God tweaks

I had some god rebalance changes quite some time ago, but there was confusion in GH and I never got back to them. Let's decide how people feel about these changes.

Nefas mistress chief odds scale with relationship
- 1 in 5 chance to only get a bottle of vodka from her
- Always only get vodka until relation > 200
- if relation > 200, 1 in 15 chance to chief
- odds improve with relation. At 1000, odds are 1 in 3 for chief
- previously was always 1 in 7 and always got mistress

Cruentis weapon enchantment is more frequent
The scaling is based on Loricatus hardening odds. More relation makes
higher level enchantments more probable. Higher than +5 requires luck.

Dulcis trains cha if she can't help normally
She will give at least 0.5 points of Cha to a Cha 10 player, and at most
1.0 points of Cha to a Cha 15 player. She will raise Cha to at most 30,
but this would take ~75 prayers near maximum relationship with her.

Legifer enchants armor when not near enemies
Now the three most diverse gods all enhance your equipment in comparable
ways. Loricatus hardens materials, Legifer enchants armor, and Cruentis
enchants weapons. It should be difficult to manage relationships with
two of them at once, but now every alignment has a powerful boosting
god.

I like all of these. They will (of course) affect balance, but most importantly they are interesting.

There are still, unfortunately, several gods who I find rather uninteresting: Sophos, Silva, and Scabies. I only pray to Sophos to boost my alignment with the other L gods; I never pray to the other two as their boons often feel more like a hindrance to me.

I like all those changes

Me too.

I think Silva has interesting, if niche, prayers.

I never understood why Infuscor can give you scrolls of teleport, but not Sophos who actually teleports you. For me, it would make more sense to grant wands from Infuscor (godess of violet, destructive dark magic) and scrolls from Sophos (god of knowledge, thus also written word).

Scabies sounds so cool (godess of disease!!!) but is not cool to pray to. I think she needs more/better prayer effects. Something along the lines of coating your wielded weapons in poison, producing fart clouds around you (harmless but blocks monsters, great for a defense power), maybe she should bless you with lycanthropy/vampirism? You could also be granted a ring of stasis as her champion, it would be interesting with her polymorphs and could be used as a way to grant it to the player without a wish or RNG. She should also loose the leprosy "blessing".

I pray to Sophos for quick escapes and occasional gifts of teleport wands and scrolls of charging (!). The main problem with him is that finding my way back to the world map makes every prayer cycle take a lot longer when he's included.
Silva is great for getting ommel hair limbs before mirroring/cloning and socms are available (there's also a risk of crystal limbs, but she eventually changes those to phoenix feather, which she leaves alone). Regular prayers in town build up a huge collection of wolves, which make excellent decoys for fighting Ischaldirh in GC6.
Scabies is pretty bad though.
Not sure about the Dulcis change. Cha is already pretty easy to get - hoovering up the contents of the dungeon and maxing out both of the shop owners gets a lot of points, especially if you make some unnecessary purchases on top of that, and Mellis provides ommel tears over the regular spawn rate because of gifts. The 25 cha to safely resurrect bosses is a low bar; taming elite guards is more or less the only challenge that charisma poses.
The Cruentus change would be very welcome - +5 weapons aren't hard to get, but I would prefer to spend soews on higher enchantments, and it's a real hassle to get Cruentus to do such a simple task.
I would definitely start including Legifer in my endgame prayer list if he could enchant armour. At present the L+ gods hold little attraction.

Part of my full religion rework had Infuscor igniting any enemy you can see within ESP range. I could throw that in. I think in main she only ignites adjacent enemies, and since it takes hours to burn to death, that's rather useless. This was meant to let you exploit your ESP and try to avoid enemies for a while to get an advantage.

Sophos could be changed to teleport enemies away or else give one or more inexpensive scrolls.

Silva is trickier. I'm not sure what I'd give her.

For Scabies, I can remove leprosy and add the ring of unchanging to her champion status. Not sure if that'll really make her very interesting.

Serin, do you have a suggestion for Dulcis? I gave her Cha around the time I made Cha training for buying and selling work, so when I did it there were few ways to train and now it may be too easy.

Ohh I love the igniting enemies within ESP range. That is awesome.

I had forgotten about the buying/selling charisma bonus. However, that does get less effective over time right?

It sounds like we are moving towards making Charisma a much more powerful trait. It's not just a pretty face any more, it could potentially cause others to join your team, etc.

