a different game name each time and also restarting Demigod in between each game helps with this, but it doesn't work every time.

Happens to me all the time. I can't join, but if I host, people can join my game without any problem. Very strange, indeed.

I'm behind a router. Perhaps my router allows the traffic only if I initiate the game.

I'm not sure about that : I don't know anything about router configuration.

I'm not a monk.

warskull.. that is what I came up with as well.  although, there was this one game I hosted were I had the message "UserA cannot connect to UserB" or something of the like and the game just would not start.

Quoting Brad's webpage,

What this does is have the Impulse cloud take care of setting up multiplayer games.  This means not having to open ports [...] But right now, it's flakey and slow.  Very flakey and slow.  Yesterday, we did get a good Stardock vs. GPG game going using it. But at other times, I couldn't play someone at Stardock whose machine was 5 meters away.

 

That's the problem people are having Pelorn, sometimes connecting but often not, not being unable to join any games as you'd expect to see if port forwarding was needed but not set up. You must have been awfully lucky so far not to have experienced problems yourself, most people I've played against online have had similar experiences.

 

Regardless I'm sure they're plenty aware of this and given it's a part of impulse they have big plans for it'll be getting plenty of attention too.

 

Untill then, it will be rather frustrating trying to get games going, thumbs up for the A.I's improvements since last version at least.