Torchbearer - 1350 damage fireball at level 1?

Do you have his name?  I would, if it's possible, report him.  If of course what you say is true, it has to be cheating, no way around that.

thats hacks. sounds like he used a trainer program to giv himself full skill points at level 1 as those numbers correspond to the max rank damage for those spells.

im also not sure how he could be using a trainer program since Impulse Reactor will check versions and make sure nobody is runing a hacked version.

are you, by chance, playing an unregistered copy over LAN or game ranger?

This is something you'll have to look out for when using Gameranger or other such programs.  I've had similar things happen to me on a few occasions.

OH THE HACKS ALREADY FUUUUUUUU. WTB BLIZZARDS WARDEN.

There's also a multi player option 'starting level'.  If the game had the starting level at 15 or greater, he could begin the game with that skill.  That sounds like the most reasonable option here.

Guys, guys! Before we shout HaXXoR and Burn the WITCH, lets think this through first. Demigod has a few very powerful tools in place to make this kind of cheating almost impossible. If you edit the blueprints the game will desync, even over Game Ranger. And you can't get online on Impulse with an edited game version at all afaik.

badcad, when something like this happens or you have a doubt, save the replay! You can find it in My Documents\My Games\...\Replays\<Username>\LastGame. While we dont have a working replay system yet, there is a lot of data in those files that is extremely valuable. And there are workarounds to watch them.

My guess is that he may have used unusual settings for the game as Zechnophobe suggested, maybe there was a glitch or something. We don't know yet. Keep an eye out for strange stuff like that, collect information. For the Allfathers sake, don't post usernames unless you are absolutely certain that he used cheats. And by that I mean you have proof.

If you have a replay and there was bugusing, cheating or exploiting, tell a GPG or Stardock employee and send them the replay. They will check it out, ban the user account (if he was cheating) and fix the problem (if there is one).

Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?

*goes off to look for a duck*

Just a mapper, I have worked with the SupCom engine for almost 2 years now. So I know it a little. Oh and I've seen many threads similar to this. In my experience they rarely solve the problem, a PM to the right person on the developer team usually does.

But talk is cheap, let me give you an example, a small hommage to Portal in the SupCom engine.

It was obviously just the setting put on "level 20 starting level". There are no hacks for Demigod atm and as mentioned above, any changed files or hacks used will just reslut in a desync.

Besides the rather unfortunate typo (sorry, had to :P), yes, it's rather hard to hack a P2P game for anything deterministic. Since each player runs the full simulation rather than just getting data fed from a server, if one player tries to hack something like fireball damage, he'll just desync since the skill does proper damage on all the other connected machines.

Afraid you're wrong friend-o.  Look up Demigod Trainer.  The OP didn't specify through what method they entered their game, and I was about to assume they meant through the Demigod Server Browser.  As I said in my original post, if they loaded through Gameranger or some other similar program, it's entirely possible to use Trainers.

Too serious Colonel

I was invoking the "burn the witch" sketch from Monty Python Holy Grail.

As Annatar pointed out, no it's not -- game is based around a P2P design that prevents such hacks from working.  Gaining info might be possibly, but directly editing levels and the like will desync.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/code/944424.html

works on gameranger and hamachi. not sure about online. there is one missing if you push alt+g to unlock all the skills.

Colonel. the cheat does not make you an insta lvl 20. well one does, but the other simply unlocks and gives you all the characters abilities at lvl 1. thus how the TC got hit by a 1300 damage fireball and 800 damage frost nuke.

also copy and pasting rook towers on top of each other provides some good lols. nothing like instant death.

Thanks for the great response guys.

I can tell you that I was playing over Game Ranger so this would explain the lack of Reactor protection.

I did see in another game someone enable the cheat to hit level 20, but a message came up so it was quite clear. In the instance I originally posted about, there was no message. There was also no desync.

I'll save a replay in future and pass it on.

On a side note, regarding desync's. I've seen this happen a few times. Is this only the result of modify game files/hacking or can there be legitimate, innocuous reasons for this occurring?

Thanks

In theory, it should only happen for hacking / modifying files; in practice coding mistakes can cause this as well.  For example, sins had a huge desync issue that eventually boiled down to discovering that they mixed up two of the random number generators in the code.  They had a 'deterministic' and a 'nondeterministic' generator to handle different things -- the deterministic one is used for the 'universal' stuff (actual gameplay) while the nondeterministic one was used for anything that could vary from machine to machine (like graphics).

Oh, and cheats =/= trainers or hacks people! 

Well he got better...

this is because you're playing v.91

the debugging mode has been fixed in later versions so if you don't want to play with cheaters, use the latest version.