Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Re: Let us choose gods from the start
all before wrote:I assume the point of spreading out altars across the dungeon is to create the sense of a strategic choice. Do you want this god now, or will you hold out for a more suitable god later? That would be ok if the gods were better balanced, or the game placed better gods at lower depths, or in some other way were designed around this kind of strategic religious choice. But it isn’t. If a player comes across a d:2 trog altar, it’s always in their best interest to take it if they want to win. Maybe this is just a matter of how the game communicates its design to players, but it doesn’t seem good that a feature developers have essentially made a choice between easier and harder modes is presented as if it were a strategic choice to be made in the game.
I think you overestimate the difference in difficulty between taking the better and the middle gods, yes, the difference between Trog and Xom is pretty drastic, but when presented with the choice of Fedhas early (Or Makhelb, or Hep, or any of the other reasonably powerful gods), and waiting for Trog it's pretty reasonable to select a non-trog early god.
"You should always select Trog if you want to win" is a meme, but not a basis for arguing that selecting a god is a difficulty selection not a strategic choice.