God of Analysis [Serious]

[bcadren]

[Not complete enough of a proposal for GDD. Posting here.]

Based off a scanner that I created in a title that I didn't (and probably won't) finish that was for a 48-hour game creation contest; since I didn't finish on time; I may take ideas with me; but too much of the rushed stuff would have to be redone to be any quality anyways, etc. etc. The original entity had a lot in common with Ashenzari, (and others are now irrelevant here; like seeing traps) but some of the other abilities could be interesting for a different god slot for some people. Adapted back to your mechanics.) Originally it was a mechanical scanner that used power; but it can be reflavoured as a god of eyeballs or whatever suits Crawl better. God's primary focus is knowledge, with slight improvement on consumables and drops. Full focus is trying to predict more and control the chaos more with foreknowledge.

Piety ???

Joining ???

Restrictions ???

Abilities:

Passive Scanning:
[Start] - Highlighting any creature in your LoS (targeting an attack on it on using X) will show the creature's current HP and Max HP.
[*] - Find [Piety/8]% more items on corpses. (Affects Ammo and Gold stacks dropped by enemies on death).
[**] - When highlighting any creature in your LoS with an attack (Melee, Ranged, Spell or Evocable); shows how much damage the spell would do to them and the odds of knocking them out in one, two or three hits.
[***] - When highlighting any creature in your LoS, lists all Spells they know and the damage their current spells and equips would do to you (factoring in current resistances, buffs and AC). IE Lehudib's Crystal Spear - [130-155 dam]
[****] - Lower chance to lose items. (Mulch chance - 50%).

Active Abilities:
[*] Surface Scan (1 Piety) - Identify.
[**] Distance Scan (5 Piety) - Identify item on dungeon floor or in shop.
[***] Staircase Scan (10 Piety) - Shows the LoS at the bottom of target staircase with no chance of waking anything up. Works on Trapdoors showing LoS centered on their target.
[****] Detailed Scan (5-25 Piety) [Varies with Target]. Scans item at detail to detail what a more unpredictable item does and optimize its use.

• Uncharged Elemental Evoker (5 Piety) - Tells how much XP the player needs to gain to recharge the item.
• Scroll of Enchant {Foo} (10 Piety) - Scroll will not fail.
• Scroll of Brand Weapon (10 Piety) - Affixes and inscribes Scroll with the Brand it will apply. (IE: Melee - Flame; Ranged - Freezing)
• Temporary Potions (5 Piety) - [Flight, Might, Haste, Lignificaiton etc.] - Inscribes item with how many turns it will last. Roll boosted by Piety/4%
• Mutation Potions (25 Piety) [beneMut, Mut, cMut] - Rolls potion 3 times. Player picks one effect, potion is inscribed with this effect and will have it when quaffed. (Flavoured as showing different preparations to finish the potion).
• Healing Potions [Magic, Curing, Heal Wounds] - (10 Piety) Inscribes item with how much it will heal by. Roll boosted by Piety/4%
• Acquirement, All others - Fail. (In case of acquirement comes with the explanation that it doesn't work, because the scroll's magic is too complex to analyze.)

[*****] Vulnerability Scan (10 Piety) - Scans target enemy to search for weakpoints in their armor. Future attacks on the SINGLE enemy gain a chance to bypass AC.
[*****] - Portal Scan (25 Piety) - Scan any portal (including the Next floor of a Ziggurrat; Treasure Troves; etc.) - The god gives you a list of 3-5 of the items inside (weighted to show you the rarest); and a list of 2-5 of the enemies inside (weighted to show the strongest).
[******] - Technique Optimization (ONCE) - Scans your usage of a particular weapon and optimizes it; decreasing weapon delay by 20%.

[Ayutzia]

Thank

[duvessa]

I like how most of the abilities are literally impossible

[twelwe]

if you put your hand on the screen here it says good of anal

[Arrhythmia]

What happened to dungeons of Nemelex Xobeh?

[and into]

Okay, I think that's enough picking at the OP.

