Beogh feedback thread


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Shoals Surfer

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Post Thursday, 28th August 2014, 21:35

Beogh feedback thread

A week or so ago a friend of mine told me about all the changes in Dcss, due to other things in my life needing priority i haven't been able/find time to play for a awhile.
One of the things he told me about are the recent changes to Beogh, i used to love playing with uh it(genderless right?) and I really liked what i heard, with some spare time on my hands I decided to see how these have panned out.

Me and my friend both tried a few Hofi^be"s and i would like to post our findings here:

Pro's:

1: I really love the new gifting interface whoever designed it kept it smooth and simple, making sure it works very intuitively, contrary to the old way of giving things which was quite a hassle and it took me and i expect most players quite some time to figure out there actually is/was a ctrl+t command to facilitate it.

2: Beogh now gifts weapons, armour and ammo, really helpfull and making it unneccessary to scum the floor or endlessly change pickup orders, to avoid the dreaded:"Arbeogh drops 255 arrows" "Arbeogh picks up 2 arrows of flaming"

Cons:

1: Only 1 gift is kindoff poor, you used to be able to create 2-3 "super" warlords with gda a nice randart weapon etc, this would give them the neccesary resists to survive the lair branches mid game and zot and similair branches later, also this seems like a nerf since even though it took some time to make them pick it up at least it was possible.

2: Beogh no longer upgrades gifted stuff or anything with an enchantment on it even if already worn by the orc, in previous versions he would enchant the armor and weapons and such you gave your orcs, I gave one of my orc warriors a chain mail (he had no armor) early to help him survive lair but it never upgraded to plate or got enchanted, even though he made it to warlord status and was with me a long time. Same thing happened with a battleaxe of freezing.

3: Even though he gifts ammo Beogh will not gift anything but bolts as far as i can tell, I gave one of my orcs a randart bow of velocity but he never gained any arrows.

4: I kindoff expected to be able to finally gift jewellery, since it was made opperable for enemies a while ago, and would greatly help giving them the resists they need to survive things like ice/poison clouds or the infamous fire crab.

Conclusion:

Beogh as far as i can tell has always been seen as one of the weaker gods, interface wise the new version is a huge improvement over the old one, still I think it would be a good thing if some of the above issues were adressed.

Mainly:

1: Only being able to gift once, maybe 3 gifts would make it so you can equip them with some lower level stuff early and upgrade it later with the cool stuff you find.

2: Make Beogh gift arrows, needles etc. if you gift a bow or blowgun.

3: Have Beogh upgrade non artifact weapons and armor you gift, and the branded versions orcs sometimes wear when they join, like he used to be able in the past.
I don't think scumming would be much of an issue since his gifts are few and far between also dragging an orc warlord along to gain a few enchant scrolls doesn't seem worth the xp drain.

bonus: Make it possible to gift orcs jewellery.
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Post Friday, 29th August 2014, 00:05

Re: Beogh feedback thread

(1) No.

(2) This should already be the case; if it's not occurring, that's a bug.

(3) This is likewise already the case.

Shoals Surfer

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Post Friday, 29th August 2014, 12:14

Re: Beogh feedback thread

PleasingFungus wrote:(1) No..


Some more eleboration on this answer would be nice, imho it was fun gifting your orcs all that cool randart crap you sadly never got to use. I can't really see it breaking the game or anything, especially since it was possible before 0.15 so why would it not be possible now?

2&3,
Well in our games it didn't work hopefully it gets fixed soon :)
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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 13:59

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Thanks for adressing these issues Lacuenta. I have been playing this game for years now and actually do not visit the tavern often, let alone reply on threads. Still, it felt like I had to make an exception this time.

Your main point is actually very valid. It seems strange to me that you cannot decide what your orcs wear anymore. The new assign item option does make the gameplay a lot smoother, but in reality it just made Beogh worse. Let's be honest, You could gift orcs with stuff in the older versions too. Sure, it was a bit of a hassle, but it was possible. Being able to only gift one item seems unreasonable to me. Especially since you could gift multiple items in older crawl versions, if done correctly. Why would I bother playing 0.15 with orcs really? The new system is more user friendly and I generally like it, but this issue really needs to be adressed. Not having the option of giving your orcs decent armour AND cool randart weaponry just sucks out all the fun that Beogh used to offer.

