Piety indicator granularity/linearity

[Pollen_Golem]

Recourse # 1 - special indicator for piety at absolute maximum
A lot of gods have benefits that scale with piety, so it's optimal to keep piety as high as possible without letting it get wasted in overflow. It can be really hard to know where on the 6* piety scale you are. You might be conservative with active abilities, preferring consumables instead, for fear of hitting 5*, while in reality you're at 200. Conversely, you may be sure you're hitting 200 all the time, and suddenly find yourself at 5*. Furthermore, an unspoiled player can't possibly know the upper limit to which piety accumulates - whether it's 180, 200, 220, 300, or more. Pointing out that piety can no longer be increased will be especially helpful to unspoiled players, and don't we all care about them? I would suggest that [******] be replaced with [======] or [######] at 200 piety, and the worded message in the ^ screen be something like "Ashenzari could not possibly be more happy about your worship!" Alternatively, it could be used for a small piety range near the maximum - such as 190-200 - I feel either would be fine.

[Rast]

Just rescale piety to 0-100, then display current piety as a number.

[dowan]

While I would be glad to see my exact piety, or even just have an indicator when it's maxed, I'm pretty sure the reason it's presented so vaguely is specifically so you don't know 'I'm at max piety, I may as well use some active abilities'. Whether or not that makes sense is open to interpretation, but as I understand it, that's the reason it is the way it is.

Note that Ru piety actually is at max at 6*, which is fine because his abilities don't spend piety anyway, and the game indirectly tells you you're at max with him when it stops offering sacrifices.

[Blobbo]

Would be nice for Ru followers have a more accurate indication of what is needed for max piety though. Nothing like chopping off a hand when you could have just sacrificed a couple points from a dump stat, because it all just looks like *****-

[Pollen_Golem]

Recourse # 2 - A piety scale that is finer and more linear.
5* (120-160) and 6* (160-200) piety levels are very broad compared to earlier piety levels. This makes it very hard to approximate your piety at high piety. There is no good reason a recent convert should have a better understanding of his standing than a devout follower. Furthermore, it's misleading: when I first played Crawl, I thought piety gain decreased with higher piety, because it took such a long time to get from 5* to 6*. (My past self thought, "maybe you have a piety/max_piety chance of cancelling a kill's piety gain?" )

  Code:

Piety:       0-20 21-40 41-60 61-80 81-100 101-120 121-140 141-160 161-180 181-200
*s showing:  1/10  2/10  3/10  4/10  5/10    6/10    7/10    8/10    9/10   10/10

A truly linear scale such as this is more accurate and avoids obfuscating high-piety followers. The number of *s showing does not correspond to your 1-6 tier piety level. This means that you may lose or gain abilities without seeing the number of *s go up or down. This may be good (gods are slightly more mysterious) and bad (players use *s to see what abilities they have available).

[archaeo]

avoids obfuscating

Sorry, but isn't obfuscation the entire reason we have stars instead of a raw number?

[Arrhythmia]

I thought piety gain decreased with higher piety

It does.

[Pollen_Golem]

@Arrhythmia, source? Okawaru demanding higher-HD enemies as you level up doesn't count, if that's a thing.

avoids obfuscating

Sorry, but isn't obfuscation the entire reason we have stars instead of a raw number?

Nice snip What I said was "avoids obfuscating high-piety followers" in comparison to low-piety followers.
And obfuscation by design is why Rast's suggestion is unlikely to pass the 'maybe' threshold, dev-wise.

Recourse # 3 - Adjust scale, expand by one more star.
See code below. Just like recourse # 2, this makes the piety meter linear and rather granular. It does not introduce oddities like abilities appearing/disappearing without gaining/losing *s. It does mean that god balance is shifted ever so slightly, because god abilities come online slightly later or earlier. However, it's so negligible that power-wise, the change would be imperceptible in most games. It also does not rule out recourse # 1.

  Code:

Piety:                  1-25  26-50  51-75  76-100  101-125  126-150  151-175  176-200
Revamped *s to show:    0/7   1/7    2/7    3/7     4/7      5/7      6/7      7/7
Old abilities granted:        *      **     ***     ****     *****(5) *****(5) ******
                                     ^      ^
                                   ["exact" match]
For comparison,                      v      v
here is the current     1-29  30-49  50-74  75-99   100-119  120-160  161-200
piety-star correlation        *      **     ***     ****     *****    ******

[archaeo]

Nice snip What I said was "avoids obfuscating high-piety followers" in comparison to low-piety followers.

My point is that that amounts to the same thing. Your OP got a lot of "thanks," so I get that people would like to have a better idea of when they have maxed piety, but my understanding of the design goal of gods generally tends toward making them "act in mysterious ways," insofar as you don't get to have a firm idea of where you stand outside of a non-granular measure. That's at least what I got out of the responses to the recent suggestion to make god abilities have firmer piety costs. I don't really mind crawl's vagueness on this score, if only because I've never really found it to be a huge problem to manage piety, and avoiding obfuscation seems like it might make it more likely that the game would be telling me to pay closer attention to the underlying numbers.

Of course I am an infamous number-hater, so maybe I'm just wrong on this.

[Arrhythmia]

@Arrhythmia, source? Okawaru demanding higher-HD enemies as you level up doesn't count, if that's a thing.

learndb:

Piety growth slows at high levels; 0% at 200, 44% at >=160, 66% at >=100. Sif Muna's taper is slower - 0% at 200, 80% at >=160. Ru has no tapering (and stops at 160).

[Sar]

well I never knew or noticed that

but to be fair, now that I do I doubt that would influence my play in any way

[Lasty]

Would be nice for Ru followers have a more accurate indication of what is needed for max piety though. Nothing like chopping off a hand when you could have just sacrificed a couple points from a dump stat, because it all just looks like *****-

Might be nice, but the situation you're describing is already impossible. Ru will make a strong effort to ensure that you don't oversacrifice; if a stat sac would get you to max piety, then you will not be offered Sac Hand unless you have repeatedly sacrificed and then abanadoned Ru in order to run through all the possible sacrifices.

Edit: more specifically, Ru will only offer you things that don't give much more piety than you need to hit 6* unless there are literally no other sacrifices that can be offered. Anything but the silliest challenge play, this state of affairs is impossible.

[Blobbo]

Ru will only offer you things that don't give much more piety than you need to hit 6* unless there are literally no other sacrifices that can be offered. Anything but the silliest challenge play, this state of affairs is impossible.

That is good to know, and good coding! Thanks.