Proposal- Tweak corpse sacrifice piety gain

[TeshiAlair]

Currently, the gods that accept corpse sacrifice are Trog, Okawaru, Makhleb, Lugonu, and Fedhas. Out of these, I feel Okawaru, Lugonu, and Makhleb feel a bit clunky. Fedhas allows for mass corpse sacrifice, and with Trog, because their abilities/berserk use so much hunger, it makes sense to have single corpse sacrifice. However, single corpse sacrifice is fairly tedious, particularly after a long battle, and makes that aspect of the other three a bit "same-y." Here's what I propose:

Lugonu- Give them mass-sacrifice that takes longer based on number of corpses. If the sacrifice is large, there's a piety based chance to generate a "singularity" on a square. This singularity acts as a special tele trap. On stepping on it, 66% chance of blink, 32% chance of tele, and 1% chance of banishment. Smart enemies will try to step around it.

Makhleb- Give them mass-sacrifice that takes longer based on number of corpses. If the sacrifice is large, Makhleb grants a "boon"- HP, mild temp stat buff, a small demon.

Reasons- Removes tedium, and provides a small bonus after large fights.

Okawaru- Lower piety decay, and remove corpse sacrificing. Instead, there's a chance after every kill to give bonus piety based on the total HD of monsters murdered by you within the span of a "combat."

Reasons- Okawaru is the god of Battle, and should reward epic battles, either against strong opponents or a wave of foes. This would also have the side effect of causing gifts to occur more after significant combats than just random popcorn enemies.

[and into]

I like the Okawaru change, and I agree Fedhas can keep corpse sacrificing because that fits with the play style and does more than just give extra piety.

I don't like mass sacrificing taking longer, and the effects you describe from Lugonu and Makhleb seem like they would not really be improvements. The problem is that your proposal doesn't make the decision to sacrifice corpses more meaningful, which is really the problem: You want to sacrifice all corpses that aren't required for satiation, so you eat just enough to keep from getting hungry then sacrifice. This would still be the case. Though now you also have to worry about sacrificing taking longer than one turn, so rather than streamline a non-interesting choice you now still have a non-interesting choice, it just demands more effort and attention from you.

For Lugonu in particular, your proposal additionally means you wouldn't want to sacrifice any corpses that are on squares that you might want to step on. Placing traps like that would encourage a lot of degenerate behavior, even if the traps eventually timed out.

One-turn mass sacrifices for Makhleb and Lugonu without added effects would be an improvement. Removing corpse sacrificing and giving longer piety decay or slightly larger piety gain on average, so it balances out to being basically identical to situation now, would probably be even better for Lu and Makh, however. Trog should get same treatment, too IMO.

[Sar]

This is a band-aid solution, but you can put this:

  Code:

auto_sacrifice = true

in your init/rc file and your character will sacrifice eligible items during autoexplore.

[dpeg]

Yes, corpse sacrifices are clunky. Fedhas not only has the best interface, the effect is actually tactically relevant sometimes. Of course, Fedhas came last

One idea I had was to have corpse-loving gods to simply take the corpse without player intervention. (And perhaps not all corpses: this may be not relevant for chunks in the future, but corpses have other uses.) I have an irrational liking to Trog corpses sacrifices; this probably comes from chopping up corpses when berserk.

Anyway, onto Teshi's proposal: Okawaru already values tough fights. However, your idea of piety for chaining kills looks really good to me. (And no more sacrifices.)

Lugonu: With god wrath redone, I will make another attempt to remove corpse piety by desecration piety (ability to desecrate other gods' altar, get piety and some wrath). In particular, no sacrifices for the Abyss god (it doesn't make that much sense anyway).

Makhleb: With this god demanding "Blood and souls for Makhleb", corpse sacrifice seems thematically justified. Instead of a multi-turn action (we really don't want variable duration during combat!), it should be just automatic. All it'd mean is that Makhlebites have no access to corpses for necromantic purposes.

