Playing Demigod is a giant test of your patience...

We're looking into what causes this.  But one suggestion: Play it windowed. 

Being this is not a First Person Shooter, and is rather Lag tolerant, 160 MS is absolutely acceptable. In fact anything under 300 MS is quite playable.

Then why does it seem like unless the host has below 100 MS my computer (which runs at 60 FPS constantly) seems to turn into a photo album... yet I am still able to move around and view the map smoothly?

and my ventrilo / internet music stream doesn't cut out

ehh id say anything under 200 ms is tolerable but u hit anything under 5 or 6 sim speed and BOGGGG. i agree 100% on sitting there connecting, i would say u could alt tab out, but u cant alt tab cuz you get fatal errord and ctrl alt delete takes 10 minutes. and yes even with the new patches if people leave join connect fail to connect join leave. you get stuck in the the ridicoulous cycle of never connecting. ive put the game off to the side for now i played 1 game tonight attempted 2 others since the beta patches and probly wont play again untill next patch

Host doesn't matter any more than any other person in the room.. Correct me if I'm mistaken...

True, if you have lag and everyone is under 300, then maybe someone has a very slow pc.

Also i think you miss-wrote your statement, trying to start a Multiplayer game is a test of your patience, playing it its really great.

Sounds more like a Sim-speed problem than a Lag one. When a game lags in P2P, you'll notice it because you won't be able to view the map smoothly while the movement of all of the units is slow. The games can only run as fast as slowest computer allows.

I never alt-tab out of the game but sometimes when I get matched up with folks I auto-drop just as the game starts and it automatically gives me a loss on my record. Infact at least 4 of my losses are caused from dropping, and not doing anything to cause it either.

From 3 attempted games todays, only the first one did not get passed the loading screen. Unfortunately the 2 that actually loaded were a massive waste of time as players decided to constantly suicide then rage quit from the opening minute.

There were only a few games being hosted and they were all US East, me being from Australia warrants a 200+ ping to this location but once in-game seemed to be reasonably stable other than a few random connection freezes from other players during the game. Most of the issues ingame were not related to the network environment.

You make it sound as though stat tracking isn't broken.

Playable, yes.  Annoying as hell?  Better believe it.

Playing it windowed massively gimps your play if I am not mistaken, since you can't move your screen just by moving mouse, you gotta use keyboard on click and move with mouse, playing something easy like UB, that might be possible but play Oak and try to control your minions + Oak + move your screen...

Ive played demigod in windowed mode since beta1, I never use edgescroll in demigod anyway, I either just zoom out and back in where I want to look, or middle mouse button to drag the camera small distances if needed.

Imo I cant find one good reason to play it in fullscreen, alt+tabbing takes 3 secs instead of 0.1. you cant see when someone wants to talk to you over messenger et.c

Playing in windowed is fine. Just be careful not to click outside of it.