God of Desire

[greepish]

I've looked at the dev wiki and found some similar gods to this one (glutton, gold), but I decided to go ahead with writing this anyways as I think it's a bit more fleshed out.

Reasoning: God of desire just sounds cool. Also, some game aspects, like hexes, food, and mid-game gold can have a little more use. This is sort of a rough draft, so feel free to add/critique anything.

God idea:

Name: Craveedon, The Starving God of desire (functionally: gold, food, hexes, and charms)

"Give me more, more, MORE!"

Restrictions: Because of a lack of food clock, mummies cannot worship Craveedon (and demigods). However, other undead can however (or maybe not due to below abilities, working this out)

Appreciates:

-Increasing charms and hexes
-Sacrificing permafood, corpses (feed the starving god!)
-Buying expensive items (500+ gold)
-Enslaving monsters via enslavement, control undead (if so, needs anti-abuse for re-enslavement)

Deprecates:

-Casting Necromution. Not because Craveedon is a good god, but Necromution is seen as giving up desire because you're "dead'. (penance)
-Wearing rings of sustenance
-Very rapid piety loss over time (1 every 250 turns! Starts with a small piety buffer, though)

Abilities:

Innate: Your hexes grow less resistible with increased piety (considered casted at a higher spell power). Don't expect to enslave Ancient liches and Lords of hell, but expect a reasonable increase.

NOTE: Whenever "Food" is listed as a cost, the cost is fairly high.

* Gain book of maledictions

** Extend enslaved monster's enslavement (Food)
Protected from passing out while starving

*** Protects against hexes/charms miscasts, gain book of control

**** Midas Touch- Turns corpses into gold (Food)

***** Gain book of Enchantments
Can cast spells while starving

****** Desperation- Can be used only while starving. For the duration of this ability (length TBA), you are under an effect similar to death's door. However, eating food ends the effect early and causes your body to go into shock, effectively paralyzing and exhausting you for several turns. (Piety)

Gifts:

-Book of Maledictions at * Book of Control at *** Book of enchantments at *****
-Portals to bazaars
-Gifts of gold
-Gifts of acquirement

Wrath:

-Hunger Set to starving
-Hexes/charms miscasts (fitting, but paralysis seems a bit harsh...)
-Sends packs of sirens and hungry ghosts after you.

General description: Craveedon is good for several things:

a) a nice pack of allies
b) Gauranteed some great spells like haste and deflect missiles
c) lots of goodies from bazaars and shops, pretty good for octopodes I'd think
d) a powerful panic button that's rather dangerous in itself

Carveedon, however, is unfit for most extended endgame, as piety rapidly drops and most of the gods piety is based off corpses. Additionally, the rapid drop in piety over time causes some pretty severe food problems from corpse sacrifice.

Problems: I'm still not really finished with this concept, particularly how to handle ghouls and vampires. On the one hand ghouls fit the description perfectly for this god, but a lot of the abilities have to do with starvation, something that doesn't apply perfectly to ghouls specifically.

[Roderic]

Strangely, this god reminds me of Rahu, an inmortal dragon head from the Hindu religion and astrology. It is a hungry, full of desire entity which is a master of illusions and aslo deals with poisons. Maybe you can find more inspiration reading about it.

[dpeg]

I am amazed that you think the god proposal is more fleshed out that that for the gold god (who is slated to come into existence at some point). A few quick remarks: Book gifts are not interesting -- with Vehumet we are just trying to get away from that (Thasero, where are you?). Skill training for piety gain is not ingenious either, we try to avoid that (yes, Sif has it, but for a wider range of skills). Buying and enslaving for piety will lead to players do that without actually needing the items or the monsters.

[greepish]

Yeah fleshed out was the wrong word, and I think I'll take a better look at that one (by one of those freak chances it happens to be written also with someone I know irl lol). However, I made gold only a part of this god because I can see gold getting incredibly abusive in the late game when one has rather rediculous amounts of it, (later infinite amounts.) Perhaps if the Gold God had that worked out I could see that god working better. And if that god's going to get implemented, I'll just abandon this one and help with that because there wouldn't be much point in two gods that are so similar.

But anyways, as for the reasoning for some of those things: The first book gift of maledictions is absolutely needed, as enslavement is part of piety gain, and it's kind of pointless to have a hex magic god without access to hex spells. That's why literally all of the magic focused gods have spellbook gifts. As far as skill training by piety, I've never made a god idea, so I just picked something mundane to start with. But I don't think it's even needed, as I came up with that idea before the other three piety reasons.

[AtT]

Book gifts are not interesting

Am I the only one that thinks guaranteed book gifts (ie Kiku) are awesome and incredibly interesting? I love the consistency offered by Kiku; he makes necromancy a viable support option to any start!

[dpeg]

It also means that the god feels a bit empty once you have all the books.

[greepish]

Yeah but still necessary for at least the Lower end books.

Anyways, I made a big comment on the gold god after reading it, hope you'll like my idea on how to work bribery.

[dpeg]

greepish: Thanks for comments. I will reply at the wiki, of course, but not on the bribery system. I explained twice why I think branches work better than individual monsters. There is no need to do it again. I realise that you may not be happy with the proposal or the explanation, but the proposal is unique, thematic and strategic -- enough to try it out. Also, I have a little experience with gods and am convinced this will work. (The parts where the gold god will require most work are these: How much gold per corpse? How strong to punish players not collecting all gold?)