[and into]

Also: I'm not sure corpse sacrificing should be made meaningful for Mak, Lu, and Trog. But if you wanted to, you'd probably need to do something like make corpse sacrificing cost a small amount of piety and give some other kind of boon/bonus. That could be a cool mechanic for some other new god but probably isn't worth shoehorning into the design of already implemented gods.

[Kate]

The corpse sacrifice gods (Trog, Okawaru, Lugonu, Makhleb) conveniently happen to be the exact set of gods whose piety gain I had plans to slow down overall. Just removing corpse sacrifices (keeping Beogh's, which is rarer and more flavourful, and Fedhas's which has a better interface and interacts with the god's abilities) would be one way to do that, at least (probably with further adjustments afterwards).

[DracheReborn]

I think the current system of corpse sacrifice does introduce some tension ("do I eat this corpse or sacrifice it?") so removing it totally for all the blood gods doesn't appeal to me. At least keep it for Trog or Makh. Automatic corpse sac could work - Trog or Makh taking their tithe, as it were.

[and into]

I don't think there can be tension to any decision in which the stakes are so low. If you mess up and mismanage your hunger a bit, your "punishment" is either missing out on a chance for one piety, or you maybe have to eat one piece of permafood that you didn't strictly need to eat.

Yes if you are constantly mismanaging your food *very* badly then it could eventually make a difference, but then that's just a matter of learning how to manage your food, which people generally learn how to do well enough very quickly. Even then, it isn't as though any single instance of corpse sacrificing really matters, so when you go with a corpse sacrificing god, that's a rather large amount of game play and design focusing on a mechanic that only matters if you are continuously making the exact same bad choice over and over again without learning from it.

[Lasty]

If any gods still need corpse sacrifice, I would like to see them roll for piety each time a corpse is created; if piety is granted, the corpse is auto-sacrificed. That way the player no longer has to take actions to implement it, or make the trivial decision of "sacrifice this corpse I don't want or not?" It would mean that valuable corpses will be less likely to be accessible, but it's not like any of these gods are so weak that they can't take an extremely minor nerf. If that were to become a problem, we could make it less likely to sac dragon-hide-bearing corpses.

[and into]

Makhleb: With this god demanding "Blood and souls for Makhleb", corpse sacrifice seems thematically justified. Instead of a multi-turn action (we really don't want variable duration during combat!), it should be just automatic. All it'd mean is that Makhlebites have no access to corpses for necromantic purposes.

Sorry to double post, missed dpeg's contribution.

I like all of those ideas, including an automatic "corpse tithe" from Makhleb, the only thing I'd say is that it shouldn't be every corpse. Not only does that block necromantic uses, it also messes with Vampires and Ghouls of Makh. Plus Fedhas already disdains necromantic corpse usage. Corpselessness as a god conduct would also step on the toes of the corpses-->gold idea for the gold god that we both hope will be added eventually, wouldn't it?

[Brannock]

At a minimum I'd love to see the suggested Okawaru change to be implemented. Individually sacrificing each corpse after a major battle is insanely tedious (but auto_sacrifice helps!) and doesn't fit with Okawaru's flavor. Why does the God of Grand Battle care about dead bodies? They aren't going to fight back. They're just meat.

There's other things that you could add in to replace the lost piety for Okawarites that would be more keeping in flavor for him. The original "combo" idea I like and is likely one of the easier ones to implement code-wise. Okawaru could "mark" specific powerful enemies and give you a piety bonus if you manage to kill them within a certain amount of rounds. He could grant bonus piety for kills made while equipped with one of his gifts for X turns after it was gifted. There's a ton of untapped potential here to make Okie more interesting and really push the idea of seeking out glorious, against-the-odds combat, using his boons as a means to that end.

[giovform]

Another band aid is:

Macro "p+Tab+o"

Sacrifices, auto-fight and auto-explore. Works perfectly. If your char is strong enough, you can just clear a whole level holding this key.