Most other traits have easy ways to slightly strengthen them early on (e.g. reading a ton of books, carrying heavy stuff) so I don't think there is any harm in keeping the buying/selling bonus. But maybe we should make it slightly less effective, and also raise the bar for resurrecting named bosses.

I always thought the idea behind the lawful gods was that they could get you out of sticky situations, while the chaotic gods give you awesome abilities over time but don't help you when you're in trouble.

EDIT: I also like the proposed changes above, and the Legifer/Cruentus enchanting thing has good inherent balance.


To this end, is there a roadmap where we can put all the suggested changes into a to do list? I think github has this facility, only I haven't taken the time just yet to explore how this works. Would someone be willing to administer such a list?

Yeah, that's totally the original intent. Maybe I should move the armor enchantment over to Atavus, so that you still get the Legefer save-your-ass effects but also L+ has some end game utility. After all, Atavus already doesn't help in a crisis! Should we avoid having Sophos give out scrolls, and instead just have him teleport enemies (or their equipment or limbs) away? Maybe Sohpos is close enough to neutral to do scrolls, as Cleptia helps you in battle with haste.

If Cruentis can give you up to +5 weapons, should the armor only go up to +3 (+2?), since there are so many more equivalent enchant scroll effects you'd get out of armor enchantments? That is, +3 to all armor is way more scrolls than +5 to two or three weapons. Maybe I'm overestimating the relative worth of armor vs weapon enchants, though.


My 2 based on doing this for a living: suggestions should be labeled with the `Enhancement` tag, as they are today. The devs should pick larger features (such as a fire system, or complete rewrite of religion) that multiple people are willing to code towards, and then meet on IRC or Skype or whatever to plan a number of the minimum units of work (smallest features that makes sense to PR and merge on their own). Ideally, we would sketch out which parts of the code should be touched so that novices would be able to contribute more quickly, and so that there is a sane approach before code is written. All of those features are collected into a milestone, to track progress toward the overall feature. I could definitely put labels on tickets and write milestones, and could also try to organize this kind of "milestone planning", but it's mostly a matter of getting buy in from other folks. Also I'm in the US, and I think most of you are many many hours away from my timezone, so that could be a barrier.


I think we should worry about Charisma training when the new features are added, but not until then. I've never resurrected a boss to get it as an ally, so I can't comment on how easily that is exploited currently. If buying and selling makes training trivial and the pets are too good, we should definitely reduce the effects of shopping, which is very easy to do.

I had a thought earlier today - it would make a lot of sense if Cruentus occasionally gifted you powerful weapons. For game-balance reasons this could might not be great, but what if prayers caused him to occasionally dropped a random mirrored weapon with a high enchantment bonus?

Though, I'm wary of giving Cruentus too many abilities. Just making him more likely to enchant your weapon alone would make him a lot more useful.

As for other gods... Hmm... Time for a checklist. All opinions are my own, take them with a grin of salt; this is mostly meant to spark discussion:

Valpurus:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Legifer:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Atavus:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Dulcis:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Seges:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Sophos:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Silva:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Loricatus:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Mellis:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Cleptia:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Nefas:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Scabies:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Infuscor:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Cruentus:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.
Mortifer:
SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text.

Added Infuscor burning and reduced Mellis from filling 5 objects to 4. He's probably still the best god, but I consider the gods near his alignment to be mostly crappy. He'll have to be reworked when some of the others do too. That PR is up. I propose we just merge it since it seems like these changes are agreed upon.

We could make Silva work just like Loricatus, except she upgrades leathery stuff. If she doesn't see something to upgrade, she can send wolves. Scrap earthquake?

Regarding that, Mellis will swap out broken bottles. You can throw all your useless potions against a wall and break them.

Regarding the topic however:

Dulcis is the goddess of love and art. The love part is obvious, the taming, but I feel you can extend that theme and have her gift you pet related items. Scroll of golem creation, scroll of taming, magical whistle. I also feel there's a lot of potential with the art element however, especially with all the random useless items already in the game. Have a gem/crystal stone and a stick but RNG screwed you over on weapons? Why not have Dulcis put them together into a spear? Why not combine that useless acid bottle with a stick to create a wand of acid rain? Dulcis could be a great support.

