Developing Ieoh Jian Council (Latest version inside)

[Steel Neuron]

Do the Flowing Blade effects happen automatically? For Whirlwind and Lunge it makes sense, but for Staves and Pole Arms it sounds really annoying if it makes it actually impossible to move adjacent to a wall when there's an empty spot two spaces in the opposite direction. I'm imagining trying to move into a safer position forgetting that I'm wielding a staff or polearm and then being launched in the opposite direction and that sounds awful.

I also don't like flowing master. If the goal is to give you more control over what weapon types you get, then having to do it through different movements is awkward. If the goal is to make the god interact with unarmed, then filling your hands with a weapon as soon as you try to move around enemies while unarmed seems counterproductive.

Sorry, I might've been unclear on that one

Pole vault doesn't happen when you move adjacent to a wall, it happens when you attempt to move into the wall. It substitutes the warning you'd get for trying to move into a solid obstacle. This makes it possible to explore the dungeon normally (even with autoexplore) and like the others, triggers on predictable scenarios.

About flowing master, we shall see. I think it might be worth testing to offer the player the chance to manifest a particular weapon. After all, it won't happen when you're already wielding one, and I think it will open up cool plays(throw a dagger somewhere, pole vault into it immediately and lunge). Furthermore, I think you might be overestimating the variety of moves that players typically do when playing a melee character. The vast majority of melee fights consist on luring and retreating, so you'd have to do something relatively atypical for a weapon to spawn (and if you're approaching, say, a ranged monster, it's likely you'd like to get that extra approach hit from Lunge anyway).

On a side note, I've been taking to Lasty on irc and he convinced me to drop the collection mechanic the god will grant weapons that will steadily improve in base and enchant as you gain piety and xp, and they'll always be vorpal, speed or protection. Occasional artifacts will still spawn and stealing remains an option, but you can not send any weapons to your God.

[Midn8]

I feel like this god is incredibly complicated and would be hard to program, just because of all of the tension effects: "roll this, and then if this is greater than tension do this, and then if it is not do this and..."

Otherwise feels like a challenge god but really powerful if played right (like chei). Would this be an Invo god or a piety god? Or would powers scale off of fighting?

[minstrel]

I agree with the sentiment that this seems too complicated. I think theming it around the vault would be what I'd find most enjoyable. Something like the following:

* - 100% weapon crosstrain

** - vault gets filled with 1 of each weapon type, all good acquirement type stuff, possibly scaled to level (or however is best to code a good weapon)
** - small piety, no delay, draw a weapon from the vault and immediately wield it, that slot empties, weapon duration based on invoc.
** - on piety gain, the god has a change to either replace an empty slot (probably bias toward this), or augment an existing weapon

*** - small piety, the player can summon a weapon from the vault as a dancing weapon, weapon duration based on invoc.

**** - no new abilities

***** - medium piety, the player can throw all the weapons from the vault at once at a given enemy, smite targeted, dealing initial damage for each and summoning them adjacent to the enemy as dancing weapons, duration based on invoc.

****** - no new abilities

Now we have the usual strong passive ability, two good and one really strong activatable abilities, all centered around the vault and all intuitive. Power level can be adjusted easily by tweaking the strength of the vault weapons and the strength/frequency of augments/refills.

Fears of adding too many mid-combat keypresses are alleviated because you only have so many slots to empty. The unique and hard to remember weapon-class effects are gone, along with fiddly weapon collection management.

My gut feel is my proposal is a little weak, but that could be confirmed by playtesting and adjusted via the above knobs or strengthening directly the existing mechanics (like smite targeting for the *** summon weapons).

[Steel Neuron]

I feel like this god is incredibly complicated and would be hard to program, just because of all of the tension effects: "roll this, and then if this is greater than tension do this, and then if it is not do this and..."

Could be, but don't worry, I won't be pestering any devs to waste time implementing this, I'm doing it on my own (which is going to progress at a slow-ish pace, but I will get there).

Otherwise feels like a challenge god but really powerful if played right (like chei). Would this be an Invo god or a piety god? Or would powers scale off of fighting?

I'm thinking pure piety, just scaling off your weapon abilities.

[Steel Neuron]

I agree with the sentiment that this seems too complicated. I think theming it around the vault would be what I'd find most enjoyable. Something like the following:

That's a good suggestion, thanks! Unfortunately, I don't think I'll take the God back in that direction...

I was also leaning towards the vault idea more at first, but I have to admit that after gauging the reaction by the more experienced players here, it seems to be the consensus that it would be too fiddly and complicated. While I have my reservations, I want to make sure I'm working on something that the maximum amount of people can enjoy, and it seems that what everyone is more excited about is the movement based abilities, so I'm going to end up making the god revolve around that, even if it means sacrificing the vault.

There's time for testing though, so we shall see

[luckless]

On reflection, I'm a little worried about crosstraining with Unarmed. At higher skill levels Unarmed becomes much stronger than virtually any weapon, which means mid-to-late-game IJC worshippers will typically want to get rid of their weapons as quickly as possible (and you'll generally want to avoid walking into summoned weapons, and Flowing Master will usually be a disadvantage).

idk what the solution is, but I suggest committing to the IJC as a weapon god. Unarmed characters already have enough goodies.

[Psieye]

On reflection, I'm a little worried about crosstraining with Unarmed.

Thankfully, this is a trivial code change once the branch is in the playtest stage.