I am not too sure about your second and third point. I have been avoiding playing orcs in 0.15, mainly because the point made above, but I still did like five runs. Here are my findings. Player gifted stuff does not seem to grow. For example: giving your orc a shield will allow Beogh to enchant it, but he will never grow the shield to a large shield. Same seems to apply for weapons and other armour. I am not sure how it works with player gifted branded weaponry/armour, because as soon as I found out Beogh did not grow gifted items, I only gave my warlords randart equipment. My advice is to just make sure you find a few orcs in the early game already wearing plate and growing them to warlords. This way you don't have to gift them armour, because gifting good weapons seems way more important. You want your warlords to be making a difference, the weapons Beogh upgrades/enchants are often simply sub par later on. I do think he enchants weapons that were already branded when an orc joined you, but I'm not sure about player gifted branded nonrandart weaponry.I only gift them randarts/unrandarts, because these tend to offer some form of resistance.
I had the same ammo problem you had. I gifted an orc warlord a randart longbow. He got it and a few arrows. Once he fired all his arrows, Beogh never gifted new ammo for the fellow. It could be a coincidence, but that seems unlikely. Not sure if the same applies for crossbows or blowguns.
Sidenote: Beogh only gifts arbalests as ranged weapons and does not enchant the arbalests or grow them it seems. I guess growing them into triple crossbows would be quite ridiculous! :D

After having a discussion about the new Beogh with a few fellow orc players, we came to a conclusion you should take to heart Lacuenta. If you are an experienced orc player you should probably just avoid playing 0.15 and pray that in future expansions they adjust the main problem you adressed. Not being able to give your warlords good armour AND weaponry, basically means they will never be the orcs you had fun with like in older versions of crawl. They will either be weak on offense or subjected to the elements/poison. Having to choose one or the other just makes them worse as opposed to older versions of crawl and it does not improve your gaming experience in any way. Is gifting 3 items really such a difference? Did orcs get so much better in 0.15, that these restrictions have become necessary? I do not know. I do think even being able to gift 2 items would be a huge improvement.

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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 14:07

Re: Beogh feedback thread

The core idea of Beogh is to have a source of interesting (as in: growing) permanent allies. This is in itself problematic, because permanent allies lead to micromanagement. So all Beogh changes try to reduce micromanagement (inter-level recall, monsters & allies don't pick up items). If players could issue Give and Take commands, they'd do that. For every single orc. (And if you tell me that *you* wouldn't do that, it won't affect my reasoning -- "it's the fault of everyone doing that if they bore themselves" is not design, it's an excuse to avoid design).

The fact that you can give exactly one item to fellow orcs is good, because it forces decisions: when to give, and what to give. If you can give several or even many items, then this choice is diluted.

None of these questions are related to Beogh power. That's a different concern which can (and has been and will be) addressed through other ways, for example frequency and strength of Beogh blessings.

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Meticulousdrifter

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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 15:41

Re: Beogh feedback thread

It is not that I do not understand the reasoning behind the change to just being able to gift 1 item. I just do not feel like, as I mentioned in my previous post, this change has made my experience with Beogh more fun/interesting. This is, of course, completely subjective and just based on my personal experience with orcs. I am very happy that it is possible to play older versions of crawl, so players wo dislike certain changes have a chance to play in conditions they feel are more suited to their personal taste.

It is hard for me to get used to the fact that orcs just got a bit worse in 0.15, but I understand why this change was implemented. Really wish there was another way to make Beogh a bit more powerfull to compensate for this loss (maybe let him brand weapons/armour for orcs? Maybe that is too good...), but this is probably not the place to discuss this. Thanks for the quick reply dpeg! Maybe I'll give 0.15 another shot with orcs, because I really do appreciate most of the other changes 0.15 offered (bye bye Cloak of Preservation!).

I'll do a couple of runs with orcs on 0.15, just to test wether or not the ammo issue on player gifted ranged weapons Lacuenta made apparent is actually true. It seems he is right, but I am not completely sure. I will also be testing if player gifted non artifact armours/weapons grow, but I am pretty sure Beogh only enchants them, as Lacuenta stated.

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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 17:17

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Meticulousdrifter wrote:It is not that I do not understand the reasoning behind the change to just being able to gift 1 item. I just do not feel like, as I mentioned in my previous post, this change has made my experience with Beogh more fun/interesting.

This is probably because you weren't playing Optimally. The optimal approach for Beogh was immensely tedious, comparable to acting as though every monster with an unidentified glowing weapon has a weapon of distortion.
A game should not punish people for having fun, and it definitely shouldn't reward people for making the game less fun.

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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 18:42

Re: Beogh feedback thread

It is hard for me to say how optimal I play with Beogh. I usually finished the game with a bunch of warlords with the weapons/armour I wanted them to wear, without dying too often, and without losing too much warlords(ofcourse in some runs a warlord or 2 of mine did die to be fair, damn you Depths). Have to agree on the tedious part. Keeping your warlords alive was and still is a battle of patience and planning. And, at least with 0.15 you do not have to go through the boring process of making them pick up the stuff you want them to.

