crate wrote:I disagree about the corpses -> gold mechanic being terrible (I like it as a player since pressing aad periodically is less work than pressing c on lots of corpses), but I agree that effectively every single other thing Gozag does needs lots of work.
Gold giving a tactical bonus is super weird and the way it's implemented has the additional problem of incentivising not picking up gold (until it stops giving the tactical bonus). I hope I do not have to elaborate on why this is awkward at best.
Potion petition is basically Nemelex except with only a single deck and every time you use it you triple draw (apparently Nemelex has only a single deck in new_nemelex branch but I touched on why I think that's not ideal from a design standpoint in the Nemelex topic). The original way it worked where you could "save" up a specific potion set to use later had the problem that it heavily encouraged setting up precisely that, but the new way where you must choose an effect immediately is both awkward in that you cannot cancel at all (every other similar ability can be canceled until you have made the final decision asked for; you can cancel decks by using esc instead of targeting, for example, at the cost of the card) and awkward as TDA suggests because you cannot see the cost before you attempt to use the ability.
Possibly the shop buying has changed since I played Gozag but if it hasn't: the price you pay to create a shop should probably be disconnected from the value of the shop's items. My general impression was that all this accomplished was making low-sum-of-value shops even more desirable than they already were (and potion and scroll shops in particular are already the most desirable shops in general, and also the least "valuable"). Other types of shops were dramatically too expensive to be worthwhile (you could get how many potion effects for that cost?) though this is an implementation thing.
Bribing seemed a complete waste of 3k gold to me when I tried it but I'll assume that it's been tweaked since then. I don't have problems with it in theory but it has to beat out 3k worth of potions pretty handily to be worth using.
Additionally there seems to be no real theme to this god. All other gods tend to have at least some loose flavour/gameplay theme that connects their abilities together: Fedhas has various tactical abilities (plus mushrooms which are a mix of tactical and strategic) that are mostly not accessible in other ways with a "nature god" flavour; Nemelex is the "effects god" as I discussed elsewhere; Makhleb gives you offensive abilities that fit "demonic" flavour; Dith has various somewhat-defensive effects (plus shadow mimic which still doesn't make sense to me but ok); even Q has elemental damage as a theme. Gozag is just "here's a collection of things completely unrelated to gold, oh and shops except you don't want to use the shops".
It's a shame that a year later and after Gozag, for some incomprehensible reason, made it into a stable version all of this still applies.
The joining fee is completely pointless and largely detrimental - it's perfectly realistic to run into a situation where you plan to join Gozag all along only to find out you can't. How DARE you pick up those aux armour pieces from an early shop! If people swapping to Gozag later to buy a bunch of shops is an issue, and frankly I'd argue it's not since anyone who attempts to do this has to farm so much it doesn't matter anyway, it's easily fixed by applying to joining fee ONLY if Gozag isn't your first god.
Potion petition? Way, way too expensive early to be of much use. As usual you don't even know what kind of offers you're going to get, or how much they cost. Oh and no porridge anymore as a cheap option. Having it was nice since you STILL can't quit the potion interface after you use potion petition until you buy something. Oh, and speaking of porridge I hope you dislike eating chunks because Gozag prevents doing just that. And potion petition no longer has porridge. Food shops are expensive, probably get placed somewhere you can't reach, come into play so late it probably doesn't make a difference anyway and only appear randomly.
Yeah, that's what call merchant is. You spend a ton of gold so you might get to pick a shop type you want. Then it gets placed somewhere you can't reach it. Clearing Lair? Better dump that shop inside Vaults! Oh and stuff inside is probably garbage, as is often the case with shops. Well it's essentially a god gift so no problem with that. Except other god gifts are free. With Gozag you have to spend what is essentially your piety.
Bribe branch might be a decent ability if it wasn't ludicrously expensive, didn't suddenly time out with no warning and worked somehow consistently (last time I used it in Zot it affected a total of zero draconians). And didn't have the "works in *that* branch but not *this* one as *that* one has bribable enemies and *this* one doesn't because reasons" thing going on.
Duplicate at the very least seems to be gone which is okay, it was a weird ability in the first place. Also I'm not entirely convinced the ability to (eventually) trivially ransack random shops is really desirable. No other god has such interaction with pre-existing features. Closest thing was probably threat-free holypan for followers of good gods and that's a thing of the past.
All in all I'm puzzled by the fact this god I've seen very little positive feedback on, who has remained essentially untouched for the last year or so (except for the starving part, dohoho) despite all the obvious complaints and flaws, who in pretty much every stage of the game is outshadowed by most other gods, who doesn't even add anything significantly interesting or unique to gameplay (spamming shops, sure, oka already floods you with crap and he does it for free in addition to being an extremely desirable deity), made it into a stable version. I didn't mind Gozag while he was in trunk since trunk is for experimenting but the fact he was included in 0.16 implies he's a finished and desirable addition. I couldn't disagree more.
At best Gozag gives you a shot at
getting additional bling for your atheist-ish character. That's pretty much it. Sort of resembles Chei as a god of messing around, not winning. Except Chei actually has a solid theme, interesting abilities and a notable impact on your gameplay (+ he's actually a good pick for speedrunning). None of that applies to Gozag.
Oh, and since corpse gold seems to glitter for ages you'd better avoid picking up gold while following the gold god. Remember to disable autopickup too whenever potentially useful piles of gold are around!