God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry


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Temple Termagant

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 14:08

God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Greetings, I'm new here. (Probably a bad way to introduce a god proposal, I know.)

I'm a web programmer from Sydney AU; been crawling and nethacking for 20-odd years. Tempted now and then to try hacking crawl, and may yet.

I've put a god proposal up on the wiki >> https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... e:symmetry

Meet Euquanauque, God of Symmetry. --- Note, Updated in reply to some initial feedback, see below.

Also known as: One last crack at solving the Dual Wielding balance problem, by making it a god's gift. I'm aware, of course, that Dual Wielding is on the list of Refused and Rejected Concepts; I'm proposing that making it a god's gift provides a few elegant and genuinely crawly ways to skirt the balancing problems, esp. by linking them with compensating challenges.

This seems to me to fit the crawl style of gods pretty nicely. There's a motivation for the God that is a single, unified, believable concept (aesthetics, not just “Likes you killing stuff!”). And it has unique and fundamentally plausible implications for game-play ("... but still helps you kill stuff!") which empower a particular playing style (light-armour + high-dexterity) that I think is currently disadvantaged relative to heavy armour, and could use a non-magical damage boost to give that playing style some extra legs, like Dithmenos did for stabbers.

And for the absolute pedants, it helps explain the in-game existence of Blademasters, who can just be assumed to be its worshippers.

Critique away! With TWO keyboards...
Last edited by DeptOfElf on Sunday, 8th February 2015, 19:02, edited 2 times in total.

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 15:48

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

"Having a palindromic name"
"It can be lowered by misspelling or abbreviating Euquanauque's name, e.g. in a comment."

this isn't nethack, that kind of interface goofery isn't what's done around here

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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 15:58

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Wow. There's a lot going on there, even besides the dual wield proposal.

I like how quirky it is; the god comes off like a god of OCD (clean and sweep, not to mention the balance requirements). I'm not sure if it would end up being annoying and leading to weird meta-game behaviors like "don't pick up scrolls until you've found an even number of them" or gaming the enchantment equalization system.

Also, the game doesn't have item destruction anymore, so that may moot a few items in your list (like protecting even-numbered stacks).

It's very interesting overall and I'd love to see more god proposals like it.

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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 16:29

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

1) "This, of course, prevents praying being used as a simple Apportation device to grab the goods and run away." What would be wrong with that? It'd certainly be more useful than the other effects of praying to E.

2) The obsession with even numbers is silly, and as grisamentum suspected, it would absolutely lead to annoying weird behaviors.

3) The implementation of Dual Wielding is full of restrictions and odd requirements and side effects and toggles. Why is this complexity needed? If you're going to make a god entirely to implement something in the "Won't Do" list, you could at least make it actually let you do that thing, and in a simple and intuitive manner.

4) Aesthetic Credit is another layer of complexity that doesn't need to exist. Why not just use Piety or even Invocations skill? For a god that "eschews complexity and encumbrance, and instead favours minimalism", there sure is a lot of fiddly crap.

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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 16:55

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Sounds like you just came with a nice god idea for a game that doesnt exist yet.
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Temple Termagant

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 18:57

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Thanks -- Some very good comments. I found myself agreeeing with most of them, and I think the proposal is better for the feedback.

  • Euque's thing about palindromes is gone.
  • Euque's predilection for even numbering is gone (together with destroying odd items), a similar effect is now achieved with penalties on encumbrance and measures against hoarding unused goods.
  • Sweep now simply stacks similar objects neatly by the walls, and doesn't touch artifacts and runes. -- Resolves my apportation concerns.
  • Dual wield is much simpler and clearer. No differing skill requirements per weapon type. Restricted purely to melee weapons.
  • A few options have been dropped to the status of IDEA, to be added or left out as tuning requires.

Let me know if you think that looks any better.

(Curious about Dynast's comment.)

Dungeon Master

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 19:14

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Uh, encumbrance also doesn't exist in the current (5-month-old) stable version of Crawl. Nor does permanent corrosion. It might be worth getting a bit more up-to-date with what's changed in 0.15 and what is changing in 0.16.