I feel Sophos could have a greater variety as well. Enemies already have equipment teleportation, it's not as though we'll need to code it. Also, if you piss off Sophos you start getting teleported into pieces. As in, you literally have chunks of your flesh teleport off your body. This is another thing that's already in-game. I feel these would make Sophos much more interesting to pray to. Simply teleporting away is something that's already available to the player.

Silva is easily the most useless of the gods. The earthquake is more of a nuisance than anything, it basically teleports chunks of the wall around that'll destroy anything it lands on, and the wolves are, at best, meat shields. On the flip side, ways to improve Silva are too numerous to list. IVAN being down to earth as it is, a good portion of the game's contents are nature related and can be associated with Silva. It's just a matter of finding things that are both interesting and useful, without being too much so.

Scabies is somewhat interesting, but just not worth praying to currently. Random polymorph? Too much of a gamble. Splash poison on enemies around you? Too weak! Leprosy? No thanks. We need to add some other prayer effects that are still risky but worth it. Why not diseases that'll inflict confusion, or severe vomiting? Flesh-eating bacteria, necrosis, paralysis, there's a whole host of nasty things we can use. The other thread says there's too much healing, Scabies is the ideal candidate to force the player to down that stockpile.

...and break the wall.


She could mutate your limbs into crab claws and tentacles. Heh, if you become her champion, you could become a full-blooded mutant!

Nice balancing effect. Somewhat subtle, but probably enough.


This sounds like more Sophos' (God of Handiworks) and Infuscor's (vile magic) field respectively. However, I actually really like the idea.

As for Dulcis:
* In line with her singing a taming song, she could sing a lullaby, putting nearby enemies to sleep. Or maybe recite poetry until they fall asleep.
* She could also screech/shout/sing a death metal song, dealing sonic damage.
* As a goddess of art, she could appreciate a nice statue. If she transformed your enemies into stone, they would make nice statues...
* She could also swap your ungly things for nicer things. This should only work on useless items, like normal rocks for gems, sticks for golden or silver bars.
* She could transform nearby walls into glass/crystal/gemstones, making your surroundings pretty. And allowing you to see through walls.
* She could very, very rarely (only as a champion gift?) give you rings or amulets.

I like the idea of Silva hardening your leather items. I also must say I like the earthquake ability, even though I don't actually use it that much... But it's so cool.

I use Silva's earthquake once per game to gas the dungeon shopkeeper. An important milestone on my quest.
I like the idea of Dulcis turning walls to transparent materials. Has implications in the early game when deciding whether it's worth the time and nutrition points to bash a door down.

I really, like this.

If the enemies turned into statues though, would they block your way, or would they be turned into really heavy items?

May depend on the enemy.

This power is actually quite powerful. Petrifying enemies would have to carry a pretty heavy prayer cooldown, and possibly PC stat requirements for some enemies. Otherwise this would be a really easy out for some of the more dangerous battles (locate izzy -> teleport to izzy -> pray to dulcis -> no problem!).

It should also make their entire inventory inaccessible (part of the statue). So no looting enemies removed by Dulcis.

The logical way to determine whether the petrified enemy becomes an obstacle or not should naturally be determined by the IS_ENORMOUS tag.

Currently this means that the enemy is so large, it blocks line-of-sight past it. So it would make sense for the same enemy to be large enough to actually block access.

From a gameplay standpoint though, having enemies turn into what are essentially fancy walls doesn't sound like such a good idea.

Excellent point Azba. Is there a compromise? Perhaps they become a dungeon fixture (ala fountain, couch, etc); the IS_ERNOMOUSE tag could cause such fixtures to continue to block LOS.

Fake Edit: I am aware of my typo. It's more amusing to me this way.

I see what you did there.

I like this. It would also mean we could add statues to Attnam for the looks.

Petrifying should definitely do some check againt the enemy. Dulcis' taming song checks the player's Cha and piety with Dulcis, right? It could make a similar check for petrification.

I'm testing out Scabies giving every enemy on the level a parasite, and if that won't work (or they have one), splashing them all with a little bit of poison. We could make her instead give you a symbiont that eats your food and in turns trains some of your stats, or causes you to heal quickly. Further along, there could be a whole set of mutations she could give you, but that could be an inordinate amount of effort for just one prayer effect. We'd have to at least add radioactive materials to make use of them...

we should totally rename that flag to IS_ERNOMOUSE as a dev easter egg