Spell: Animate Golem

[mumra]

Getting some feedback before I wikify the idea. Overall this proposal might just be too complicated for one spell, but I think it's interesting in both tactical and strategic senses and has a lot of choices - and (in my opinion) very balanced for a high level spell, at least it has some defined balancing mechanics which can be easily tuned.

Background
The golems you meet in the dungeon [as well as proposed player golems] were raised using mysterious a powerful ancient rite, both exhausting and time-consuming. This is not that spell. Tukima was able to devise a much easier process which, whilst being far more usable in the field, tends to produce somewhat inferior results. They can still hit hard, but are flimsy and have a tendency to fall apart under stress. Golems can be animated from a variety of ready-made materials, but require a scroll to be consumed in the process.

Spell
A high-level Hex spell. From a "magic theory" standpoint, this is a very advanced version of Tukima's Dance (perhaps Tukima invented the spell purely to raise virtual dance partners...) The basic interface is straightforward - target an adjacent square to select the source material, then if the spell casts successfully you select one of the valid scrolls from your inventory. The golem will always be friendly. Its HP will be scaled by spell power (and perhaps your skill with a relevant element).

Gameplay
I wanted to differentiate these from normal summons (and hence another reason they're in Hexes), in that rather than send them up front to battle for you, they work better as support and backup, and you have to get into the action. If you send them in against tough foes they'll get annihilated quickly, however as long as you are primarily drawing the enemy fire, or disabling enemies with other hexes, they are very good at dealing damage for you. It takes multiple turns to cast, so you don't usually want to be doing it during a fight; you prepare the golems beforehand, and the tactics come about in how you use them during a fight.

Balancing
These are permanent allies; but they have low HP, almost no EV, and cannot be healed. Additionally, instead of anything like an artifical summons cap, they are designed in such a way that having more gives increasingly diminishing returns; to the point where keeping too many might even have a negative impact and be downright dangerous. There are two parts to this limitation: firstly, a malus to a golems' performance when it's on a tile adjacent to another golem. This is because they're great, lumbering things, they tend to bump into and trip over each other. The effect is multiplicative to the point where a golem surrounded by eight others will be functionally paralysed. The second part is with somewhat intentionally broken AI; the golems will get in each others' firing line and, whilst they'll never make any attack that might directly hit the player, they have a "blind spot" for other golems. So if you try and take in an army they'll end up hurting each more than the enemy. The desired strategy is for players to hand-pick a small unit of 1-3 types of golems for a given fight, and try to keep them alive.

This spell also encourages moving out of corridors; in the open when the golems have space they will try to avoid standing directly next to each other if there aren't too many of them. In corridors they'll get bunched up and become less effective, hiding behind them will mean they just get killed, and standing in front of them they might as well not be there.

Scrolls
Which scroll you choose to create the golem with imbues it with certain intrinsic properties. Rarer / more powerful scrolls generally give better effects; it should be worthwhile using up these very valuable items. Some scrolls are not allowed because they'd make no thematic sense, these are mainly the curse-related scrolls. Not sure about acquirement, it's omitted for the moment; could be an interesting decision and produce a semi-randomised set of properties, so something it'll be mundane, sometimes great.

Enchant weapon: Bonus to damage output, accuracy, or both, depending on the scroll
Enchant armour: Bonus AC
Blink: Phase golem has better EV than most
Teleport: Has an intrinsic uncontrolled blink which it uses whenever it gets damaged [Note: It might seem that the Blink scroll should get the blink effect, but I considered that EV is overall more powerful than an rBlink and should therefore get awarded for the rarer and more valuable scroll. A plain uncontrolled teleport wouldn't be very useful. The effects are themed around the scroll, not necessarily the most obvious effect.]
Fog: Emits fog, creating LOS control.
Silence: Has a small silence aura.
Holy Word: Holy golem, rN and/or holy branded melee
Torment: Pain branded melee
Immolation: rF+, occasionally produces a small immolation explosion (e.g. 2 tile radius)
Random Effects: Chaos golem, somewhat unpredictable

Some I'm less sure about, these scrolls could be omitted instead:

Vulnerability: Has a debuffing attack or suppression aura
Vorpalise: Perhaps a random brand (from those not available via scrolls or materials)
Noise: Singing golem. Draws attention to itself instead of you.
Recharging: The only golem that can heal - at the expense of max HP
Fear: Terrifying golem, will occasionally attempt to cause fear in a single target
Summoning: Summons spammals / butterflies in small quantities

Omitted: acquirement, amnesia, curse armour/jewellery/weapon, detected curse, identify, magic mapping, remove curse. It might be possible to suggest effects for some of these, but the theme wouldn't be great, they're too common and not valuable enough to present a decision, and it's just simpler from both dev and player point of view to just stick to more obvious effects.