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 19:41

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Functional:
* So there's no such thing as encumberance or weight left in the game, all things related to encumberance are meaningless in this proposal, unless you're suggesting re-introducing it for this god (which sounds terrible and awful and plain old no good)
* There is no "item corrosion" left in the game
* Skills in game can't be tied to gods, you can't create new skills or remove them when someone stops worshipping a god.
* Creating a toggle between "focus on one creature" and "hit things nearby" makes the interface for generic melee combat fiddly and annoying.
Unclear:
* You don't explain what you mean by "dual wielding" in the context of attacking things, does it simply attack with both weapons, how long does each attack take (Somewhere between "as long as it would take to attack with both weapons once" and "as long as it would take to attack with the longer-delay weapon once" I would imagine????)
* Clean: there's no description of what this does
* Sweep: this appears to be simply aesthetic, does it have an in-game effect? (Since it's on the 'p'ray key maybe 'clean' and 'sweep' are intended to gain piety? If the in game effect is "piety gain", what prevents the player from distributing things around a room, "sweeping" to clean it, then picking up the items and redistributing them again ad nauseum)
* It's unclear what's meant by "two identical creatures" do they have to be the exact same monster? Do they have to have the same conditions applied to them (e.g. slow/haste/etc)? Did they have to roll exactly the same number of max Hps?
Balance:
* Hoarding is already mostly suboptimal (There's no encumberance in the game any longer) as such this is not really "anti-hoarding" so much as it is "you can't keep consumable items around for when you need them" This is a HUGE penalty, as it basically negates a large part of the tactical thinking that needs to go into difficult situations in the game (the main thing that makes one go from a not-winner to a winner of crawl is being able to use the correct consumables at the right times, no-one should be able to steamroll all situations in the game without a large degree of luck) It also means rare things that are needed for unusual situations (cure mutations et al) are completely made worthless. Such a large penalty would need to be offset with god powers that could supplant the lack of consumable use, which does not appear to be the case.
* Having to use two of the same type of ring is also a significant penalty, it pretty much restricts you to AC or EV or slaying rings, all other rings of the same type aren't usually as effective to double up on.
* Doppelganger is super powerful, being able to swap with it freely means that you can use it as an awkward cBlink, an ability which is both very powerful and extremely awkward to use means lots of awkward annoying attempts to 'game' it into what you want to do with it.
* "Even out" seems abusable, if it has a chance to remove creatures in LOS to "even" them out, doesn't that imply that I can run around and manipulate LOS until all packs are reduced to 2? Horribly tedious tactics for net gain with no danger are an anathema to good game design.
* It seems like this would fit overly well with races which rely on evasion, and be horrible for races which are bad at evasion.
* It seems like this god is completely useless (actually a net loss) for spellcasting characters
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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 20:00

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

What i meant is that i had such i good time reading your idea, but as far as putting this god on DCSS goes theres some issues:

Clean and sweep used for floor clearing in order to gain piety(correct me if i got it wrong) could lead to tiresome floor management(and it used to be a way to gain piety with nemelex, which was then changed to piety on exploration for good);
Dex boost and Evasion game needs to be properly balanced, i dont see anything wrong there except some species dont even need that much EV or dex;
Equalize objects would be pretty much useless in comparison to Duplicate artifact and overall be a bad trade;
Doppelganger is effectively the same thing as using summon butterflies and blinking, the idea still has potential though;
Timed loot would never catch on because it punishes autoexploring and backtracking;
The idea of dual wielding with this god is to use twin weapons, which equals using a single weapon with half the attack delay(except in the case of weapons with atribute/resistance/etc bonus).

My thoughts on Dual Wield:

It shouldnt penalize encumbrance or it could remove the armour skill from the player and restrict him to robes/hides;
It shoudlnt penalize spellcasting because that may remove access to very supportative spells that squishy, robe wearing species usually latch on to (like shroud of golubria or phase shift).
Hitting two targets at once instead of hitting the same target twice is not optimal behavior, it would be used only on weak foes for evasion game and to quickly dispose of nom threats. Also, considering how random the combat roll is it could be very hard to kill two threatening targets at the same time(the evasion bonus doesnt make up for being hit by two foes at the same time instead of one, but thats situational). Maybe it should be a active temporary ability to make the adjacent target take the same ammount of damage as the one you are hitting.

You could also add wrath to this god, making it constantly summon illusion copies of the enemies you are fighting.
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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 20:13

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Thanks especially, Siegurt. I'll have a think about these and come back to it tomorrow.

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 20:40

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

DeptOfElf wrote:Greetings, I'm new here. (Probably a bad way to introduce a god proposal, I know.)


New or not, you put some time and thought into the proposal, and you are taking criticism well. Those are very good signs.

There's a lot going on here and a number of problematic ideas, but some of that has already been raised, so I will focus on what I think are some of the more promising or interesting things about the proposal.


1.) A conduct that makes consumable items perishable, whether you are carrying them or not. Notes:

+ This is different from current gods' conducts, even the harsh ones. It is somewhat similar to Jiyva, as an anti-stashing conduct. However, it is a much more serious anti-stashing conduct, and in addition it could seriously affect game play and would, I think, give Crawl a different dynamic and feel.
+ An additional idea is that, rather than hating encumbrance (now removed), this god could limit the number of item slots in your inventory. (Not sure how I feel about this; however, since the god would be majorly anti-stashing, you couldn't just juggle your inventory around to side-step this conduct. Anyway, it is an additional idea.)
+ Certain powers or abilities would need to be given by this god in order to balance this conduct and make it not annoying, while still keeping it strict enough that it impacts game play meaningfully. If the "perishability" applies to permafood items, for instance, you'd need to think of some abilities to counteract that (reduced hunger costs based on piety, etc.)
+ There would be lots of different ways to "flavor" this or justify it thematically; I'd focus first on getting a good mechanical framework for the god, and then fill in the flavor later. (Just off the top of my head: god of asceticism, god of decay, a connoisseur/collector god (takes items from you, gives piety in return), etc.)



