more Sac Love religious interactions

[HardboiledGargoyle]

There are some kinks getting worked out when you worship different gods after sacrificing love to Ru. For example, you can't summon angels/servants/BiA/etc. Here are some final aspects to consider:

Beogh
The loveless cannot worship Beogh, but why not? There's still smiting and water-walking, and great flavor in being a hated, lone, and spiteful chosen one. Allow joining Beogh, but disable Orc conversion and Orc god gifts, and don't give the recall/gift/resurrect invocations.

Nemelex
Nemelex should not give any decks of summoning to the loveless, only destruction and escape. Note, destruction can still summon an air elemental via Storm card.

Lugonu
Corruption works normally and summons neutral abyssal critters that turn hostile instantly. It would be fair, and really cool, if Corruption changed terrain but did not summon anything, for loveless chars.

Hep and Dith
Hep doesn't allow the loveless to worship at all. But this seems to be at odds with Dithmenos, whose shadow mimic works normally. Seems to me that either Hep should work normally, and the ancestor be an exception along the lines of IOoD, which is the better option, or Dithmenos's shadow mimic should be disabled.

[chequers]

I don't think abilities like corrupt should change behaviour if you sacrifice love. It's a corner case, and sacrifice love is meant to be a sacrifice.

PS my favourite sac love interaction is summoning hostile miscast monsters with Plutonium Sword or Spellbinder.

[Malevolent]

Beogh
The loveless cannot worship Beogh, but why not? There's still smiting and water-walking, and great flavor in being a hated, lone, and spiteful chosen one. Allow joining Beogh, but disable Orc conversion and Orc god gifts, and don't give the recall/gift/resurrect invocations.

Or an even better idea: if you Sacrifice Love, make it so that the orcs don't "love" you, but they are still forced to follow you because you are their absolute leader and you have absolute control over their spiritual and personal lives, and if they try to leave you or object to anything you say, you just have all his friends and family isolate and berate him for the rest of his life. So they are kept in a state of constant terror and anxiety and can't do anything about it - except that occasionally one of your orcs might just randomly "snap", becoming berserk and attacking you. Screw being Orc Jesus - I want to be Orc L. Ron Hubbard!

[HardboiledGargoyle]

if they try to leave you or object to anything you say, you just have all his friends and family isolate and berate him for the rest of his life

lol what kind of orc has time to groan and moan about that

[vergil]

Nemelex
Nemelex should not give any decks of summoning to the loveless, only destruction and escape. Note, destruction can still summon an air elemental via Storm card.

Sounds awesome to me. Can we have the same thing without the need to worship/abandon Ru?

Spoiler: show

Summons are overrated.

Spoiler: show

Also, screw you panlords

[Shtopit]

How does it interact with demonic guardian?

[HardboiledGargoyle]

it suppresses demonic guardian

[CanOfWorms]

Nemelex
Nemelex should not give any decks of summoning to the loveless, only destruction and escape. Note, destruction can still summon an air elemental via Storm card.

Nemelex gifting summoning to followers isn't actually a problem, unless "god is weaker after sacrificing love" is a problem, which isn't the case given your suggestions for beogh/lugonu

Hep and Dith
Hep doesn't allow the loveless to worship at all. But this seems to be at odds with Dithmenos, whose shadow mimic works normally. Seems to me that either Hep should work normally, and the ancestor be an exception along the lines of IOoD, which is the better option, or Dithmenos's shadow mimic should be disabled.

this argument only works if you assume oods, bspheres and fprisms are even remotely similar to actual allies (they aren't.) the fact that they have to be excluded is a symptom of a clumsy implementation

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Dith's shadow mimic is intentionally programmed to be like a separate monster that does stuff from your position, and it's explicitly not *you* doing the shadow actions, but a distinct agent, which is why I find the special-casing of this particular ally somewhat odd. I suppose you think of it as not an actual ally, but more like ood/bsphere/fprism? I just had the feeling that effort was expended to create the opposite impression.

[CanOfWorms]

it's as much of an ally as qazlal's clouds (read: not at all)

[Arrhythmia]

IMO Crawl should have less corner cases rather than more, and the number of corner cases sac love has inspired means it should never have been added.