Please do keep further comments related to the content proposed in the OP (even a curt statement, like "this is literally impossible" posted earlier, qualifies as being on topic). If you cannot keep your hands to yourself, just ignore this thread. Thank you!

[Berder]

I can't imagine why they could be literally impossible... some of them might be difficult. The problem, bcadren, is that there's still too much thematic overlap with Ash. (Also, some of these piety costs are off - like vulnerability scan or portal scan are much too expensive).

[Arrhythmia]

I can't imagine why they could be literally impossible... some of them might be difficult. The problem, bcadren, is that there's still too much thematic overlap with Ash. (Also, some of these piety costs are off - like vulnerability scan or portal scan are much too expensive).

[*****] - Portal Scan (25 Piety) - Scan any portal (including the Next floor of a Ziggurrat; Treasure Troves; etc.) - The god gives you a list of 3-5 of the items inside (weighted to show you the rarest); and a list of 2-5 of the enemies inside (weighted to show the strongest).

The items and monsters inside the portal do not actually exist in any sense until you go inside the portal; it would require completely changing Crawl's generation algorithms for this one ability.

[Berder]

I can't imagine why they could be literally impossible... some of them might be difficult. The problem, bcadren, is that there's still too much thematic overlap with Ash. (Also, some of these piety costs are off - like vulnerability scan or portal scan are much too expensive).

[*****] - Portal Scan (25 Piety) - Scan any portal (including the Next floor of a Ziggurrat; Treasure Troves; etc.) - The god gives you a list of 3-5 of the items inside (weighted to show you the rarest); and a list of 2-5 of the enemies inside (weighted to show the strongest).

The items and monsters inside the portal do not actually exist in any sense until you go inside the portal; it would require completely changing Crawl's generation algorithms for this one ability.

It would require generating the items and monsters at the time you perform the portal scan, and saving them somewhere, then loading them again when you enter the portal. Not impossible.

[duvessa]

except the vault and items generated depends on your character

[Berder]

except the vault and items generated depends on your character

I think you're talking specifically about a treasure trove?

[duvessa]

i'm talking about almost every level in the game

[Berder]

You're saying that just the normal dungeon or branches generate differently depending on your character? I hadn't noticed any obvious bias towards particular vaults or items based on my character type. What kind of dependence are you talking about, would an octopode find more rings, or a heavy magic user find more books?

[Sar]

It's Crawl so I'd expect this to be the opposite.

[Arrhythmia]

You're saying that just the normal dungeon or branches generate differently depending on your character?

Any vault that generates loot using the "acquire" tag, for instance.

[duvessa]

You're saying that just the normal dungeon or branches generate differently depending on your character?

Yes.

[tasonir]

Most things here are either too much information that the devs don't want to expose, or - as others have mentioned - information that hasn't yet been generated. Replies inline:

[Start] - Highlighting any creature in your LoS (targeting an attack on it on using X) will show the creature's current HP and Max HP.

-- More information than crawl wants to expose. There has been some talk of using an adjective like weak/strong for high low values, but never showing the number, and not current hp either.

[*] - Find [Piety/8]% more items on corpses. (Affects Ammo and Gold stacks dropped by enemies on death).

-- More items is vague - do you find 8% more great swords? Is it only ammo and gold? If you do find more great swords, that would mean enemies would have more equipment, making them stronger, which may be unintended. If it's just ammo and gold, don't say items

[**] - When highlighting any creature in your LoS with an attack (Melee, Ranged, Spell or Evocable); shows how much damage the spell would do to them and the odds of knocking them out in one, two or three hits.

-- This hasn't been calculated yet. Would you calculate the next attack once, or for each monster? Say I want to fireball, but I see that it's going to roll very low damage, can I then try bolt of fire and see a higher roll, or does it use the same dice as fireball did? This would lead to you trying each spell to see how high of a roll you could get, which would slow down combat dramatically. Does it change for each monster, or do you apply the same damage roll to their different ac roll? Quickly becomes exponentially complicated.