Books: [Optional] A book can be used instead of a scroll. The golem won't have any intrinsics like above, but will get a random selection of up to 3 spells from the book [obviously the spells are filtered first, as not all spells are appropriate or usable for a non-player character]

Materials
Different source materials will produce different base types of golem.

Earth (floor): Clay golem. Fire heats them up, increasing their speed; cold slows them down; but the clay is liable to shatter under the expansion / contraction whenever they heat up or cool down.
Rock: Rock golem. Slightly tougher than clay, otherwise mundane.
Stone: Stone golem. Tougher than rock. [Needs something else to differentiate]
Lava: Lava golem. Immune to fire. Hurls clods of molten rock (which gradually deplete its health).
Metal: Iron golem. Stronger than other golems.
Crystal: Behaves partially as crystal wall (chance to reflect fire and cold beams)
Ice: rC++ rF-
Wax: Damage shaving, rF-
Glass (translucent rock/stone): The ultimate glass cannon. Extremely fragile, but has MR bonus. Energy spells (IMB, IOOD) can pass right through them [optional]
Gold: Something to consider. Interface-wise it wouldn't fit, since you can't drop a stack of gold. This should consume a good quantity of gold and perhaps grant intrinsic reflection.

Items: Armour golem. This should be considered optional since it's more complicated, but will allow some customisation and flexibility in building golems. The idea is that you pile a set of items on the floor and cast the spell on the stack. The golem is raised from those materials. Valid items are armour (no robes/leather, gauntlets not gloves, helms not hats), weaponry, and shields. No jewellery whatsoever. A golem can be raised from a single body armour, but it will tend to fumble its melee strikes. If you want it to carry a weapon you'll need gauntlets as well. Boots will aid movement. You can only use one of each armour or weapon slot in a single golem to create a valid set. If you attempt to cast the spell on an invalid stack, a message will state as much, and the spell won't be cast. You can use bardings, but the rest of the armour set must be a valid one for the species to which the barding belongs (i.e. no boots). The golem will adopt the properties of the items they are built from, with some modification; e.g. they will only get a fraction of the AC. When it dies it turns back into the stack of items, so you can create it again with another scroll (as long as nothing is standing there). If the golem is damaged by acid it may leave the items corroded when it dies.

No one source material should produce a strictly better golem than any other; the above list needs further tweaking to ensure this.

Combinations
Because you are able to pick both a material and a scroll (and potentially combinations of items) there are many builds of golem to experiment with. Since players will only be using 2 or 3 at most at any given time, they will want to experiment with different combinations of builds to find an optimal set to support their playstyle in different types of battle.

Other Notes
I realise that, despite the balancing controls described, this proposal could still have serious issues (especially with all the [optional] bits). It also allows a circumvention of weight/inventory restrictions by getting items to carry themselves. However this is always at the cost of a consumable resource, and trivial scrolls such as random effects or immolation will have potentially dangerous side effects. The list of allowed scrolls can easily be reduced.

It's also just very complicated and perhaps requires too much information to use effectively.

[Infinitum]

Items: Armour golem. This should be considered optional since it's more complicated, but will allow some customisation and flexibility in building golems. The idea is that you pile a set of items on the floor and cast the spell on the stack. The golem is raised from those materials. Valid items are armour (no robes/leather, gauntlets not gloves, helms not hats), weaponry, and shields. No jewellery whatsoever. A golem can be raised from a single body armour, but it will tend to fumble its melee strikes. If you want it to carry a weapon you'll need gauntlets as well. Boots will aid movement. You can only use one of each armour or weapon slot in a single golem to create a valid set. If you attempt to cast the spell on an invalid stack, a message will state as much, and the spell won't be cast. You can use bardings, but the rest of the armour set must be a valid one for the species to which the barding belongs (i.e. no boots). The golem will adopt the properties of the items they are built from, with some modification; e.g. they will only get a fraction of the AC. When it dies it turns back into the stack of items, so you can create it again with another scroll (as long as nothing is standing there). If the golem is damaged by acid it may leave the items corroded when it dies.

