I had hardly any connection problems before the two Thursday patches.

Connecting to custom games for me has been really fast.

I have not successfully joined any skirmish game so far. Every match has featured one player that (a) can't connect to anyone or ( can't connect to me. Thus, I always get the "matchmaking failed" error message.

I played a pantheon for the first time in a while, and the connection screen has improved dramatically for me.

Before, conencting to other players was relatively slow - About every 10-15 seconds I would add one person to my list of 'Connected to:' players. Today, I connected to all other players in about 1 second.

However, for some reason or another once I got into the game I was split from all the other players and had fun against some AI...

But the connecting is much much better

The custom game connections seem much improved.  I still see people drop on game start, and it happens to me occasionally, which is new.

I'm curious why this most recent patch seems to have annihilated my ability to play in either skirmish or Pantheon.  Out of 20 tries, which excludes the many many times the service never got to the "connection info" button appearing, I had 18 of them end in a failure to create a game of any kind, one created a game which crashed for me before the loading screen cleared, and one which actually started a game.  The last one was 2v2 Pantheon and had all human players.  One of my opponents either quit or was dropped 40 seconds in and shortly after that the game kept informing me that my partner was desyncing.  Literally every six seconds a window would pop up that I had to click "ok" to clear.  Every. Six. Seconds.

Aside from that one game, which I admit made me laugh, I have exactly this to show for about an hours worth of trying to connect:

You're disconnected

Matchmaking system is fail

Please don't cry so loud

I have a new concern from this build. I'm not a network guy, but have a pretty high level of experience with building pcs... has anyone experienced their internet dropping on this build of the game?  It could be that my router (WRT54G) has issues with the port forwarding (configured 1-2 weeks ago per frogboy's specs), but I've had to restart my pc twice now on this new build to restore connectivity to the internet.  Both times, I'm playing an internet game of demigod when all of a sudden, my internet drops.  This didn't happen on previous versions of this build and my internet has been very stable for a long time now (eg it's possible my router or ISP is having issues, but I'd doubt it).  Stranger still, if I simply restart the router, I find that I still need to restart windows to restore connectivity... windows vista 32 bit.  Has anyone recently encountered this?

number 3 = not true.  I've encountered it once out of the 6-7 games I've played today.  I agree with 1, don't have the same issues you do with 2.  I still see an improvement, but def not perfect... I'd wager -70-80% of the time, no issues... for me anyway.

You might need a new router...

The latest patch (v.0014 I think) has made multiplayer unusable for me. I was able to join one game in approximately 3-4 hours of trying to join in. The game, while a little finicky, worked fine before this last patch. To put it simply: hit the "undo" button, please.

Pantheon game:

I've taken a screenshot of my connection status screen. Seems like I'm connected to the rest but the rest not to me? Oo

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/6740/demigod001.jpg

Custom game:

I can connect ot 1 person the rest stays on 'Waiting to connect':

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/2333/demigod002.jpg

Can only connect if I put my PC in the DMZ - works perfectly now whereas before even in the DMZ it was flaky at best. On the flipside, with ports 6000-6200 forwarded, all firewalls down, ports set using ImpulseReactor I have yet to connect to a game without getting NAT failed error. Not ideal at all, especially when I could eventually get into a game without being in the DMZ before.

Ok, managed to defeat total lack of connectivity by removing everything related to packets routing from my modem settings.

However, lag spikes are at large really. Joining a host (played with the guy in past, having around ~100ms ping) and finding out that you're showing like 1000+ms to him isn't cool and usually ends with the nice solid kick from lobby.

In every previous patch i've been able to play fine.  Now Pantheon takes forever, and often it's 2v1.  I also have a nearly impossible time joining custom games.  

What it boils down to is that from the time i open demigod to the time I play a game that lasts more than 3 minutes usually takes me about 60-90 minutes. 

Issue i'm getting is if i forward ports 6000-6300 i connect in the lobby fine, really quick, no problems at all. However once the game is launched after 'waiting for players' pops up and disapears i drop out. I get disconnected from all players, and i'm in a game with AI.

However i have found by forwarding ports (1-65534 UDP) i no longer get this occuring, basically i'm going in a kinda dmz, but for UDP traffic. This problem has only occured with the most recent patch, and only when there is a few people in a game.

It implies there is traffic going on other UDP ports other than the ones commonly mentioned, or ports are getting mangled in someway.