[***] - When highlighting any creature in your LoS, lists all Spells they know and the damage their current spells and equips would do to you (factoring in current resistances, buffs and AC). IE Lehudib's Crystal Spear - [130-155 dam]

-- Spell lists are already in game, they are now listed in xv. Descriptions in general have been getting considerably better lately. That said, crystal spear would do something like 1-160 damage, every time, and that range is so ridiculously large that it isn't really helpful. There's been a lot of debate around narrowing those ranges, but little traction.

[****] - Lower chance to lose items. (Mulch chance - 50%).

-- This could work, although I'm not sure how's connected to the theme.

Active Abilities:
[*] Surface Scan (1 Piety) - Identify.

-- I'm not sure we want to remove the identify mini-game for players of this god so easily.

[**] Distance Scan (5 Piety) - Identify item on dungeon floor or in shop.

-- If you get an artefact shop (meaning items are unidentified) they are sold at a discount. If you later ID the item (say it's a potion) the price increases. Does distance scanning an item let you buy it at a discount still? DS'ing items on the ground has the same problem as surface scan, free ID is bad, and it is now also overcosted in piety.

[***] Staircase Scan (10 Piety) - Shows the LoS at the bottom of target staircase with no chance of waking anything up. Works on Trapdoors showing LoS centered on their target.

-- This is one ability I actually like, but still suffers from the fact that the next floor has not been generated, so you're vastly complicating level generation to pregenerate floors. I'm not sure if trapdoors link to the same tile on the next floor each time, I believe it's a random destination, I could be wrong.

[****] Detailed Scan (5-25 Piety) [Varies with Target]. Scans item at detail to detail what a more unpredictable item does and optimize its use.
Uncharged Elemental Evoker (5 Piety) - Tells how much XP the player needs to gain to recharge the item.

-- This isn't really interesting.

Scroll of Enchant {Foo} (10 Piety) - Scroll will not fail.

-- This already happens, so congrats, your feature is implemented!

Scroll of Brand Weapon (10 Piety) - Affixes and inscribes Scroll with the Brand it will apply. (IE: Melee - Flame; Ranged - Freezing)

-- do we now have to manage 5 different inventory slots of brand weapon scrolls since they can't all stack anymore?

Temporary Potions (5 Piety) - [Flight, Might, Haste, Lignificaiton etc.] - Inscribes item with how many turns it will last. Roll boosted by Piety/4%

-- They generally always last about the same amount - adding a number isn't really beneficial to the user. There's a ton of numbers I'd love to see in crawl, but this one never occurred to me. Spell duration maybe, since I might want to recast it, but potion duration generally not.

Mutation Potions (25 Piety) [beneMut, Mut, cMut] - Rolls potion 3 times. Player picks one effect, potion is inscribed with this effect and will have it when quaffed. (Flavoured as showing different preparations to finish the potion).

-- Turning mutation potions into "select a positive mutation", beforehand and at no risk is absurdly powerful. Also causes problems with mutation potions no longer stacking.

Healing Potions [Magic, Curing, Heal Wounds] - (10 Piety) Inscribes item with how much it will heal by. Roll boosted by Piety/4%

-- Useful, but more information then devs will want to give, and causes item stacking issues.

Acquirement, All others - Fail. (In case of acquirement comes with the explanation that it doesn't work, because the scroll's magic is too complex to analyze.)

-- This can be implemented.

[*****] Vulnerability Scan (10 Piety) - Scans target enemy to search for weakpoints in their armor. Future attacks on the SINGLE enemy gain a chance to bypass AC.

-- For 10 piety I think I'd want more than just a *chance* to bypass AC. You're talking about adding 5-10 damage or less in most cases. It would probably work better as a completely free passive - this isn't a huge boost to damage.

[*****] - Portal Scan (25 Piety) - Scan any portal (including the Next floor of a Ziggurrat; Treasure Troves; etc.) - The god gives you a list of 3-5 of the items inside (weighted to show you the rarest); and a list of 2-5 of the enemies inside (weighted to show the strongest).

-- Piety cost is far too high, level hasn't been pre-generated, etc.

[******] - Technique Optimization (ONCE) - Scans your usage of a particular weapon and optimizes it; decreasing weapon delay by 20%.

