True... of course playing UB in a dark Panth these days works pretty well too...  u know... soon u will have too admit that I do play the game (and game my play) quite well...

Prussian u are far from playing good, u average at most. Feel free to jump in when abbugerehedgie or me host game to prove me wrong. I can 1v1 or 2v2 if u got someone.

So there is no way now to get AI now? even if  u get 2 people on dark and 0 on  light? will it  still give you expierience points and count towards ranking if u beat AI.

I think thats the main issue with pantheon. I agree that there is no point of dividing demigods into light  and darkness. Instead we could get demigods to fight for ruling pantheon (something like turnaments in single player.

Please remove divining demigods into dark/light side.

Make "Random Demigod" the only choice at start! If possible avoid double or tribble Demigods.

Winner of the Pantheon will be the Demigod which won 20000 favor points first!

I played a couple of pantheon games today and there was an issue in each of them.

The first game started OK with 4 human players, but after about 15s or less a player left rendering the game pointless, so I left as well.

From that, I think it might be better if when a player leaves within the first few minutes of a match the system would simply end/cancel/void the match.

The second game didn't even get started, as the pantheon system put together an 8 player match but the match didn't start it just got stuck, presumably someone was having connection problems. I have to say it is pretty unclear what is actually happening at this stage, it is only with experience that you can see the signs of players leaving. Gradually it became apparent that people were leaving so I clicked cancel as well. Sometimes connecting players can go on for 10 or 20 minutes or more with no match starting.

Couple of things from that:

 1 - An 8 player pantheon game is too much there is a high likelihood someone won't have enough bandwidth and twice as likely than a 4 player match that someone will disconnect or otherwise drop out. I would say 6 players max for pantheon games.

2 - I think if after something like 1 minute not everyone is connected then matchmaking should fail or if anyone cancels before everyone is connected then matchmaking should fail. This would save on starting pointless unhappy matches which have AI in beacuse someone had disconnected or decided to leave before the match starts.

The third game started fine but one of the players was replaced by AI from the very start making it too easy for my team and quickly the other team conceded. Not much fun for any of the 5 players actually in the game. Plus one team didn't know they had an AI on their team, so they didn't even know thay had an unfair disadvantage. Having an unseen handicap is definitley anti-fun in any game.

I think if at the very start of the game one of the players has disconnected already then instead of replacing them with AI the game should just end there instead of we wait for everyone to realise there is a problem and one team concedes, the system should just end it automatically.

I think these things might make pantheon more fun for everyone and then more people would play the game. The game is great and getting better all the time, but that doesn't mean it's all perfect!

Good thread BTW.

Thanks for another post, Ciber.  I'll go through that later today if possible and update the OP as appropriate. 

primz - The possibility of not getting a match to launch AT ALL does exist now because of the removal of AI.  But there might be an issue if you were queued up on light side and the other individuals were on dark.  Was that the case this morning for you or was everyone that joined the queue on the same side?  Were you viewing opengames.asp or did you just note that X players are waiting for a match in game?  The more details you can provide, the easier it will be to track an issue down, if there is one. 

Low population tends to not be so much fun.  Since the change removing AI, I decided I would try to play on whatever side I felt like would have a lower population this time around.  That works fine for me as I enjoying mixing up my character selection quite a bit, but may not for others.  I typically check out opengames.asp before I even bother to queue up in panth to see what the sides are looking like.  I personally wouldn't wait around 30 minutes... if the population is that low, I'd just host my own game. 

I agree about using prison for 1v1 as well.

Kitch,

I do understand where you are coming from and agree (to some extent) that the new options might make it possible to have AI in a pantheon game.  But, then a few things would be back in effect.  1 - people would be able to go back to farming AI for experience.  2 - the AI's are still remarkably dumb.  Even on nightmare + high HP, they still aren't much of a challenge.  You'd have to come up with quite a few parameters for it to work...

the game would have to only launch if there are at least 1 human on each side.  The AI's would all have to be on nightmare + high HP + low gold.  The game would have to not launch if a player quit at the load screen so AI farming wouldn't be increased all the more.  In short, I think it would require far too many things to be tweaked, imo.  Some might disagree with me. 

There is always the option of hosting a 1+4AI v 1+4AI game in custom with the settings I mentioned though.  AND it will count for stats as well.  I'd actually imagine that many might enjoy playing this type of game.

The missing dark side valor flag on zikurat has been added back to the map in version 1.2 on 11/19/2009.  Confirmed by morph and pacov.  OP updated. 

Another thought too, kitch - that 1+4AI v 1+4AI is actually a perfect example of where we'd want to use the custom lobby... its a high customized situation.  If you decide to host a few, please post back here and let me know if it was easy to get some games going or not so much.  Thanks!

People will get wise soon enough... 90% of the population can't be on the same team if you ever want to get matches off.  That said, if you are actually on the light side, I'm pretty sure you're getting your games in fairly quickly. 

It seems like pantheon almost always chooses 2v2 zikurat. It gets pretty boring playing the same map and it's not even the best map.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting zikurat zikurat zikurat: