The Tavern

Overall Gozag is one of the strongest gods, I don't think that's in question. So winning all races and classes is more an exercise in patience than skill. Still, a few points are worth noting:

The food thing: Not actually a restriction except for a few races. Floorgod provides enough permafood.

DD: This is not difficult. You need a vamp weapon, but it doesn't have to be a good one, because of how strong DD are. Weapon shops are important, but often floorgod will provide a +0 vampiric trident or whatever, and that will carry you until you find/buy/make a vampiric battleaxe. I had just seven games where I ran out of max MP and died, and most of those were earlier on before I got the hang of the combo.

The 7 streak: DD is the easiest race to streak because they start the game with a ton of on-demand HW. So that just represents seven games in a row where I found vamp weapon before running out of MP or doing something extremely stupid.

DDAK^Gozag: This was a nightmare. Many, many failed attempts. Lucy wrath is a crapshow, and strikes so many times that you need almost impossible luck at low levels, even when you have old version ring of teleport. Finally, I waited until XL 15 before switching to Gozag, and that went OK.

Tr: You have to buy a few food shops, but it's fine, since Tr are powerful even before god abilities.

Gh: You'll have to buy a few corpse shops. It's fine to carry around a fair amount of rot; don't waste chunks by buying a corpse when you only have a few points of rot.

Vp: Find a vamp weapon and go bloodless, like a crappy version of DD.

Felid: Awful regardless of god. Why do they still exist?

Orbrunning Tomb with bribery spam: Less effective than you would think. The bribe didn't seem to affect the mummies. But it did work on orb run summons, who fought the mummies for me. http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/rast/ ... 045602.txt

Bribing Zot 5: This is probably too good. Just absolutely trivializes what is supposed to be the hardest part of the standard game.

Dump logs are here: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/rast.html

Is it more enjoyable than DD of Mak?

Sure, you get to do a lot of shopping in between being invulnerable.

That was my experience too, but I actually managed to get in trouble, because somehow my allies kept turning hostile. I was probably doing something stupid like using a full LOS AoE spell or something.

Gozag is definitely OP in general, but this seems like a lot of deaths for DD. How often does DD of Makhleb run out of max MP?

I've hardly gotten to playing Gozag, but pulled my only recent tournament win off with it (on a GrFi -- and yes, I was sort of anxious to get one on the board).

Also managed casting out of depth level 5-ish conjurations with a Staff of Wizardry on a Deep Elf of Gozag. The hunger thing was a bit tight on that one (a few casts of a spell around 7 hunger and time for another chunk or ration), but a couple food shops and still pulled me through the Lair branches, as far as that character made it.

It seemed to run me around 6,000 gold (2 bribes) each to bribe Shoals 1-4, Vaults 2-4, and Depths 2-5. Somehow Snake 2-4 ended up costing only one bribe, if I followed what was going on correctly. I do tend to dip in and out of branches to reequip or try different routes. Not sure if bribes fade with time, or only after meeting or after actually buying a certain HD of mobs.

It does feel like a very powerful deity... Although it takes some patience, too. If you don't find an early strong main weapon etc., you don't get much instant help beyond a few potion effect shots. And in the long run, the cost of those potions or merchants could be worth a huge amount of bribing. It's also possible to land in big swaths of branch floor where nothing just seems to accept the bribe at the moment.

Presumably never.

Running out of MP as DD^Gozag happens if you don't find any vamp weapons and none show up in shops. You train evocations, of course, but that can't carry you forever.

I think it's clear that the bribes can be improved (I mean balance, of course, so "improving bribe on branch X" could mean a nerf). I'm interested in feedback for the various bribe targets.

I would agree that bribing Zot is very powerful. I'm not sure that's really because it works differently but just because monsters in zot are so powerful that the remaining monsters take a long time to cut through them, so if you're fighting at all you get a lot of time to tilt the battle towards your team. And then sometimes you hit a teleport trap on Zot:5 and this happens:

So that helps a lot. Although honestly with statue form I'd probably have pulverized those without much trouble either, but hey.

I would consider replacing the bribe ability. It totally breaks zot, as others have said. Its cost is sufficiently high that I don't see using it much outside of zot either, so you get this situation where the standard use case is pretty unbalanced. A possible replacement would be rolling nemelex's cards into gozag with a second potion petition-like ability that does card effects instead of potions. (And also remove nemelex, natch.)

The biggest problem with Gozag is the tournament scoring rules don't let me start with gozag and then later switch to someone else and still get credit for Gozag! You have to keep Gozag all game long, which is certainly a fine choice, but I want to switch, damnit!

Your Chei addiction clearly requires some sort of intervention.

funny how that works. The tourney rules let me start with another god, max piety, switch to Gozag for the rest of the game, and still get credit for the first god. Pretty sweet deal.

"Huh?" I used bribe on multiple branches in two tournament games alone.

I'm currently finishing Swamp (post-Lair, post-Orc, post-D:12) with another character who's used Potion Petition once [Edit: oh wait, wasn't the first one free], bought around 3,000 gold worth of items, and still has nearly 5,000 gold on hand. So I can anticipate bribing most of Snake (to the extent they take it -- still not sure why so much was left over last time I tried it there?), and probably stocking up enough to bribe much of the next branch soon after that. It helps that I had one white weapon drop (ranged) and one shop weapon option from regular shops (melee) that I really loved. But it's quite conceivable to get at least one uber white or a bunch of blues that work out much the same, in quite a few cases I would think.

The situations where you don't get to use bribe are where your regular inventory/skilling/luck/drops just don't get you through without a whole mess of potions and Gozag-purchased shops... Or where you're not clearing so much of each floor in the branches. It can still happen and then it's frustrating... But otherwise, there can be tons of gold from Gozag kills lying around. Or such has been my experience so far.

Does the bribe "totally' break Zot? I don't know. Haven't been there enough. It can certainly help in the other branches in a major way... But it isn't foolproof. Sometimes I'd run out of funds soooner than I expected (Depths ate through it pretty fast), or meet large crowds that didn't seem to take to the gold so much. Even when it works, you still get some mobs that attack you once or twice before they decide to accept it.

I don't have a strong opinion about it yet, but I feel like it's more a question of the pricing and how easily it affects various mobs that might be tweaked if anything.

Clearly we play very differently. If you spent all that money on items, you'd be able to tab through snake without bribing.

Actually, in this case I might be able to. I have an Elemental Staff, +10 freezing sling, and +6 ring of protection (the sling and ring were just lying around - bought the staff for around 2200 gold). On the other hand, I have only one pip of MR without the staff and I've been practically insta-killed so many times in Snake by Mage and Guardian Serpent effects tossing me into a crowd, I'm usually inclined to be paranoid about the branch. (I just survived once by immolating and then berserking 9 enemies plopped on me by a Serpent thanks to rF+++, ahem!) In this particular case, I've gotten to Snake:4 at least without bothering with the bribe.

It doesn't change my overall argument though. Whether or not you actually need a bribe depends a whole lot on your build, drops,and what's in the shops anyway. I've played other games where the drops were useful but caused massive hunger so I'd be buying lots of shops instead of bribing (staff of wizardry etc.), and yet others where the drops and shops were meh and a bribe would be a whole lot more helpful.

It's annoying in some situations that you can't bribe a lesser amount than 3,000. Now I have this awesome gear but still I get to decide whether to spend a whole 3,000 just to push me through the difficult vault or keep rolling the dice with things like Guardian Serpents. I probably won't spend that much just on principle, but it would be really nice to have some more flexible options.