-- Can I scan my fists? Is this base delay, or final (min) delay? If you change min delay, that's very powerful, but you're going to run into rounding issues. 20% off 7 aut is what? You might want to just make it -1 aut for simplicity - boosts faster weapons slightly more, but that's life. Fails on quickblades. Lowering base delay by 2 aut would let you reach min delay with 4 less skill, which seems more balanced.

[PleasingFungus]

Yes.

are you talking about shit beyond "acquire any" loot and gimmick lua vaults (e.g. the lugonu bribe vault), or are you just scoring points on technicalities

[duvessa]

mostly!

[twelwe]

this aint the nba.... you can still score if you commit a technical foul

[bcadren]

I'll try to answer everyone in a single post.

What happened to dungeons of Nemelex Xobeh?

Same thing that happens to all projects that I work on by myself that can't be finished in 92 hours or less. I work on it for 20-40 hours straight; feel like I need encouragement or someone to work with. I get discouraged and stop for a couple days; I get depressed because I made no progress; I seek help on the project, even though I technically could make it by myself; just not liking the feel of working alone...I fail to find it; I get more depressed. I eventually abandon the project...even though I still think about it constantly and want to do it. I'm a bit too depression prone and full of past failures to keep my own morale high for long enough. I can show you some of the concept art for it though, like this dude. Final version of him would have turn, move and attack animations, this was just a preliminary.



Please though; if you want to see it done. I need encouragement badly. Feeling that people want to see it and it will do well helps give me the drive to work; without it I'm a lonely depressed mess. Find and follow me on twitterand FB...and nudge me about it. Tell me you want to see it and it will be much more likely to get done. I just have no one in my life that cares IRL, so it's hard to feel like people do. I know I need more self-confidence, but this can help me get there.

have you played his 3 dimensional Snake game?
I had fun doing it, actually. even if it made my head hurt.

Just gave it a shot... I was mostly impressed, it could use a heavy amount of polishing but at least it was refreshing.

Glad you liked that little experiment. Took about 60 hours to make. An embarrassingly long amount of it was learning how to texture the cubes in Blender. I abandoned it because I couldn't think in Euclidean 3D fast enough to play it and a lot of the feedback I got about it was that other players thought the same. It was a cool little experiment, but not polishing on it I don't think. I just don't think it can be finished to be something of more universal appeal. However, if you disagree; I'm open to negotiations on giving my source out to someone that wants to debug and polish to see if it makes a difference. Only solid rule is when it's rereleased I'd be keeping a portion of the revenue (25%-ish, but negotiable). [Assuming 2-3 other people's hands would need to work on it to polish it, thus a quarter to a third of the work would be mine.] ...

I like how most of the abilities are literally impossible

The items and monsters inside the portal do not actually exist in any sense until you go inside the portal; it would require completely changing Crawl's generation algorithms for this one ability.

Staircase Scan -- This is one ability I actually like, but still suffers from the fact that the next floor has not been generated, so you're vastly complicating level generation to pregenerate floors. I'm not sure if trapdoors link to the same tile on the next floor each time, I believe it's a random destination, I could be wrong.

[*****] - Portal Scan (25 Piety) - Scan any portal (including the Next floor of a Ziggurrat; Treasure Troves; etc.) - The god gives you a list of 3-5 of the items inside (weighted to show you the rarest); and a list of 2-5 of the enemies inside (weighted to show the strongest).

-- Piety cost is far too high, level hasn't been pre-generated, etc.

The idea on those was pretty much generate it as if you entered when you performed the scan, but without the danger of immediately going through. [Avoid really dangerous staircases; see if a portal is worth it ahead of time, etc.] I didn't directly say it, but I did mean generate as if the player went in without them actually going in (or closing the portal in the case of portals) affect would take like 1 turn. You'd see an eyeball glyph on the other side of the area; with the entrance and some info. In the case of Troves, I admit that might hurt yourself by scanning way before entering (since a weaker character gets weaker acquirements); but...in most cases that's not an issue "do I want to go into the timed portal or not" or "do I want to do the next floor of this Zig" is a now thing, not a later thing. Piety cost may be too high. I was primarily thinking of Troves and Ziggurats when I wrote this and if Piety was from kills you'd regenerate very quickly in a Zig.

Most things here are either too much information that the devs don't want to expose, or - as others have mentioned - information that hasn't yet been generated. Replies inline:

-- More information than crawl wants to expose. There has been some talk of using an adjective like weak/strong for high low values, but never showing the number, and not current hp either.

Herein lies the rub. I wrote the god idea primarily as a god that doesn't offer THAT much, but lets you know things you wouldn't in a normal game. I actually believe the game in general should expose more, but I thought pushing it as a god would hit less resistance than pushing it as a change to the whole game. Having a clearer idea of how likely I am to hit an OoD monster and how many hits it'd take to kill make me more readily able to judge whether I should run or engage. Enough information to figure that out is the idea.

-- More items is vague - do you find 8% more great swords? Is it only ammo and gold? If you do find more great swords, that would mean enemies would have more equipment, making them stronger, which may be unintended. If it's just ammo and gold, don't say items

Ammo and Gold was the idea, yes. Was originally going to say more items on level generation in general by 20% but I thought that could be more complex.

-- This hasn't been calculated yet. Would you calculate the next attack once, or for each monster? Say I want to fireball, but I see that it's going to roll very low damage, can I then try bolt of fire and see a higher roll, or does it use the same dice as fireball did? This would lead to you trying each spell to see how high of a roll you could get, which would slow down combat dramatically. Does it change for each monster, or do you apply the same damage roll to their different ac roll? Quickly becomes exponentially complicated.

I meant expose the range. Again it's about trying to figure out how likely you are to kill the enemy. You have a clear miscast chance on spells, but you don't know the amount of damage you'll do or how likely you'd be to miss...

-- Spell lists are already in game, they are now listed in xv. Descriptions in general have been getting considerably better lately. That said, crystal spear would do something like 1-160 damage, every time, and that range is so ridiculously large that it isn't really helpful. There's been a lot of debate around narrowing those ranges, but little traction.

More predictability is the name of the game here...notably yea without changing the whole game seeing that insanely large of a range wouldn't do much.[/quote]

[****] - Lower chance to lose items. (Mulch chance - 50%).

-- This could work, although I'm not sure how's connected to the theme.

The idea of it linking to the theme was that the items aren't actually destroyed they are just permanently lost (embedded in the ground making it too hard to see, etc. etc.)

Active Abilities:[*] Surface Scan (1 Piety) - Identify.

-- I'm not sure we want to remove the identify mini-game for players of this god so easily.

I hate the Identify 'minigame' most the time for me it either just means I have no potions until I find sufficient identify scrolls...or I frantically quaff when fatally poisoned turn into a tree and die...depending on if the early game goes well or badly. It also literally only affects up until about the lair. Heh.

-- If you get an artefact shop (meaning items are unidentified) they are sold at a discount. If you later ID the item (say it's a potion) the price increases. Does distance scanning an item let you buy it at a discount still? DS'ing items on the ground has the same problem as surface scan, free ID is bad, and it is now also overcosted in piety.

Antique shops are what the ability is intended for...and reverse identification at normal shops. IE they have a stack of potions of poison, you use the ability to gain knowledge of what potions of poison look like.

Uncharged Elemental Evoker (5 Piety) - Tells how much XP the player needs to gain to recharge the item.

-- This isn't really interesting.

I know. It's just a valid use, not an interesting one. Occasionally useful.

Scroll of Enchant {foo} (10 Piety) - Scroll will not fail.

-- This already happens, so congrats, your feature is implemented!

Yea, I came back after a long leave of absence and wrote this. last game I'd played was in 0.14 BEFORE writing this.

Scroll of Brand Weapon (10 Piety) - Affixes and inscribes Scroll with the Brand it will apply. (IE: Melee - Flame; Ranged - Freezing)

-- do we now have to manage 5 different inventory slots of brand weapon scrolls since they can't all stack anymore?

Or you chuck the ones you don't want...or stash them, but yes it'd stop the stacking.

