God of knowledge and prophecy

[Sandman25]

I wonder if there is space for god who changes crawl into a more tactical and less luck-dependent game. Probably it is not easy to implement but here is the idea any way.

The god allows player to see future events but prohibits some luck-based spells and items.
Shroud of Golubria, Phased Shift, Passage of Golubria, Crystal Ball of Energy, Disc of Storm etc. cannot be used.
Piety is increased by exploring.

Abilities for piety levels:
* - You know which spell will be cast by all monsters during their next actions ("Ogre magi will cast Banishment, Orc Priest will smite"). Passive.
** - When you enter a new level, you immediately know which uniques are present ("Mennas and Boris are on this level"). Passive.
*** - No new abilities.
**** - Controlled Teleport. 2 MP, 6-9 piety.
***** - Controlled Blink. 5 MP, 15-22 piety.
****** - Activated ability which allows to see expected damage (0 for misses) dealt by target monster with next action. Duration depends on Invocation. ("Troll will deal 15, 4 and 0 damage in melee", 3 numbers because Troll has 3 attacks. Another example is "Mara will deal 57 damage with Bolt of Fire"). Instant, 1 MP, 1-2 piety. Vs the Troll you may want to retreat 1 tile (expected damage can change next turn), vs Mara you can try to do something useful (or just keep tabbing if you see "Mara will deal 0 damage")

[Sar]

God of knowledge and prophecy

Ash is this thematically. He reveals the map and warns you about monsters using dangerous brands.

[Sandman25]

God of knowledge and prophecy

Ash is this thematically. He reveals the map and warns you about monsters using dangerous brands.

So no room for a god with somewhat similar background? I intentionally tried to avoid Ash's abilities (scry, for example) and I think the proposed god would play really different being able to predict spells and damage while having a reliable way to escape.

[cerebovssquire]

I don't know to what extent this idea is implementable, so, ignoring possible technical issues:

I don't see how "tactical" and "luck-based" are mutually exclusive. Having to account for one action's multiple possible outcomes in your decision-making and weighing up their respective probabilities is a part of tactics, and often very challenging.

The ctele and cblink invocations being redundant with relatively common items is something I see as a flaw. When you have a god ability that is similar to a spell, especially a high-level one (e.g. greater servant/summon greater demon), the player will rarely opt to have a spell that does exactly the same as one of their god abilities, so you don't have redundancy for a single character, just between two game mechanics. Whereas a follower of this god will regularily find ?blinking and probably a =ctele at some point in the game, which is a different type of redundancy and seems to limit a character's options (doesn't sit well with the "tactics" aspect).

Additionally, cblink being part of a tactics-focussed god seems contradictory. It is a very powerful escape button that requires little thought (just get as far away from monsters as possible, in most cases) and is a way for the player to not suffer consequences for prior tactical mistakes. It seems like you are trying to give the player tools to make the correct choice in the first place with spell/damage predictions, and I'd stick to that concept. A god that gives a player prophetic abilities should care if the player makes good use of these abilities.

Apart from those that are completely deterministic, which spells are forbidden seems somewhat arbitrary. Take for instance phase shift, if you are banning that, why not EV rings as well, if you are banning EV rings, why not dex-increasing items, etc.

[tasonir]

I'm not sure I'm too fond of the prohibited items list either, it's hard to claim that all EV is random. It's true the game rolls a random number to determine it, but in the game world it would just be your agility and ability to move on your feet, which for fast, light characters, isn't really a random strategy. It's poor flavor and it's an unnecessary downside to a god who seems like they aren't offering a huge amount of raw power, and probably don't need downsides (compare to chei/Ru, who can give large amounts of power, but make you pay for it with heavy downsides).

If you really want to tank EV, then it'd have to come with some benefit. Say the god converts all of your EV into AC? AC mechanically is still fairly random, but less random than EV, and the flavor of armor is non-random.

Of course this may all be over reaction to you just banning phase shift, as non-phase shift EV isn't penalized in the proposal.

While I haven't done much reading of crawl's code, it doesn't seem to hard to place a check before monster's actions to see if the monster has a prepared action already created (a new flag for this god) and if so, execute that action instead of rolling a new one. Then when the player uses the ability/after the last turn, it creates the prepared action. The passive skill would have to determine the type of the prepared action each turn, the active one determines the result of it as well. Could probably do both in the same way and just not show the results in the passive skill. I think the bigger problem is the UI issue, with 5-6 mobs on the screen at once, how does it tell you each mob's next action? Are 5 lines printed out every turn (in addition to all the messages that already exist)? What happens when you get to 30 mobs on V:5?