I just did a quick test run with a gang of four orcs, all of which I gifted branded nonartifact weapons and discovered that the branded gifted weapons do grow and can get enchanted. It is just a fairly slow proces it seems. After clearing the lair with the orc crew, one of the four branded weapons grew(dagger elec evolved to long sword elec). So at least branded gifted weapons do grow. Would it be safe to assume this means armours do as well?

I'll be tackling the ammo issue later on.

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Post Saturday, 30th August 2014, 23:00

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Okay, so I tested the ammo issue and the armour issue in a quick run.

I took 3 orcs to the lair. One was wearing a shortbow(velocity), one was wearing a blowgun and one was wearing a chain mail. I gifted them these items. After getting to lair 4 I dumped the orc with the chain mail, because he had gotten his chain mail evolved to a plate armour. This proves that the armour issue Lacuenta pointed out proved to be wrong, I saw no reason to keep him in the gang. I took the 2 orcs(blowgun, shortbow) and ventured on to lair 8. After clearing lair 8, the arrows from the orc to whom I had gifted the shortbow had been replenished. So I ditched him. I took the one orc with the empty blowgun(it had been empty since lair3) to the snake pits. I cleared the first four levels of the snake pit, but he still did not have ammo. Then I quit the game. It would seem that blowgun ammo does not get replenished, though in theory it could be a coincidence that it did not.

I've had some time to think this over. I did have the same problem Lacuenta had in another game. I gifted a randart longbow to an orc when I was getting my second rune in that run and he never got any arrows gifted to him afterwards, basically the same problem Lacuenta experienced. Even after getting 4 runes and clearing Zot the orc did not manage to get fresh ammo. However at the time I gave the longbow, I already had a gang of about 8 orcs (5/6 warlords and 2/3 orc knights). About 5 orcs already had arbalests gifted to them by Beogh at the time, and more got arbalests later on as the gang grew to a total of about 10 warlords. I can only conclude one thing: because Beogh randomly gifts ammo, the orc with the randart longbow probably got unlucky and never got arrows. Because of the amount of ranged weapon wielders in the gang, chances of him getting ammo were probably actually pretty low.

To conclude: ammo for bows does get replenished. Beogh does grow gifted inferior armour(not sure about armour with any form of resistance, did not test those, but I assume he grows them too). Blowgun ammo does not seem to get replenished, but I could be wrong since I did quit after Snake Pits 4. It does not really matter either way, I do not think there should be a reason to give orcs blowguns anyway. :)

Shoals Surfer

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Post Wednesday, 3rd September 2014, 16:07

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Lacuenta, if you have even a tiny bit of technical capability I strongly encourage you to download the source code and modify the game as you see fit. I completely agree with your first point and it is extremely simple to enable endless gifting to your minions. You just have to comment out a few lines of code in beogh_can_gift_items_to() which is in godabil.cc and recompile. After I did this, I enjoyed Beogh a lot more. Fiddling with minion equipment isn't boring to me and it sounds like it wouldn't be boring to you. Feel free to PM me if you need a hand figuring it out.
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Post Sunday, 7th September 2014, 20:22

Re: Beogh feedback thread

skjarl wrote:Lacuenta, if you have even a tiny bit of technical capability I strongly encourage you to download the source code and modify the game as you see fit. I completely agree with your first point and it is extremely simple to enable endless gifting to your minions. You just have to comment out a few lines of code in beogh_can_gift_items_to() which is in godabil.cc and recompile. After I did this, I enjoyed Beogh a lot more. Fiddling with minion equipment isn't boring to me and it sounds like it wouldn't be boring to you. Feel free to PM me if you need a hand figuring it out.


I looked into making this change for myself, but compiling the code seems to involve tracking down and installing a bunch of different items, and the INSTALL.TXT is apparently out of date. Any chance you could just upload the crawl.exe binary somewhere to save those of us who'd like to try it out some headaches?
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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 00:13

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Beogh is terrible. Though it doesn't really matter since Hill Orcs are really easy. You'd expect Beogh to be the best god since only one species can follow him but for some reason he's Xom tier.

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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 14:13

Re: Beogh feedback thread

snow wrote:You'd expect Beogh to be the best god since only one species can follow him but for some reason he's Xom tier.

snow wrote:Beogh is terrible. Though it doesn't really matter since Hill Orcs are really easy.

Seems like you just answered your own question there. Why give an easy species a particularly easy god?

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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 16:52

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Why give a species a particular god?


The question that should have been asked.

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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 21:29

Re: Beogh feedback thread

damiac wrote:
Why give a species a particular god?