Temporary Potions (5 Piety) - [Flight, Might, Haste, Lignification etc.] - Inscribes item with how many turns it will last. Roll boosted by Piety/4%

-- They generally always last about the same amount - adding a number isn't really beneficial to the user. There's a ton of numbers I'd love to see in crawl, but this one never occurred to me. Spell duration maybe, since I might want to recast it, but potion duration generally not.

For how long you'll be mighted in a hard battle or how far you can fly on one potion it'd be helpful... For a lot of other things, not so much. I can see how spell duration numbers would also be helpful. AGAIN the idea was to make the more things available to the player to know.

Mutation Potions (25 Piety) [beneMut, Mut, cMut] - Rolls potion 3 times. Player picks one effect, potion is inscribed with this effect and will have it when quaffed. (Flavoured as showing different preparations to finish the potion).

-- Turning mutation potions into "select a positive mutation", beforehand and at no risk is absurdly powerful. Also causes problems with mutation potions no longer stacking.

With regular mutation and cure mutation it's still (probably) risky. (Roughly 1/8 chance of all three mutations being positive. For 3 rolls there's a 1/3 chance one of them will be that way.) Can rig it so it's always 2 Positive, 1 Negative. Similar with the Cure Mut idea would be trying to preserve positive and remove negative; odds depend on mutation amounts. I can see the BeneMut being a bit too powerful though, suppose. I'd make mutation roulette a little more viable and a lot more interesting, I think. I also don't think it'd be too powerful; especially given the rarity of the items. [Roughly used because some positive muts may be bad to some characters and vice versa. Wild Magic is a horrible mut for an OgWz, for example. Similarly Horns (which BeneMut can give) may cause you to lose your artifact helmet.)

Healing Potions [Magic, Curing, Heal Wounds] - (10 Piety) Inscribes item with how much it will heal by. Roll boosted by Piety/4%

-- Useful, but more information then devs will want to give, and causes item stacking issues.

Again, the point of the god is the info not the boost; but the boost could be helpful. Idea was probably (in this case) to only allow one scanned at a time (top of the stack) to prevent the stacking issues. If the effect was far more pronounced (doubled the curative effect, etc.) it might be worth an additional slot.

[*****] Vulnerability Scan (10 Piety) - Scans target enemy to search for weakpoints in their armor. Future attacks on the SINGLE enemy gain a chance to bypass AC.

-- For 10 piety I think I'd want more than just a *chance* to bypass AC. You're talking about adding 5-10 damage or less in most cases. It would probably work better as a completely free passive - this isn't a huge boost to damage.

I was thinking about the extreme cases when I wrote this. Bypassing the 20 AC on an Emperor Scorp; the 25 AC on a Hell Sentinel or the 28 AC or Antaeus would significantly shorten battles against them, for example. But you may be right, that high of cost might justify ignoring outright. Be amusing to kill a Hell Sentinel in 2-3 hits.

[******] - Technique Optimization (ONCE) - Scans your usage of a particular weapon and optimizes it; decreasing weapon delay by 20%.

-- Can I scan my fists? Is this base delay, or final (min) delay? If you change min delay, that's very powerful, but you're going to run into rounding issues. 20% off 7 aut is what? You might want to just make it -1 aut for simplicity - boosts faster weapons slightly more, but that's life. Fails on quickblades. Lowering base delay by 2 aut would let you reach min delay with 4 less skill, which seems more balanced.

UC is excluded from every other god-final weapon ability, why not this one? Was mostly thinking about doing it with Min-Delay. Less of an effect than the Speed Ego, but could be stacked with other Egos (bows already do this, I know).

---

Overall though on the idea. It's more that I really wanted to be able to see a little bit more info on what damage I do and how likely it is to finish an enemy to judge situations better. I gave it a god slot, because I thought that was more likely to be accepted than as a change to the whole game. Could change to a god of doors (would be the fourth such god suggested); keep the portal and stair related powers and add different ones though if the combat predictions are that unpalatable. I think I'll write a full review of Crawl now. I've been doing a bunch of full reviews lately. Great for self-esteem; feels like a finished work and only takes a few hours.