Feedback on Gozag design

[duvessa]

current bribe branch is pretty much based around being a source of permanent allies...

[The Ferret]

Crawl doesn't need more sources of permanent allies.

Sources of permanent allies: Yred gifts and Enslave Soul, Beogh orcs, Fedhas plants, Mercenary card.

That's not many sources; it sounds like your opinion may be "Crawl doesn't need permanent allies", which is a fine opinion to have. Yred buddies could be changed to long-lived temporary allies with appropriate adjustment to the gift timer; Beogh orcs could be changed to an active summon ability (they practically already are with Recall Orcish Allies); Mercenary card can be removed or possibly replaced with an equivalent temporary summon. Fedhas plants are practically temporary - wandering mushrooms lose HD with attacks and oklobs are stationary. I'd leave Enslave Soul as the rule-breaker, personally.

Bribing a target enemy to become a permanent ally does overlap with Enslave Soul, which I missed. (I assume that the cost structure would be such that you won't be able to bribe a monster you couldn't kill.)

[nicolae]

That's not many sources; it sounds like your opinion may be "Crawl doesn't need permanent allies", which is a fine opinion to have.

Well, "permanent allies should be rare" is the opinion shared by a lot of the devteam, is the thing.

[tasonir]

So it took me a fairly long time to actually get a Gozag character going, but I was finally tempted by the hilarious yet probably bad advice to do a melee octopode of Gozag. Plenty of early splats, but eventually I got one who was able to call jewelry shops in early, and became really strong. Let the feedback commence!

Overall feedback: Pretty good!

Is it new that monsters can be distracted "by your gold", ie, gold you are carrying and not on the ground? I'm not crazy, am I? Seems like a nice buff in that you can now benefit 1v1 or at the start of engagements, which is nice.

The first free potion petition is also a nice boost for a god that doesn't help terribly much right away. It can be a long time before you save the gold to call a merchant, actually get to it, and be able to afford several items. Once you get a few shops, Gozag is about as powerful as most other gods, which is good.

Problems:

One thing I don't like is the increasing cost of abilities. Why do petitions/call merchants get more expensive each time you use them? Heroism's piety cost never goes up, slouch is always the same cost. It isn't even like calling that 5th book shop is overpowered - you already have all the books you need. I'm not sure calling repeated armor/weapon/jewelry shops after 3 is really going to make much of a difference either, you already have a powerful randart at this point. Maybe for octopodes, hunting down their 8th overpowered ring, but generally speaking it's not like the 9th shop has much reason to be three times the cost of the first one. Same with petition - it's a strong boost, but finesse's piety cost never increases, why does potion petition? I assume the same with bribe branch, but I'm not sure who would want to bribe two branches. I'm personally leaning towards more shops instead.

Early game boost is not nearly as bad as tavern makes it sound, but it's still on the below average side. Suggestion: Lesser potion petition: Only generates one potion, randomly like current potion petition, only costs 100 gold to use. Actual costs of potions vary like with current potion petition. Greater potion petition is still available, player starts with one free petition of each type. Possibly move greater potion petition to ~500 or 600 gold range, in combination with removing the increasing cost after each use. Lesser potion petition is always 100g.

Design issue: Gozag is currently a really good god to abandon. I haven't yet gotten to that point in my run, but I'm expecting I will abandon him once I've bought all the items I want from shops. Assuming the wiki wrath section is roughly correct, it doesn't seem that rough. Note that there are plenty of already out of date things on the wiki page, such as potion petition still offering porridge (never saw any, I am fairly sure porridge itself doesn't exist anymore), or duplicate still existing (it doesn't). I guess this is acceptable in the long term, but it does run somewhat counter to other gods which are designed to not be a pump and dump scheme

Bottom line: I actually liked Gozag more than I expected based on various criticisms on the tavern, he's fairly good. Not great, still has some improvement to go, but he's by no means unworkable. Would be an easier start if I wasn't melee-octopoding.

[le_nerd]

@Tasonir: agreed on all accounts, esp on the "easy to abandon". Wrath a bit too light. Potion fail can be bad for that emergency quaffing of !HW, and all those hasted and berserk enemies ramp up difficulty for a while- but not too bad or even nearly as bad as the airdropped armies of dithmenos, trog, oka etc.

[savageorange]

re:wrath: What about tweaking of item generation?
Generating equipment that makes enemies more effective against you, without being useful for you.
(eg. weapon of holy wrath, if the player is undead. Specialist equipment like barding, if the player race cannot equip it. GSC, if the player cannot equip it. Weapon of distortion (maybe, dunno if this is stepping on lugonu's toes). Chance of any kind of branded weapon, if the player is a Felid and hence cannot use it. Potions, if the player is a Mummy and hence cannot quaff them.)

[advil]

I just finished my first gozag game and have some thoughts as well. First, my feeling relative to this game is also that gozag isn't nearly as bad as sometimes reported, this was an extremely strong character and a very fun game (the most fun game I've had in months). However, I may have been very lucky with my first shop, which netted me three rods. It also isn't probably just for any char, gozag seems to synergize very well with Mu. These comments are for 0.16.1, I guess things may have changed in trunk, sorry if they are a bit out of date.

