minion swarm

Yeah, we pretty much rule.

LOL. This has been another TAG production.

Probably all using Horn of Battle too, that's brutal

I really have no clue what you could do in that situation. Probably try to buy priests, angels and upgrade tower regen as you noted. Get them to use their horn before they reach citadel.

The problem was probably that u were defending the citadel rather than meeting the minions before they got that far.

It sounds like this happened so early nobody would even have war rank for angels and above.

Well against minion swarms you need at first alot of area damage, so an ooze build UB, a fire build Torch and mine Reg should be pretty awesome. Fire ring an ooze should kill the minions in a decent time.  Second, dont defend to much try to be offense. Force them into 3 to 3 situation, they are usually not that well equipped in terms of items. 

Yeah 2 or 3 direct Mines completely destroy clustered minions that early even through Horn of Battle, Ooze is not so great though, neither is TB till high levels against Horn of Battle.

For early game i agree with u ooze and torch will not much do damage to the minions, but they are anoying. For midgame and lategame that team should become very decent against minions especially with reg on their side. Well i dont have another theory countering mass minions. Additional to that, cloves of fell creature would be very nice too.

imho they should give gold/xp on minion kills

that would make people think about how they use their minions and would stop them from sending them in blindly on every cooldown to slowly rip your towers/citadel apart.

I'd say take the battle to the Demigods.  Seeing as it sounds like all 3 did minion builds they should be weaker early, especially if their minions are halfway across the map and not around themselves.  So go attack them and if you get a couple kills they'll probably stop sending minions away and keep them close.

qft

why bothering with the minions that will continue to come and not go for theire masters that are obviously weekened without their minions.

Because the general is probably near/behind his towers.

in this case ingore their minions and keep the flags! you will win, because your weakned opposiotn can not hold the flags against you. their minions are doing far to less dmg  at this lvl time that you must fear to loos because of your citadel getting destroyed.

you hold the lines, you hold the flags, you level faster and your warranks increase faster. they sit back with a big disadvantage but are eating slowly your citadel. anyway your citadel won't die so fast -> ingore it until you are high enough in level to kill them even behind their towers!

it is really very easy to counter this. inf act it is a very stupid tactic.

edit: buy tower dmg increase rank 1 (only rank 1). this gives your towers splash dmg if you think you need it.

You don't want to defend more than one wave of this strategy.  Attack attack attack. If they don't stop after the first wave then just press forward, creep and break towers.  They can't hold flags or territory with this strat.  Spread your demi's out so you can cover more ground.  If minion waves pass you by on their way to the citadel then do some damage to the idol priests before returning to your own attack.

You still might lose the game while attacking, but at least you have a chance of winning.

Universal Gadgets are always a nice way to make quick repairs to structures.

So many bad assumptions made here. If not defended properly the citadel dies from the first wave on Leviathan, easily. You also don't need every char to be minion spec.

There's not much you can do. I've done a minion build Oak that just feels...unfair. I think minions need a complete rework.

Either:

A: Minions have a very SLIGHT impact on the game if you dont spec into them
B: Minions are downright cheap if you spec into them.

I can't think of a good middle ground though. 

AoE the shit out of them and 4v1 focus kill any demigod that is in the area(assuming 4v4). They spend too much money and effort into this strategy that if they fail, they're fucked. Which is exactly what happend when we played them last night.

We all upgraded the citadel pretty well when needed though, it got to about 1/5th health at the lowest, it was close. But we recapped portals eventually on leviathan and pushed them back to their base, and they made some more badly failed attempts at sending more minion swarms which quickly got disposed of.

We won at around 35 minutes. They had nothing up their sleeve aside from these early swarm tactics.

Edit: Wow nevermind, 52 minute game, longer than I thought. Here's the game: http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/game/668921/player/43177/

Looks like it was your only loss since the update, guess that tactic has been working fairly well.

Actually, we forgot to buy currency somehow. I think we got currency at like war rank 7ish or something fail.

Lol they used the same strat on us last night too, I was dumbfounded as I never saw anything like it before.