2.) A version of dual wielding that might actually work in the game. However, I would caution against just making DWing give you more damage, in which case it is just a (potentially cheaper, skill-wise) version of wielding a big two-hander. In this respect I offer a few ideas/observations:

+ Min-delay and damage roll are handled the same way, you just get two attempts to hit. However, based on weapon skill, the difficulty of attacking with two weapons could badly hurt spell casting success (not power), and/or give an EV malus, and/or provides an accuracy penalty to your weapon attacks. You need higher weapon skill than min-delay in order to offset these penalties, but no amount of skill will completely eliminate them.
+ Based on weapon skill, attacking while Dual Wielding has a chance for one of your weapons (at random) getting a low-tier stab. This wouldn't add a ton of damage for non-short blade dual wielders, but it would offer an incentive to dual wield short blades, change the feel of combat, and would provide an additional way for s. blade users to consistently melee high AC enemies in the late game that they couldn't get stabs against via hexes, invisibility, or luck. This would also (potentially) provide an incentive for higher training of weapon skill than just reaching min-delay, especially if combined with above point.
+ Other things would have to be handled on a case-by-case basis, for balance. (E.g., vine stalkers probably should not get two bites when dual wielding.)
+ In terms of thinking about the balance of this for damage output, it could be (at one extreme) comparable to permanent, passive finesse. So some of the stuff above would probably need to go along with it, in order to keep it from being quite *that* good. Even if the god's conduct ends up being quite strict, straight-up (effective) double damage output passively is a huge boost. Among other things, haste, and perhaps also !might or other buffs, would almost certainly have to be banned for DW not to be completely broken (with whatever flavor justification, although some kind of "asceticism" flavor seems to apply quite nicely here as well).



3.) The god could have a good game play niche, forcing additional risk (significantly less ability to rely on consumables; at least certain buffs are banned), while offering high reward (very high passive damage boost). This theme or feel could also be developed with active abilities. Certainly, I think duplicate artefact—Gozag offers [EDIT: oops, not artefact, but the point about similarity/redundancy still stands] duplication of anything, once per game, already—and the other item-management-type abilities should be cut, with some abilities that are much more tactically-oriented being put in as replacements.

While on that topic: other things that step on other god's toes (passive dex boost is basically the same as 1/3 of what Chei offers) should also be dispensed with.

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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 21:04

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Welcome to GDD, DeptOfElf. Thanks for providing detailed proposal.

Generally speaking, if you want a god added to the game, you need to write the code for it yourself, but I think you will find that a lot of this god's features would be difficult to implement within Crawl, particularly the fiddly ones that are mostly for flavor.

Beyond that, it looks to me like this god is focused on flavor first and gameplay last. Many of the details of this god as suggested seem to encourage tedious behavior (last-hitting, acid damage, dungeon cleaning, symmetry). Overall, the purpose of the god is to solely to allow dual-wielding, but you haven't yet laid out a case describing why that would be a positive thing for Crawl, and what dual-wielding effectively means isn't well addressed. Since you're encouraging dual-wielding so strongly and almost every other aspect of the god is a drawback, it should do something more than hit twice with the same weapon in the time it takes to hit once with that weapon -- after all, that's what Finesse does, and it does it elegantly and without all the other OCD stuff in this proposal.

Feedback on specific aspects of the proposal:
* Having acid attacks lower your piety would be like stepping back into the days when acid damaged equipment: You'd do tedious stuff to avoid taking acid damage so that you didn't lose a permanent resource to an otherwise petty and irrelevant enemy.
* Having piety rely on killing things simultaneously mostly means axes and AOE conjurations are particularly favored, neither of which are otherwise well-supported by this god.
* The "a" and "b" slots in your inventory aren't necessarily wear/wield spots -- suddenly equipping or unequipping things in slot b based on piety change is both an awful interface and also potentially hazardous with distortion/contam/vamp weapons. It also has a weird interaction with curses.
* Light armour is already quite good, so restricting heavy armour feels like a needless limitation of options rather than a balancing restriction of the god.
* Clean would be easy to have destroy items you wanted by accident.
* If sweep offers benefits (e.g. piety), it would be incredibly tedious to use, and, as was pointed out above, abusable for tedious infinite piety. If it doesn't give piety, it's like an irritatingly limited form of Apport.
* Siegurt already pointed out the issue w/ the anti-hoarding idea and doppelganger. To add slightly on Doppelganger, using it as controlled blink is by far its strongest and most frustrating use.
* Equalize Objects is a bad ability aside from the god's symmetry requirements, as you note. It also allows altering artefacts, which is otherwise totally off-limits in Crawl.
* Duplicate is the same as a Gozag ability, except that it allows duplicating artefacts, which is off-limits to Gozag because artefacts are immutable and unique in Crawl.
* Generally speaking gods should offer wrath unless there's a compelling reason not to. Switching gods should never be easy, and particularly gods that offer you ways to get or alter equipment and spells.

