Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 4055
Joined: Tuesday, 10th January 2012, 19:49
Tuesday, 25th November 2014, 22:28
Some comments on Cigotuvi's Embrace spell
- Code:
Add Cigotuvi's Embrace
Grab all nearby corpses and turn them into armour + sh. (SH for
consistency with the bone plates mutation, and also to make it a
little more distinctive.)
1/3 of a point of SH & AC per skeleton, 2/3rds per corpse,
minimum one point if you hoovered any corpses/skeletons at all.
casting. Multiple casts stack. Taking damage or blocking hits has
a chance of causing you to lose 1 point; chance decreases with
spellpower. Incompatible with Stoneskin/Ozo's. Does not decay
over time, ironically.
Intent is to replace Twisted Resurrection, which has been
considered a Problem Spell for some time, with another & more
novel use for corpses.
This spell has several extremely problematic design decisions in its current state.
The most problematic thing is that the defenses are permanent. I believe very strongly that this should not be the case; it encourages doing lots of silly things like going to orc and waiting for an orc band to spawn to refresh your Cigotuvi defenses, and leads to/exacerbates the problems below.
The second problem is how it turns individual corpses into 1 AC, unless multiple corpses are in range. So what you want to do (especially since the AC is permanent!) is move out of range of all but one corpse, cast the spell, move into range of a second corpse, etc. You lose a bit of time this way but that's pretty minor (you can do things like make sure to kill monsters on the previous floor if you want, to minimize the time cost, and if you have some source of good MP regen the cost is tiny).
A third problem: it's a non-combat spell, with all the usual non-combat spell problems. See also: repel missiles.
Thankfully, there's a reasonably simple way to fix these problems:
Make the spell temporary, with a very short duration (comparable to phase shift). Then, obviously, the power of the effect must be increased significantly; I suggest making it also power-dependent. A good target for general power level would be phase shift, probably.
Unfortunately you then end up with a problem with Kiku corpse drop (thanks for the 15 AC); possibly the best solution is to make the AC nonlinear, so the first corpse gives 3 AC + 3 SH but five corpses gives, say, 9 of each or something. I don't know the right numbers since I'd have to try the spell to actually see. If you do something like cast it once on 4 corpses and then cast it next turn on 2 more, this should be the same result as if you just used it on all 6 corpses at once. Possibly a cap on total AC/SH gained too (which would probably only be relevant with corpse drop) but maybe that's not necessary, especially since you could just use animate dead or simulacrum on the corpses (from corpse drop) instead.
Possibly a better implementation would be to make the spell behave like death channel: you cast the spell once, whenever you want to start the effect, and then whenever a corpse is generated in view during the effect it adds to your defenses. This works better from a player standpoint since you aren't forced to waste turns during combat doing non-damaging things; you can cast it like you cast other buff spells.
Permanent gains from corpses really don't work imo ... I think even animate dead and animate skeleton are a bit iffy design-wise and those are far less problematic than the implemented Cigotuvi's Embrace because at least they can't go with you to other floors like your defenses can. But turning dead things into defenses could work as a spell.
