Lasty wrote: The goal of the system is, I believe, to make gods feel more like an entity you have to work with and less like a resource you can quantify; it could also be just to prevent calculation paralysis.
It that's the goal of the system, I don't think you're doing a particularly good job, except with Xom. If the player can find the average, long-term piety cost of each ability, he can just use that. He just needs to know the 120/160/200 breakpoints in piety. Calculation paralysis actually sets in when you have little way to estimate any cost vs benefit at all, so I fail to see how these intentionally obfuscating features do anything to ease calculation paralysis. Unless I'm misunderstanding the term 'calculation paralysis'.
You could have piety cost for each ability vary game-to-game. It could slowly vary, over the course of 10,000s of turns or 10s of invocations. This way, any many-game long-term piety cost of any one divine ability would be rather meaningless, and Sandman wouldn't even be posing questions like this.
You could have 2 piety counters: 1 delayed, "true" piety counter that is kept track of, but not directly used for calculating divine powers. The other, "transient" piety counter is used for powers, uses a different formula for
piety cost of divine powers. Both are bumped up equally when you gain piety. For example, the transient piety counter user lighter cost than normal for a few invocations, and heavier cost if the player really starts spamming it (dozens of Kiku's delivery, say). I'm sure you have some S-curves handy for that. The transient piety counter keeps shifting slowly toward the "true" piety counter. The goal is to keep the piety cost opaque and mysterious, and have the gods feel like an entity, right?