What happens if your Demigod falls in the thick of the action?  Will you be able to revive/replace him (or her)?

Demigods cannot be truly killed once they’re in the arena. Instead, they get resurrected by the gods. But they do spend some time in limbo while awaiting resurrection so getting slain in the arena is a bad thing.

AI can be notoriously difficult to judge when it comes to some RTS games.  Sometimes you find that your enemy, who isn't supposed to damage you much, ends up defeating you.  AI in Demigod, however, is something you are proud of, why is that?

Well Demigod has some advantages that most strategy games don’t have in single player. Most notably, because the game is a “team” game and that different Demigods can be of various power levels, we can have matches where it’s two-on-four and so on.  This allows us to have a lot of different AI options that can make the game have an incredible level of repayability.

Do you think the recent closing of Ensemble Studios leaves a gap in the market which you can fill?

Certainly.  Stardock is already working with its developer partners (Ironclad and GPG) on ways to fill in those gaps and our own internal studios have a number of projects as well.

We know that Sins of a Solar Empire was really well received, although it didn't get much attention as, I'm presuming, you'd like when it was released.  Do you look at the release schedule of games and try to slate the game when at a time when it's not competing with any other big t**les, or do you get the game out when it's ready regardless of other games being released?

We try to stay away from other big titles in general.  The problem Stardock often has is that we like to deal with IP.  You don’t see a lot of sequels being cranked out from Stardock and as a result, the press and the retailers often underestimate the impact it’s going to have.

Plus, we tend to focus on games that the “experts” claim there’s no interest in.  Sins of a Solar Empire, for instance, was a surprise to many because here was an RTS that had so much depth that a typical small game can last two or three hours and a large map might last for months.  Nobody expected it to become the best selling game at retail last year (certainly not the retailers).

With Sins of a Solar Empire, we didn’t even try making a campaign for single player. It was just skirmish and people told us “No, you can’t do that” but it turned out that people liked that because we were able to put that time into making the skirmishes super cool.

With Demigod, it’s much the same thing. It’s a new IP based on a new fantasy universe.  And people are going to be shocked at how different this game plays than other games just like they were with Sins of a Solar Empire.

In hindsight, the success of Sins of a Solar Empire seems obvious. But it wasn’t at the time because no game had ever tried to do what it did.

It’s likely to be the same with Demigod. People are going to sit down with Demigod and be shocked that Stardock and Gas Powered Games, masters of making massive scale strategy games have created a new type of strategy game that people can sit down and actually a skirmish in 10 minutes...and then play again...and again...and again.

Is there any way you could connect Sins to Demigod in a bizarre kind of way?  You know, like it's 15 millennia before Sins...? It's just a thought.

Oh I wish.  But they exist in very different universes.  But yes, if I could get The Queen of Thorns into every game then the world would be a better place.

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