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DeptOfElf

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Post Sunday, 8th February 2015, 21:14

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

what
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cerebovssquire, duvessa

Temple Termagant

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Post Monday, 9th February 2015, 10:39

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Alright.... Big thanks to Siegurt, Lasty, "and into", and dynast for the last round of feedback. Too much to itemize, but I think I've gotten most of the big points.

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:god:propose:symmetry

Loot timeout is gone. Acid anything is gone. Encumbrance was never really there. Artifact copying or modding is gone. Clean is gone.

Sweep is still there as a time-saving convenience reflecting Euquanauque's OCD and desire to save time (and as a piety boost at very low levels to get the player started).

Basically, I've had a big picture rethink around Risk. Euquanauque is now really about power through risk through symmetry...

I've turned the flat dexterity boost into a system of boosts, awarded for risky combat style, and encouraging more of the same. This is the heart of the risk mechanics, and replaces a few of the skills which previously existed.

I've defined what I mean by dual wield: It is divinely granted ambidexterity in the form of the ability to combat two monsters simultaneously, just as well as if fighting each individually. This is ONLY useful for risky multi-fighting, and linked closely with the boosts system.

Doppelganger is now called Mirror; it is still overpowered, but limited -- one of a two special abilities awarded like boosts are, for exceptionally impressive (i.e. risky) combat.

I've replaced loot time-out with an inventory limit that favours lightness, but a God feature that offers periodically accessible storage, in exchange for passing melee-specific combat challenges: "Theatre of Euquanauque". It seems to offer lightness (that stops the player carrying a mass of scrolls and potions), but also the ability to reorganize themselves tactically every few levels without trekking off to their stash 10 levels away. I'm putting the Theatre out there more speculatively, for comments. It seems like one way to manage a God-based restriction on equipment that doesn't cripple long term strategy.

I'm confident that boosts are a goer (with tweaks and mods), though -- really keen to know if that has any obvious blockers from an Crawl internals perspective.

And any other critiques that you think are still pertinent... -- Thanks!
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Post Monday, 9th February 2015, 11:01

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

I'll just quickly chime in to say that I like where this is going.
take it easy
  Code:
!lg * won !DD-- min=turns -log
<Sequell> 20749. Bloax, XL24 VSTm, T:13320: http://crawl.lantea.net/crawl/morgue/Bloax/morgue-Bloax-20140907-000920.txt

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Temple Termagant

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Post Tuesday, 10th February 2015, 21:14

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

A few more tweaks... Mainly:

-- Dual Wield no longer needs to be a skill. Rather it is a divine gift of ambidexterity which allows fighting two monsters simultaneously (the last two attacked in melee, or otherwise chosen as first-come-first-served). The a/b weapons you would usually switch between with ' are now used symmetrically. Dual Wield 'Skill' is primarily dexterity.

-- Boosts are now a much more comprehensive system of advantages, all given as rewards for audacious play.

The main current question is the Theatre of Euquanauque, and whether it is the best response to balancing limited inventory with the ability to store goods needed for each new challenge without tedious backtracking.

How does that look now?

Temple Termagant

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Post Saturday, 21st February 2015, 12:49

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Let me just quietly bump this back to the top in case anybody missed it.

Dungeon Master

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Post Monday, 23rd February 2015, 15:17

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Please don't post just to bump.

The reason I didn't repost on this is that I didn't feel the issues I had raised had been meaningfully addressed, and so there wasn't anything new to say.

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Post Monday, 23rd February 2015, 15:59

Re: God Proposal: Euquanauque, God of Symmetry

Euquanauque is a god of indeterminate gender

Aren't they all?

Dual wielding is strong and no heavy armor isn't much of a restriction. What about no armor? lol.

An instantaneous reduction from 52 to 26 item slots seems pretty drastic. Something like Chei where the penalty creeps in slowly over piety gain, perhaps reaching 26 slots at 200 piety might be a bit better; early game when a player is least powerful is when they need their items most, and this god doesn't offer anything substantial until **.... , quite a long time to sit on that penalty.

Theatre sounds interesting, although what exactly poses an "appropriate challenge" to characters at varying experience levels is pretty variable.

Why can't players return to Euq?
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