Fedhas Rework
Fedhas is a plant-themed god originally intended to support range combat. The god gives you plant allies that you can move and fire through allows you to create water to impede monster movement. Unfortunately the current design gives access to too many allies that are strong enough to carry the player through much of the game. These are either permanent or long-lived yet are stationary or have movement limitations, things that together encourage the player to lure monsters to specific locations. As a result, Fedhas has a tedious play-style, and this is reflected in the god's usage rate among players. This page proposes some major changes to the god that retains some of idea of supporting ranged combat.
New Fedhas will use only summoned allies and will allow less unfettered use of allies in general. The proposed abilities might not all work, so I've described some of the issues they have below. I'm not strongly attached to any of these individual abilities, but some or all of them could be a part of the rework. Fedhas might need a couple of iterations across versions to get it into a good final state, similarly to how we've done for Nemelex in the past.
I've marked which abilities for which I've got an initial implementation and will put the code in a public branch/repo when it's cleaned up.
Fedhas will still allow firing and moving through plant allies, since that aspect supports use of ranged attacks well.
Implemented here.
Part 1 removes Fedhas' appreciation of corpse decay as well as the Fungal Bloom ability. I haven't touched the corpse violation, necromancy conducts, and species restrictions for now, although those all need addressing.
Note: I forgot to mention in the commit that Fedhas now gains piety normally (through appreciation of all types of kills). This behavior replaces the piety gain from corpse decay.
Implemented here,
Sunlight is a pretty tedious to use ability that strongly overlaps with TSO. Removing shallow and deep water when flight is extensively available is also not especially interesting.
here,
Fedhas will use summons to create all allies instead of creating permanent ones using actual plant monsters as intermediaries. Hence Growth, also referred to as using the descriptor
RING_OF_PLANTSin the source, is no longer necessary.
here,
As per the Fungal Bloom and Growth ability removals, we don't use plants as intermediaries for creating allies. New abilities to create some of these monsters as summons directly will be added in future commits.
and here.
Part of what Rain does is allow creation of plants, but this is no longer relevant, since the other Fedhas ally creation abilities don't need plant intermediaries. The other prominent aspect of Rain is permanent creation of deep water, but this leads to a lot of luring. The new Wall of Briars ability provides some instantaneous limitation of monster movement, but in a way that doesn't make permanent terrain changes and hence less encourages luring.
Implemented here.
A 2* ability that encircles the player with summoned briar patches. The player can fire through these plants, and the briars damage monsters that attack them. Monster AI is changed so that hostile monsters always try to attack briars that are friendly to the player.
Only floor or shallow water tiles that have no monsters are viable summon locations. The briar patches' HP scale with Invocations by adding 1 HD with each level of this skill.
Implemented here
Ballistomycetes are complicated monsters that grow based on interactions with the spore monsters. Spores leave mold as they move, which can give rise to the production of new ballistomycetes. This set of behaviors fell into the realm of "complexity for the sake of complexity". One had to wait a while for this "reproduction" to play out, only to get a few more ballistomycetes spores. Now that we're putting stronger limits on ally usage through use of summons, it's a good time to simplify the way ballistomycetes and their spores work.
This commit removes the reproduction aspect of ballistomycetes, removes mold itself, and simplifies ballistomycetes down to one type of monster. Additionally, ballistos now have a Sporulate natural ability they occassionally use to create a single spore as a short-lived summon. The spore will seek after the ballisto's target and explode upon hit, still producing the damaging explosion that applies confusion to living targets.
and here.
This commit replaces Fedhas' Reproduction with Grow Ballistomycete, an ability that creates a summoned ballistomycete at any smite-targeted location within radius 2 at a cost of 5 piety. Ballistomycetes have been simplified in the previous commit and now use their Sporulate ability to create spores that try to reach their target in order to explode.
The explosion radius has been reduced to 1, so this combined with more flexibility in positioning will make it easier for players to avoid the explosion. If explosion avoidance ends up still being too big an issue, we could have a Fedhas passively protect players from the explosion to some degree.
