Exploration-based piety is bad
Posted: Saturday, 30th June 2018, 06:04
There are, broadly speaking, two main ways in which gods give piety: Through kills (Trog, Makhleb, for instance), and through exploration (Elyvilon, Nemelex, for instance). I will argue that the second mechanism is bad. I'll be ignoring cases which don't fit into either category (like Ru). Zin's piety gain is a variant of exploration which is even worse, but I'll ignore that here too.
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Firstly, why should there be two piety mechanisms? Is anything gained from this? From my understanding, Ely and Nemelex give exploration piety as a sort of "placeholder" when their old piety mechanisms were changed, and nobody has bothered to change it yet.
Secondly, what is piety gain meant to accomplish? There is no explicit design goal (which I can find), but the most coherent explanation is that you are meant to get piety as you progress through the game, which you can spend to make your life easier. It's a sort of consumable. Generally speaking, you should get more piety as you progress deeper into the game and venture into more difficult areas.
Piety through kills approximates this intuition quite well. Exploration-based piety does not.
Exploration-based piety does not adequately capture the density of monsters, nor the hardness of the floor. From what I remember when I read the code, exploration-based piety is based on floor depth. So Vaults:5 will give more piety than Vaults:4. But the difference between them is negligible, in practice. (Try it out in wizmode if you like). Also, stuff like Abyss existing screws up the mechanism even more.
There is an obvious and decent proxy for how difficult the floor on which you are right now: the XP which you get from the monsters you kill, together with how much you need to rest in between. The obvious way to handle this situation is to have kills-based piety, together with piety decay.
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Firstly, why should there be two piety mechanisms? Is anything gained from this? From my understanding, Ely and Nemelex give exploration piety as a sort of "placeholder" when their old piety mechanisms were changed, and nobody has bothered to change it yet.
Secondly, what is piety gain meant to accomplish? There is no explicit design goal (which I can find), but the most coherent explanation is that you are meant to get piety as you progress through the game, which you can spend to make your life easier. It's a sort of consumable. Generally speaking, you should get more piety as you progress deeper into the game and venture into more difficult areas.
Piety through kills approximates this intuition quite well. Exploration-based piety does not.
Exploration-based piety does not adequately capture the density of monsters, nor the hardness of the floor. From what I remember when I read the code, exploration-based piety is based on floor depth. So Vaults:5 will give more piety than Vaults:4. But the difference between them is negligible, in practice. (Try it out in wizmode if you like). Also, stuff like Abyss existing screws up the mechanism even more.
There is an obvious and decent proxy for how difficult the floor on which you are right now: the XP which you get from the monsters you kill, together with how much you need to rest in between. The obvious way to handle this situation is to have kills-based piety, together with piety decay.