PowerOfKaishin wrote:Sprucery wrote:duvessa wrote:If the gods are unbalanced, then by definition god choice is not an interesting decision.
I disagree. If I find Okawaru on D:1, for example, there is an interesting decision to make, even if Trog/Fedhas/Kiku are better (I don't know when I would find them). (Of course Chei/Xom/Qaz are for challenge games.)
This is a corner case. Duvy's implication is that for playing optimally, an early D:1 altar is one of the only few situations in which you would not choose a top tier god (Trog, Fedhas, Maklehb).
If altars are not all found at the same time, then either you have the player find them in an almost random order (the current situation), in which case an interesting survival decision is vanishingly rare, or you have the player find them in a predetermined order (worst gods first, best gods last), in which case you are really just trying to balance the gods and turn to option 1.
In a hypothetical crawl where most gods are balanced, I fail to see the value of "challenge gods" any more than "challenge weapon classes" or "challenge magic schools". I disagree that it would be a massive undertaking to give Crawl's gods a semblance of balance, it only looks like that because nobody has tried it yet. Most gods are offenders due to one of:
- overpowered * abilities (trog, kiku, fedhas)
- excessively crippling conducts (chei, xom, qazlal)
- worse version of existing god (beogh < yred < kiku)
- during some or all of the game, doesn't actually do anything useful (ash, beogh, sif, veh, xom, zin, tso)
None of these require overhauls to fix except the third, you can get mostly-balanced versions of most existing gods by changing existing abilities (move piety levels at which they become available, nerf some ally-summoning invocations), and toning down chei/qazlal conducts.
If you're hoping to make beogh/yred/kiku all worthy of existing at once, or fix xom, then yes, I admit those things will be hard.