This. The armor golem suggestion is the better of the two by far - more intuitive, uses existing mechanic (twisted resurection), less abusable in that supplementary armor pieces are relatively rare (in fact, having the spell require a full set to work is probably for the best to prevent spam). It's probably easier to implement ingame as well - max HP and base accuracy are determined by spell power, then just add AC, Damage and special perks equal to the equipment used. Maybe add a chance of corroding each item used in the creation should the Golem bite it (or destroy it outright should it be at maximum negative enchantment level) to provide an incentive to play somewhat carefully with them. Could make for an interesting minigame assembling and maintaining minions.

[mumra]

Items: Armour golem. This should be considered optional since it's more complicated, but will allow some customisation and flexibility in building golems. The idea is that you pile a set of items on the floor and cast the spell on the stack. The golem is raised from those materials. Valid items are armour (no robes/leather, gauntlets not gloves, helms not hats), weaponry, and shields. No jewellery whatsoever. A golem can be raised from a single body armour, but it will tend to fumble its melee strikes. If you want it to carry a weapon you'll need gauntlets as well. Boots will aid movement. You can only use one of each armour or weapon slot in a single golem to create a valid set. If you attempt to cast the spell on an invalid stack, a message will state as much, and the spell won't be cast. You can use bardings, but the rest of the armour set must be a valid one for the species to which the barding belongs (i.e. no boots). The golem will adopt the properties of the items they are built from, with some modification; e.g. they will only get a fraction of the AC. When it dies it turns back into the stack of items, so you can create it again with another scroll (as long as nothing is standing there). If the golem is damaged by acid it may leave the items corroded when it dies.

This. The armor golem suggestion is the better of the two by far - more intuitive, uses existing mechanic (twisted resurection), less abusable in that supplementary armor pieces are relatively rare (in fact, having the spell require a full set to work is probably for the best to prevent spam). It's probably easier to implement ingame as well - max HP and base accuracy are determined by spell power, then just add AC, Damage and special perks equal to the equipment used. Maybe add a chance of corroding each item used in the creation should the Golem bite it (or destroy it outright should it be at maximum negative enchantment level) to provide an incentive to play somewhat carefully with them. Could make for an interesting minigame assembling and maintaining minions.

Well ... Twisted Resurrection works completely differently in .10, it animates all corpses in sight to simplify the interface. But, the important gameplay feature here is the strategical idea of building a "squad" of golem units with varying abilities. Armour Golems cover a lot of bases and can give you the most flexible / powerful golems, but the other golems should still be viable options for certain situations.

However, partly due to the lack of response to this thread, I guessed the idea didn't take people much. And as I already commented it's probably far too complicated for a spell. Instead I've started thinking about this idea of a "golem god" who gives you this ability along with certain other things. It's a military / strategy flavour god, in line with the original purpose of golems.

[Blade]

I generally try to comment on threads primarily when I have something to suggest, etc., so I hadn't said anything here before.

That said, I quite like this idea. It feels complex but not terrible difficult to implement, and very nicely balanced. I would be interested to see it in Crawl. The one thing I'm not quite sure about is what niche it would fill -- summoners already have their "kill everything" spells, and hex users generally focus on the sneaky stabby side of things. If hexes had more spells not focused on stabbing (something I would personally be very glad to see), this spell could fit well; until, then, though, I have a hard time imagining much use for it.

[mumra]

I generally try to comment on threads primarily when I have something to suggest, etc., so I hadn't said anything here before.

That said, I quite like this idea. It feels complex but not terrible difficult to implement, and very nicely balanced. I would be interested to see it in Crawl. The one thing I'm not quite sure about is what niche it would fill -- summoners already have their "kill everything" spells, and hex users generally focus on the sneaky stabby side of things. If hexes had more spells not focused on stabbing (something I would personally be very glad to see), this spell could fit well; until, then, though, I have a hard time imagining much use for it.

Yes, the hexes school still needs some development. I think this spell could work quite well alongside existing hexes - e.g. using silence / invis / darkness to control the battlefield. I'm still in two minds about whether to change it completely into a god proposal.