[duvessa]

sac love should have been added, but for all chars instead of just ru worshippers

[and into]

I think you could simplify sacrifice love by having it just suppress any and all allies, by which we mean "anything that has the little heart icon by it in Tiles." Orb of destruction, fulminant prison, spectral weapon, etc. would become worthless. Neutral creatures would be allowed, however, so Lugonu's Corruption and Ely pacification would still work. Could rename it "sacrifice allies."

Shadow mimic could remain and I think it would not be counter-intuitive for it to do so (it is not an "ally" in that it does not occupy its own tile, it is not described as an ally and has no heart icon, etc.) You could add a cute line in the description for sacrifice allies to intimate this: "You will be forever left alone — just you and your shadow."

With the above I think you would not have to do any weird things with gods. Nemelex would still gift decks of summoning, but they'd just be pretty useless. Beogh, Yred worship should still be allowed, though of course not recommended. Etc. It is a sacrifice, after all, the game shouldn't mold itself around your sacrifice in order to make it more convenient. Rather, you have to adapt to it.

[Shard1697]

You should definitely still be able to use OoD with sac love... it's not actually a real "ally", it's a projectile that has travel time.
It no longer has a heart icon, if you care, but nothing has a heart icon anymore(and OoD also does not have the replacement green ally halo).

[and into]

it's as much of an ally as qazlal's clouds (read: not at all)

I get the point you are making (I think), that IOoD and battlesphere, etc., are implemented as "pseudo-allies" only because that was the easiest way to add them to the game.

However, when it comes to Ru sacrifices, the most important thing IMO is clarity: Will the player be able to understand what he or she is giving up in making the sacrifice? Can that be easily related to the player? It is a permanent sacrifice, so intelligibility and lack of (semi-)spoilers, corner cases, and counter-intuitive interactions are the most important things here.

To that end I think it is better to have sacrifices that are clearer to player — like, block any creation of friendly entities (things that are described as "allied/friendly" and also take up a tile, so not clouds or shadow mimic, but yes IOoD, fprism, battlesphere, etc.)

EDIT: Okay, if IOoD, fprism, battlesphere are no longer presented/described as allies, then I suppose it is fine to keep them as exceptions, and you can keep listing those exceptions in the sacrifice description, even if that's a bit clunky.

[CanOfWorms]

you can technically make sacrifice love affect iood, fprism and bsphere but the first two don't use allegiance to function at all, i.e. a "hostile" ood will still target whatever you cast it at, it won't magically target something else, a hostile fprism will still hurt whatever's in its blast radius. I image hostile bsphere is the same, it can't attack you unless you cast something and it would probably just attack whatever you targeted in the first place.

the only thing that would happen if you made iood/fprism/bsphere spawn hostile is confuse players into thinking their behaviour is different when it's not

[and into]

As I said, the simpler way (imo) to implement "sacrifice love" is simply to suppress allies, not to make them hostile. Doing the latter essentially requires special cases and weird interactions, e.g., demonic guardian is just suppressed because it would really suck to choose "sac love" as a demonspawn and then get demonic guardian. That resolution of the problem makes sense in terms of Crawl's design, but all these corner cases are not going to be intuitive and easy to relate to the player. "You cannot create allies" can be much simpler and more consistent as a conduct, I think.

[CanOfWorms]

so what, does following fedhas kill every single plant in the dungeon? does following jiyva wipe out trj?

[and into]

Nah, they remain hostile. By "suppress" I mean "cannot create allies." By the same token, if you use enslavement on an enemy and it passes MR check, it has no effect — it does not suddenly remove the enemy from existence. To put it more precisely: You cannot create friendly entities at all (through summoning, necromancy, etc.), and any existing entities cannot be made friendly. It isn't perfectly clean of course but I think that's more intuitive than how Sacrifice Love currently works.

[chequers]

I would really like Hep to accept your worship and then repeatedly summon your ancestor who becomes instantly hostile.

[jwoodward48ss]

What does a battlesphere do if you cast a spell at yourself? I know, I know, stupid, but some people carry around Flame Tongue to melt their OzoArmour if they need to get rid of ponderous.

[Lasty]

the only thing that would happen if you made iood/fprism/bsphere spawn hostile is confuse players into thinking their behaviour is different when it's not

I thought that too, but fulminant prism has some odd effects when hostile: monsters won't try to break it, and you don't get credit/xp/piety for its kills.

[Airwolf]

Just immediately kill characters who abandon Ru and be done with all this.