The question that should have been asked.


The problem is that it's a self feeding system. Hill Orcs only exist because of Beogh and Beogh only exists because of Hill Orcs. The problem is we already have a god that's basically Beogh only better (Yredelemnul) and three species that do what Hill Orcs do only better (high elves for casters, humans for the middle ground, and minotaurs for the melee dudes) so there's really no place for them. They're the most pointless species ever lol. For the record, I liked lava orcs and feel sad that they didn't replace hill orcs.

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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 21:57

Re: Beogh feedback thread

HO have more HP than HE and Hu, so you can hardly say they're inferior. Their similarity to Mi is obviously a subject of historical contention, but they are a lot better at magic (while Mi are better at non-magic).

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Post Monday, 8th September 2014, 21:59

Re: Beogh feedback thread

I could argue that HO make better "casters" than HE. Possibly better "melee" characters than Mi too (and that was definitely true when they had Hu XP aptitude!).

Unless by better you mean that HE are more typical "mages" while Mi are more typical "meleedudes" due to aptitudes (the part where you mention Hu suggests that), and not their "power level".

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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 16:49

Re: Beogh feedback thread

I play a lot of HO, and I play 0 games with Beogh... HO are a very good race and Beogh has nothing to do with that.

The only problem with HO is that you basically have to use axes due to the +3 apt, and I hate axes more and more every time I use them...

EDIT: I do wish Beogh didn't exist, because he's hogging the passive armor boost that I would rather see on a smith god everyone can use...

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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 17:49

Re: Beogh feedback thread

The smith god stalled because the main person who took charge for coding it up is not doing Crawl coding at the moment. The smith god gave a passive boost to "metal" (ring scale chain plate) armors and possibly there was less worry about overlap precisely because Beogh can only be worshiped by one species.

But yeah HO are very good quite apart from their ability to worship Beogh. I usually take M&F or Long Blades on them despite the Axes aptitude.
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 19:07

Re: Beogh feedback thread

does anyone know how can I change the game to limit the amount of orcs I have? I say that in every beogh thread, you guys must hate me, but the only reason I dont play beogh is because having more than 9 followers is pointless and annoying and you will always get more and more shitty orcs to make your screen messy. I just want to say "not recruiting anymore, thanks for applying."
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 19:24

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Hirsch I wrote:does anyone know how can I change the game to limit the amount of orcs I have? I say that in every beogh thread, you guys must hate me, but the only reason I dont play beogh is because having more than 9 followers is pointless and annoying and you will always get more and more shitty orcs to make your screen messy. I just want to say "not recruiting anymore, thanks for applying."


Go to a cleared level, tell them to wait, go to another level, start recalling them and instantly stop recalling when you have enough followers around you.
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 19:29

Re: Beogh feedback thread

and repeat every time a orc enters LOS. thats just too annoying. after the 5th time I did that, i just go ctrlqyes instead.
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 19:57

Re: Beogh feedback thread

Hirsch I: I think setting the number of orcs you want with you is actually okay. We certainly don't want players to handpick orcs; just take the N strongest ones, and off you go. Not sure either if a number prompt is necessary, a pretty discrete list should suffice. What about
0, 3, 6, 9, 12, all?
Would that help? (The idea is that orcs keep converting to your cause, they just stop walking by your side -- until you call them. There is the extra issue that it's hard to raise orcs in the later part, and we are aware of it.)
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 20:49

Re: Beogh feedback thread

that would be awesome.
exactly the same power level for the player, without the annoying screen pollution.
if setting the ammount of orcs manually is a problem, I think it could be set at 9 (or 12 if being closer to orc jesus is desirable), as it is a manageable number, and you will still be quite powerful.
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 21:00

Re: Beogh feedback thread

I think it's psychologically better if the player does not have to make an almost continuous choice ("Hm, do I want 7 or 8 orcs on D:14?") but rather few, distinct ones. There's probably a technical term for this. As for as Beoghites go, it's clear that we want options
0 = none, a = all, and something in between.
Would just one number do? Everyone likes 12, of course, but I guess a smaller number might be warranted as well.
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Post Tuesday, 9th September 2014, 21:22

Re: Beogh feedback thread

I think 0, 6 12, all is enough. but I can see the problem with having to choose the amount of followers every level. a maximum of 2 numbers besides zero and all, quite far apart, would be ideal, IMO.
0, 3, 12, all. 3 should priorize one priest, one wizard and one fighter, while 12 takes only the best ones. that way, the only choice is between an army or an elite force, so you would not have to change it so frequently. also, finishing the game with 3 trusty orcs will feel pretty different from doing so with 12, or an army, and thats a good thing as well.
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