[Steel Neuron]

On reflection, I'm a little worried about crosstraining with Unarmed. At higher skill levels Unarmed becomes much stronger than virtually any weapon, which means mid-to-late-game IJC worshippers will typically want to get rid of their weapons as quickly as possible (and you'll generally want to avoid walking into summoned weapons, and Flowing Master will usually be a disadvantage).

idk what the solution is, but I suggest committing to the IJC as a weapon god. Unarmed characters already have enough goodies.

Hadn't thought of that, to be honest. It's tricky, because I'd like worshippers to approach fights without a weapon on their hands, but that may indeed become problematic.

It may be possible to just allow the player to equip their own weapon and make that work seamlessly with IJC and their mechanics.

Here's how it'd work: You have your normal equipped weapon (which you obtained in the dungeon), but ICJ manifests its own around you as you fight. If you grab one, your own weapon is animated as usual. If your own weapon is animated, it's always the last one to disappear, and when it does, it will fly back to your hands.

Remove Unarmed crosstrain, and everything is simpler

[DracheReborn]

On reflection, I'm a little worried about crosstraining with Unarmed. At higher skill levels Unarmed becomes much stronger than virtually any weapon, which means mid-to-late-game IJC worshippers will typically want to get rid of their weapons as quickly as possible (and you'll generally want to avoid walking into summoned weapons, and Flowing Master will usually be a disadvantage).

idk what the solution is, but I suggest committing to the IJC as a weapon god. Unarmed characters already have enough goodies.

Well, weapons get weapon effects. If those are strong enough, then one might reasonably choose to fight with a weapon over UC. Though this is probably less true for characters with claws.

[luckless]

Hadn't thought of that, to be honest. It's tricky, because I'd like worshippers to approach fights without a weapon on their hands, but that may indeed become problematic.

It may be possible to just allow the player to equip their own weapon and make that work seamlessly with IJC and their mechanics.

Here's how it'd work: You have your normal equipped weapon (which you obtained in the dungeon), but ICJ manifests its own around you as you fight. If you grab one, your own weapon is animated as usual. If your own weapon is animated, it's always the last one to disappear, and when it does, it will fly back to your hands.

you know, that's actually how I thought it was going to work all along!

Remove Unarmed crosstrain, and everything is simpler

Yep! Sounds like the way to go to me.

[Steel Neuron]

Hadn't thought of that, to be honest. It's tricky, because I'd like worshippers to approach fights without a weapon on their hands, but that may indeed become problematic.

It may be possible to just allow the player to equip their own weapon and make that work seamlessly with IJC and their mechanics.

Here's how it'd work: You have your normal equipped weapon (which you obtained in the dungeon), but ICJ manifests its own around you as you fight. If you grab one, your own weapon is animated as usual. If your own weapon is animated, it's always the last one to disappear, and when it does, it will fly back to your hands.

you know, that's actually how I thought it was going to work all along!

Remove Unarmed crosstrain, and everything is simpler

Yep! Sounds like the way to go to me.

Still, there is always the option of having unarmed crosstrain to a lower degree. That might turn out to be the right point of balance

[Steel Neuron]

I've been getting some work done on the experimental branch (still slowly, as I'm getting used to the codebase) so I decided to update the OP with the newest design. I think it goes in the direction that the more veteran players were suggesting. Tell me what you think

[johnstein]

Looks like one of the devs pulled this into an official branch in the source. This makes it really easy to create an experimental (I tried to hook up the existing process to also use pull requests, but couldn't quite get it working).

This is available to play on CBRO now.
http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#lobby

SteelNeuron, you will have to let a dev know to update the 'councilgod' branch in the source if you update your PR (which isn't too bad of a system since experimentals need rebuilt manually anyway, so it's not a huge departure from that norm).

Let me know if anything is honked up and I'll get it fixed.

This sounds like a really cool and novel idea and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing how it works out.

[Steel Neuron]

Looks like one of the devs pulled this into an official branch in the source. This makes it really easy to create an experimental (I tried to hook up the existing process to also use pull requests, but couldn't quite get it working).

This is available to play on CBRO now.
http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#lobby

SteelNeuron, you will have to let a dev know to update the 'councilgod' branch in the source if you update your PR (which isn't too bad of a system since experimentals need rebuilt manually anyway, so it's not a huge departure from that norm).

Let me know if anything is honked up and I'll get it fixed.

This sounds like a really cool and novel idea and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Thank you very much johnstein! This is fantastic news . I'm really looking forward to everyone's feedback. Also thanks to everyone who helped with the god design, I'm sure you will find many of your ideas implemented in the playable version.

I'm afraid this thread is going to be a bit confusing, since we have been discussing four major revisions of the god and almost every comment is outdated, so if everyone is okay with it, I'll open a new one to announce the branch and centralise feedback.

[infinitevox]

Would it be possible to make it so you can fire through your floating weapons, like with Ds Demonic Guardian?
It was extremely annoying not being able to zap or cast through the summoned weapons.

[Steel Neuron]

Would it be possible to make it so you can fire through your floating weapons, like with Ds Demonic Guardian?
It was extremely annoying not being able to zap or cast through the summoned weapons.

Working on it

[gfgf45550]

I find the idea really awesome but with one exception.

I would change the final ability, because it looks pretty much like the Grand Finale of Uskayaw.

It would be much more interesting to create a massive single-turn flow of weapons with area effect.

[Esc]

I think Whirlwind should not trigger on plants. Especially when autoexploring. (Especially when wielding Firestarter.)

[Steel Neuron]

I think Whirlwind should not trigger on plants. Especially when autoexploring. (Especially when wielding Firestarter.)

That's fixed in the newest version .

Please use the other thread for feedback, maybe a mod could close this one?

[gammafunk]

Locking this thread, use the thread about the hosted branch for further discussion about the god.