• The shop generation order of dungeon, vaults, depths is really annoying, because if you are mostly calling shops you will generate some rune-locked shops as early as late lair. If the goal is to limit access to shops so that you can't get a certain amount until approximately after your first rune, I'd suggest another mechanism (rebalance the costs?). If this isn't the goal, allow some shops to generate in the lair or lair branches. Aside from this, I didn't find the generation on unexplored levels to be too annoying, it added (what I found to be) a fun dynamic to go find shops and I dove a bit more than I usually would. I agree that generation at your feet later is slightly odd though. Overall this ability is what made this char, despite these complaints.
• A certain portion (maybe half) of my shops were completely useless. I guess this is not so unlike e.g. Okawaru, and I got great stuff from the others, so maybe I can't really complain. Also, I wasn't too bothered by the increasing costs personally.
• The confusion mechanism was slightly handy but seemed a bit weak compared to similar things, e.g. Ru's effects. Maybe have this scale by amount of cash on hand or something, like Ru's scales with piety?
• I found bribe branch utterly useless; I tried it in Zot. I wouldn't use this ability as-is on future gozag chars, the money is better directed towards shops IMO. I would rather have a much greater number of neutral enemies and fewer semi-temporary allies, or some even more major change. Also, it seemed too short, but maybe this was because I was playing slowly while recharging rods.
• I never used potion petition so I can't really comment on it.

Overall, B+ would play a gozag mummy again.

[tasonir]

Gozag abandonment: After you abandon Gozag, all of his shops close. But you can still find the items on the stash tracker, so when you ctrl + F for something, see it listed, you don't know if it's a gozag shop that's gone, or a regular shop. Remove those items from the stash tracker when you abandon Gozag.

[le_nerd]

Mh? The game used to crash upon abandonment and updating of shopping list, and just yesterday I abandoned and shopping list seemed to update correctly, IIRC.

[tasonir]

I was able to search for an amulet in one of his shops and it was closed when I got there, just yesterday on .17 trunk. Webtiles also displayed a ? for the shop when looking it up from a different floor, the correct tile was used when I actually got there.

[dowan]

After playing some mummy of gozag games, I can say when you take the food annoyance out of the equation, Gozag becomes a lot more attractive.

That said, he's still not great. Distracting gold piles are neat, no problems there that I can see really.

Potion petition is a bit expensive after a few uses, but overall OK. Obviously this is extra valuable on a mummy, so it may be a bit more lackluster on other species.

Summon shop is cool, but due to the weird mechanics of only opening shops on levels you haven't been to, it encourages some weird play. Still, this is THE ability that makes Gozag even slightly worthwhile, as you'll end up with better equipment than you would otherwise. I believe this was the point of Gozag in the first place.

Bribe branch is useless. This just needs to be scrapped, even if it worked well it seems like a stupid ability.

The removed duplicate item ability could use replacing with some new capstone. Maybe at 10,000 gold you should be able to buy the orb. This makes the guardians of the orb turn friendly (oofs, elec golems, orb guardians), and no enemies appear during the orb run. Obviously you still have to go pick it up, and there are still serious threats, but it makes for a much easier zot and orb run.

[Zwobot]

So I won a MuFi and a SpGl of Gozag - and my OpFi is looking good as well, while a OpFE actually starved to death... Time for some feedback!

Gold distraction is actually pretty useful - it doesn't seem much at first, but if you can fight on a carpet of of gold packs and such get much easier. You can also use gold to get that one step away from a monster to safely retreat to the stairs. Not to mention that it helps with ranged combat quite a bit.

However the 'optimal' play seems to me to turn of gold from auto pickup when you enter a level and snatch it back up, when you've cleared it. I've done this in V:5, otherwise just occasionally tuned autopickup off. I don't know if that's intended - seems a bit weird to me.

Shopping is of course the reason to take him (apart from potion petition on mummies...). And yeah, as dowan points out the shop placement leads to weird, spoilery play. Basically I tried to leave as many floors of D unexplored so I could get shops before they appeared in Vaults.

It's also hard to gauge how good that ability actually is. For an Op for example just getting enough rings to actually fill the slots might take a while otherwise. Calling in scroll/food/gadget shops might also be something worthwhile. But I've been pretty satisfied so far. Powerful, probably occasionally gamebreaking and frustrating all the same.

I never tried bribe branch. I don't want permanent allies.

All in all some issues - but fun IF the food problem weren't so bad/annoying.

[le_nerd]

@Zwobot: gozaq gold distraction was fixed like a month ago, to avoid your grindy way of playing. Its now a status effect centered on the player; you know its active because your gold is blue.

[Zwobot]

Oh? I guess I missed that. Kinda too bad though. Yet another aura effect is kinda bland...

Edit: My gold turns blue? Well, that never happens either. I do get the distracted by your gold messages though. Mhmmm.

[wheals]

It's possible it needs to be implemented separately for the Webtiles UI and that hasn't happened yet.

[chequers]

That's correct -- it doesn't work in webtiles.

[Pollen_Golem]

Maybe Bribe Branch should have a more universally appealing function, rather than being Gozag's Con Scheme?

Instead of giving you permanent allies, Bribe Branch makes all monsters neutral to you, but no monsters become actually friendly. The harder a branch is to bribe, the fewer turns of neutrality you get. Getting even 50 or fewer turns of neutrality in Zot or Vaults could make a big difference. If it turns out too powerful, it can be nerfed to affect only monsters that aren't set to hunt you yet. How's that?

e: Amulet of Faith can still work with Gozag, but to be consistent with how it works on other gods, it should remove a third of you gold when you remove it, instead of increasing shop prices. It makes more sense too, and there's no worrying over when shop prices will return to normal.