Getting the best Demigod experience

What special powers will I get when I play as Ashley?

In my opinion, a router is suppose to last forever or atleast 10 years.  Having anyone, especially casuals, buy a new router for this game is unfair.  Luckily, I have a new router.

They don't have to buy a router for "this game". But older routers in our testing are just plain flakey when it comes to ANY game.  

We're not doing anything special with routers. We're just discovering the unbelieveable craptitude of older consumer routers.

The way technology advances, no piece of hardware can reasonably be expected to retain necessary functionality in 10 years. My 21" LCD can't even play blu rays

I guess that, in that case, you could post a list of tested/recommended routers, just for reference. I have a DLink DI-524 and I have no idea if you would consider it new, old, or crappy.  

Another question is: if I manage to open the appropriate ports in a given router, even an old, crappy router should work, or not?

Thanks...

Ha, 4 year-old router here. Not replacing it though, unless someone wants to point me to a newer not-too-expensive router which will run Linux.

Port forwarding will unfortunately not help with this case.  It's not so much a open/closed ports issue, but a can't handle multiple simultaneous socket connections issue.

Just because it's older than 2.5 years doesn't guarantee that it won't work, but the chances go up after that threshold.

That's quite a range.  10 - Infinite years.

Not necessarily. It's not just about opening ports and such. A lot of older routers simply don't handle sockets correctly or just do other flakey, bugey stuff. A router, is, in effect, a little PC and the software on the consumer ones is often very buggy that has gotten a lot better over the years.

Many consumer routers can have their firmware "upgraded" to DD-WRT, an open firmware based on the combination of BusyBox and Linux. This software tends to be both more stable and more fully-featured than that originally provided:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/down.php?path=downloads%2Fv24-sp1%2FConsumer/

You should not do this unless you know what you are doing, and how to recover from a bad flash (this will depend on your router).

Im glad I dont have a router right now

You become invincible, because you're too cute for any of the other DGs to kill you.  Unfortunately, you can't attack, so you can't win.

who says you can't win? Just cap all the flags! Upgrade citadel with, well i guess money accumulated by gold flag. But you can certainly still win!

Guys c'mon - everyone who has played as Ashley knows her strengths are in conjuring.  Best ability IMO is summoning King Frogboys but she has access to CariElves, Gunslingers, Island Dogs, etc.  Better minions than any other general, afaik

True, especially since all of them are needed combined to make up for the underpowerdness of Zubaz.

... I go hide now.

Why, I can barely see the thing at all..

It's not the size of your hammer, it's how you use it.

You could poke some eyes out with that thing.

Lovely girl, and happy half-birthday : )

Stardock guys, is it true you are developing something that has never been done before, in terms of networking a multiplayer game ?

I am curious now, since you guys are obviously the people to ask having done all this networking stuff. I have been running DD-WRT for quite a while, and it is very good, but the router itself still has rather rubbish hardware. As a result it will fall over in certain circumstances - basically it can't cope with the hundreds or even thousands of connections that peer-to-peer downloading software creates. My solution at the moment is to temporarily ban the person whose light is flashing the most and reboot.

Would this sort of thing affect ImpulseReactor and Demigod? Would a newer router fix it?

Probably depending on how old it is.  Imagine how slow the processor is in it.

Heck, anyone remember how slow embedded processors just 4 years ago were compared to now?  

But  great post NE, it really does highlight some of the challenges here that people don't realize. Heck, I certainly didn't realize how problematic routers were. I always just thought of them as a box that I connect stuff to and they didn't really do much. In acutality, they really are PCs doing a specialized job that is a lot more complex than I thought.

My router is on the old side, but handles large amounts of connections just fine.

Linksys WRT54G v4 running Tomato 1.23

I think this was the ban hammer, not the other.

EDIT - IMPORTANT NOTE - DO NOT SEARCH HUGE HAMMER IN GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH WITH SAFE SEARCH OFF

Good advice.