This was also on Leviathan, the actual game was here:  http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/game/668693/player/32715/

Same strat.  What had us going is that we were doing well and ahead on the kill count.  So we were saving up for some creep upgrades and getting prepared to push in a few levels (most of us were around level 8 at this time).

During most of this, _Shadow was just chilling out of range of the flag I was near for most of the game and I should have known something was up as he wasn't doing anything himself but his nightwalkers were tearing our rook a new one.

_Shadow vanished after a few minutes and before I knew it, "you're citidal is under attack".  I checked it out and it was already at 2/3's and dropping fast.  We had the tower I upgrade at the time.  Game was over.

It was a great game just for the fact of experiencing something like that.

In hindsight our regs should have gotten a clue and ported back to cit immediately to mine.  There was no time for creep upgrades, war score was not that high at the time.  Pretty sure they snuck down the portal lanes in Leviathan which is a great way to not be noticed as most of the action is in the inner lanes.  So there was no warning at all, except for the fact that _Shadow's nightwalkers were tearing up our rook prior to the event.

Only defense I can think of for this is focused AOE on the minions with at least 2 other people pushing to keep the demigods honest.  They do this relatively early and creep upgrades would not help you.  With the amount of dmg they were putting out, I doubt tower upgrades would have helped either.  Like RapierX said, most of what you guys have said would not work.  It was way too early in the game for any effective citidel/creep upgrades.  The only things on our cit were their minions, I never even saw their demigods at all in the end.  I mean technically all the demigods could just sit in their own base and just send their minions down the side lanes.  Personally I think they chilled in the outside lanes and maybe ate a few tower blasts so they could send their minions in without being damaged, then just sat back and enjoyed the show.

If you have a rook why not set up 8 towers at base, or 6 if your only lvl 7-9.  If he is built well he should have boulder roll so wait for the creep wave, boulder roll them to stun, towers wack away, and then hammer slam.  That should kill most of them if not all of them.  Either way they shouldn't do that much dmg before you kill them off.  The other 2 heroes can then run around the map.  If you run into real problems send in a reg to mine up between the towers in front of the citadel and that should finish them off.

The main problem is that creeps don't give xp or gold.  How could anyone have thought that this wouldn't be open to abuse?

To be fair to the strategy, and please take no offense to this, but we did not take you guys seriously at all until it was way too late. We played at about a D+ level until we realized we had dug ourselves into a hole of stupidity. Your response to the strategy was excellent whereas our approach was about as poor as we could have allowed our play to degenerate. We deserved to lose that game on account of being so crass and nonchalant.

My overall assessment of this strategy is that GPG will have to add more towers around the citadel on Leviathan. Or nerf the crap out of minions. Which is unlikely at the moment because most people think that minions are UP. They're not. They're fucking insane.

I haven't played against this strategy, but my first impression is that you will lose pretty much any game that you are forced to be on defense. Defense wins no games.

Leviathan could use more towers around the cit, though.

I think the fortresses on Levi need to be a tad closer to the citadel, otherwise spirits take 0 damage whilst attacking, and the tower right in the middle isn't that hard to get down if you're persistant, once it's down it's a free run for minions.  Tried this out just now, with just one Oak with spirits/morale I could wreck their Citadel pretty hard, and got it down to 1/2k health before I was even level 9. A team with no high damage AoEs would pretty much 100% lose without a huge kill lead against this tactic on Levi I think.

Even with a huge kill lead we lost to minion swarm on Cata (though you went for our towers more than our citadel)... Curse you lack of AoE spells! (Besides the mines from the slow reg we had.)

So yeah, minions aren't great when you don't focus on them much, but when you do they can get holy shit insane, especially if you have three members of the team focusing on minions. I can only imagine how crazy it would be with three minion Oak's with Horn of Battle and full minion gear (assuming horn affects all of your minions everywhere); they would simply destroy everything instantly.

FYI, the level 2 turret attack wasn't too helpful as the yeti's themselves had 2k hp each.  Even with splash damage and 3 DG's (including Qot) we couldn't take the minions down fast enough.  And the first reaction was "ignore them and grab flags" which did no good at all on Leviathan (early level creep portals do nothing).  By the time anyone took it seriously it was too late, the citadel was at 50% and we were all too low level to kill the high level minions. 

Ren