[greepish]

Hmmm... well if you haven't read why I disagree I think you should. There's some pretty massive problems with branch bribery TBH. If there's one point I disagree with most it's that.

[dpeg]

Of course I read it: "The only god that makes a whole branch easy is jiyva, and I honestly think even that needs to be changed, as it makes the god only useful for speedruns. Being able to choose the branch makes it even worse. I think the fears of it making too similar to enslavement are unwarranted."

I understand neither why Jiyva is "only useful for speed runs" nor how choosing a branch to affect "makes things worse". In contrast to Jiyva, bribing a branch does not make it trivial: you get some support, and for each monster made peaceful or allied, the bribe score goes down.
After that, you proceed to propose exactly the thing I don't want.
I fail to see the massive problems.

[greepish]

Well jiyva's pretty obvious, people switch to Jiyva mostly to negate slime pits. Do it last and pop, you shave off a thousand turns. I think it's actually reinforced because of the altar that so often appears at the gates of slime pits, it's cool but really shouldn't be there. Earlier, jiyva's too bad because of the slimes stealing exp, later jiyva's not as powerful as other late game gods. So Jiyva mostly get's used for that reason I think, or if maybe you can't find a cure mutation, (or just want to screw around Which isn't to say that's a bad thing.).

So here's the problems with branch bribery (minor and major). Anyways, I'd believe a little more that it wasn't debatable if a single person stood up for branch-bribe in the comments. Is there any discussion elsewhere where I can look at other reasons?

A) Inconsistent: So you can bribe a branch but not a vault of orcs, a horde of yaktaurs in the dungeons? They have leaders too, and realistically individuals can be bribed.

B) Balance- particularly in "monsters ignore you" kind of bribery, it's just too hard to do it right. Too much and it's WAY too abusive to people playing for score, too little and it looks like you haven't done much. I just can't see a person walking into a den of enemies where half the enemies are killing you and the others are jump roping or whatever.

C)Workload- This honestly I can't say for sure, you'd probably know better than me, but I think you're getting yourself into more work than you think. You're going to have to do a level up system for orcs, elves, nagas, merfolk, humans, draconians, and demons. But even on a non-coding level you will need to remove all those high ranked with abusive powers, of which there will no doubt be many, since you have to scale for occasions when players bribe a bunch of weaklings. With beogh, you only have to consider orc sorcerors, orc high priests, and orc warlords, and with individual bribing, they would cost so much more and not level up.

D)Replaces beogh- Seriously, an orc branch bribe essentially, with leveling up followers, makes beogh kinda silly in comparison. Crappy smite and piddly extra AC vs draconians and better AC from shops?

Here's why the "normal" way of bribery is different from enslavement:

A)Who it can hit. Explained
B)Long term use. Enslavement is about MP at the current time, this is about gold over a long time, with two levels of risk described.
C)Everything else that goes with bribery

I think BB is just overboard in an attempt to make the god too unique, I think he's fine with something small like regular bribes. You look at other gods and powers range from "enslave soul" and control undead (get one guy and get control undead spell, very simple) or "get books and mana" ... and then your god, bribing multiple branches with thousands of total enemies... I can't see it. Like I said, I'd be better convinced if I saw anyone else argue for it.

[dpeg]

If it is any consolation to you, there is a long row of comments like this: When I announced that Trog is going to lose Might, players said "cannot play Trog anymore"; when I announced that Elyvilon will be an actual pacifist god instead of a wannabe, players laughed at me, and don't get me started on the comments for the slow or curses gods.

A) As the proposal says, bribing a branch (e.g. orc) also amounts to bribing this branch's monsters outside the branch (e.g. orcs in the dungeon).

B) What does balance have to do with score? Not that monsters are crucial for score (high scores are about runes and time). Why can't you see a person walk into a room and half of the opponents flake out? Sounds good to me, both for gameplay and for realism.

C) If you buy an orc warrior who happens to upgrade himself to an orc knight, the next pay will be more expensive. At some point, you'll have to let them go. (Additional payments is straight from the wiki, not something I just made up.) There is no additional workload for levelling: all monsters (e.g. orc warriors and orc knights) need base prices for full bribery (allied) and half bribery (neutral). This settles further payments just as well.

D) Silly? The gold god and Beogh are miles apart: one is about raising orcs into a permanent army, the other is (in parts) about spending money to make a branch easier. The Jiyva-Gozag comparison was less off the mark...

[greepish]

Well, have it your way, I won't debate it further if you like. But if you seriously want to say players being wrong about something as tiny as might or elyvilon individual pacification should be enough to dismiss my talking about entire branch manipulation being potentially harmful, I just can't agree.

[Galefury]

Chei worked fine for my DSTm. I ditched him for Makhleb for extended, but he was quite nice for a 3-rune game. That was when he still gave resists though, I haven't tried him with the new ability.

[dpeg]

I fail to see how a god with 79 wins on CDO is an obvious non-choice. However, I don't think I have to defend my [*] gods here.

[*] Not that any of the gods is "my" god. All of these are group efforts, very often with non-dev input.

[greepish]

Heh, okay I think this thread's run it's course since I'm favoring work on the gold god and abandoning this idea, I'll just continue whatever discussion I want over there. Lock please

[galehar]

Lock please

Since it's going off-topic and the OP is asking, done.