There are solutions to this, of course, they just are currently missing from the proposal. You could simplify things and only display a message if the monster is about to cast a spell, for example. Walking/melee would be silent. Ranged attacks (yak packs) could go either way. This would still be spammy in the case of having a lot of casters around, but it's at least less bad than the worst case. Tiles could use "casting" icons, but I'm not sure there's a good way to display this in console (color shifts? there are issues). With or without main screen UI, you probably still need a ton of messages. And reading them would greatly slow down gameplay.

Some abilities besides existing Ctele/Cblink would probably be better, although I personally don't mind that Cblink would overlap with scrolls - you can easily run out of scrolls and being able to Cblink more freely is welcome. I do agree it is a "make up for your past mistakes" card though, which isn't consistent with foresight. That flavor mixup doesn't personally bother me much, though, and I really love Cblink

Inconsequential flavor suggestion: God of foresight. Less overlap with Ash - this god is about seeing the future, not the truth of what is around you, but what will be.

Additional power: Warning whenever it is possible for you to die on the next turn (assume the character rests on their turn). This one would be more difficult to code I think, but would be useful. Might be a bit spammy when you have a couple of ranged enemies on screen that technically could kill you with all hits and max damage, but you should be pretty careful in that situation anyways. I kind of wonder how often it would actually trigger in practice, if it could be coded.

[Sandman25]

The proposal was inspired partly by my CeFi who died primarily because of lack of teleport and partly by adjacent thread about paralysis with some annoying spells.
I think prohibiting Phase Shift does not make much sense indeed, I just felt the god too powerful so I wanted to add some significant drawback. Existing crawl fight is not very tactical because your moving options are very limited and you cannot spam CBlink provided its high level and MP cost. This god does not increase character power at all unlike Ash and Chei, all it gives is escape options and some knowledge and its takes player skill to use it.
Yes, only spells will be listed by default so if you have 30 monsters in LoS and all of them are going to cast a spell next turn, you will get 30 messages. Though probably the warning will not help in such situation
If spellcaster just moves, attacks in melee or casts Cantrip, no message is printed so there should not be too many messages. As an extra benefit, player will be able to use "force_more_message = will cast Banishment" or "force_more_message = will cast Paralyse" etc. Also players can mute some messages, like "message_colour ^= mute:will cast Magic Dart".

[Sandman25]

Additional power: Warning whenever it is possible for you to die on the next turn (assume the character rests on their turn). This one would be more difficult to code I think, but would be useful. Might be a bit spammy when you have a couple of ranged enemies on screen that technically could kill you with all hits and max damage, but you should be pretty careful in that situation anyways. I kind of wonder how often it would actually trigger in practice, if it could be coded.

That would trigger relatively often I think.

[tasonir]

It's possible it might, but I don't think it would be terribly much. Any melee monster who wasn't next to you would deal 0, and you should hopefully not have 8 melee monsters around you. Ranged attacks are often blocked by LOS, so those monsters would also add 0. If you have 2 melee, heavy hitters next to you and there's 2 additional ranged mobs with strong magic that have a clear shot on you, you probably should be seriously considering your move.

Certain monsters like Ettins, A.liches would trigger it somewhat often, but they're rare enough that they should probably come with prominent warning labels anyways.

I don't think it'd ever be implemented because checking all of the possible actions of each mob is a lot of conditions to check and I think it would be a technical nightmare, but hey. As an interesting side note, it might be possible to leak energy randomization information if it was implemented. If you've identified a lich as type 3 because it cast crystal spear, and the max damage on that is 144, yet you get a warning while you have 145+ hp, you would know the lich is about to double move. This is again assuming that the player's action is a rest, obviously if you swung a 7 aut weapon, you wouldn't be double moved on...Cases like this is why it'd never be implemented

[nicolae]

So no room for a god with somewhat similar background? I intentionally tried to avoid Ash's abilities (scry, for example) and I think the proposed god would play really different being able to predict spells and damage while having a reliable way to escape.

There are already three gods whose flavor is based around the attainment of knowledge -- Sif Muna, Ashenzari, and Ru. At the very least, find some sort of new angle on knowledge. Like, say, a military god of tactics who grants their followers the wisdom of history's greatest generals to deduce how the battle will proceed, or something.

I think prohibiting Phase Shift does not make much sense indeed, I just felt the god too powerful so I wanted to add some significant drawback.

It's nice to think about game balance, but really there are tons of suggestions on the tavern and devwiki that are basically thoroughly mediocre at best and yet the proposer still feels the need to add some ridiculous drawback that either makes no sense or ruins whatever good was in the idea to begin with. It's easier to make an overpowered god balanced than it is to make a boring god interesting, since the former usually just involves futzing with numbers but the latter requires redesign of the basic god concept. Go big or go home, I say. The worst that can happen is that your game idea never makes it in, which, I mean, *gestures expansively to 99% of GDD*