Ballistomycetes get increased HD and duration with Invocations, gaining 1 HD per level of the skill. The only effect of this HD increase at present is more HP. We probably don't want to increase the useage rate of Sporulat like we do for Oklob Plant's spit acid, since rapidly creating too many spores will create...a lot of explosions.
Fedhas wrath places spores around corpses using some of the same functions that were previously used for Reproduction. Hence these have been moved to god-wrath.cc. It would probably be best to simplify this wrath by creating durably summoned ballistomycetes instead, but I'm not doing that for now.
I thought about just mixing in ballistos as summons into the 5* ability, which would be the general "summon stationary plant" ability, but doing this in a random way would be frustrating in many portions of the game where most monsters could resist the spores' confusion.
Implemented here.
A 4* ability that transforms any (non-permarock) walls, trees, doors, or diggable solid features in a 3x3 smite-targeted area into plant allies at a cost of 12 piety. The created monster is a summon, but the wall is permanently destroyed.
This commit implements a targeter UI that only shows cells as affected if they contain a wall that's a valid target for Overgrow. To be affected, a wall must be in LOS and not blocked by a feature that blocks translocations (e.g. clear walls). Open doors won't be affect if they contain a monster, and if it turns out there was an invisible monster in the open door, the ability will fail but still use piety.
Currently the set of possible plant allies is weighted towards oklob saplings, wandering mushrooms, and burning bushes, with lower chances for ballistomycetes and oklob plants. The plant HD is increased by 1 with each level of Invocations, which for oklob saplings, burning bushes, and oklob plants will give more damage per use of their abilities, and oklob plants will get an increase in their "spit" rate. All monsters will get increased HP and summon duration with Invocations.
It's possible to include fully mobile summons like shambling mangroves and thorn hunters, but that breaks the theme of stationary or near-stationary plant summons. Including mobile summons makes the god feel closer to a copy of the summoning school. The type of monster created could depend on the wall type (e.g. trees become mangroves), but this is a lot of extra complexity that has to be communicated to the player and makes balancing more difficult.
There are two options I could think of for how this ability would be used and targeted
Walls closer to the player would have a higher chance of being affected by Growth. This eliminates the need to have any weird targeter at all and makes the ability less able to exploit the use of kill holes. Since players will sometimes want pretty specific tiles replaced for trying to break into vaults, the chance increase based on proximity allows this without it being a guarantee.
Another possible benefit of this approach is that it fits well with the use of a corruption-style limit of one user per floor. We could restrict usage in the same way.
The major issue is providing repeated use of some form of digging/wall breaking. It would be easy to lose access to the ability with extensive use given the high cost. As discussed above for the corruption-like limitation, we could put a one-per-floor limit on its use. Alternately and depending on what happens with the other Fedhas abilities, we could put it at 5*, further putting a limit on its usage.
Implemented here.
A 5* ability to summon an oklob plant at a smite-targeted location within radius 2 for a cost of 6 piety. The HD of the oklob is increased by 1 for each level of Invocations skill, which increases its summon duration, its HP, the damage from its Spit Acid ability, as well as the frequency with which it uses Spit Acid. These aspects are all done in the same way as Fedhas' previous Evolution ability had Invocations influence oklobs.
This is not an especially creative ability, but it's fun to play with strong stationary allies. At a cost of 6 piety, a player at 6* could make quite a few oklobs, so it's still possible to make a large group for a single fight on e.g. Zot:5.
Some quick comments from dpeg:
Planting oklobs is fun and strong, and I think it's cool if the ability stays. However, one annoying aspect was that players are encouraged to (a) create dense packages of oklobs (higher firepower, better longevity of the oklobs!), and then (b) lure monsters to the oklob farm. I think a reasonable fix is to make the oklob long-lived but not eternal.
I think the current ability addresses having a sufficiently long but not permanent duration, which I described in my response:
Regarding oklob duration, they are made as relatively long-lived summons. At around 10 invo, the ability has about 50% fail rate and summon degree 5, which gives about 90 turns to the oklob. At 12 invo you reach degree 6, which is about 190 turns. That's a fairly long time for not too much invocations, and of course the oklobs are stronger in terms of HP, spit damage, and spit frequency as you level invocations.
Implemented (but disabled) here.
This is a (currently disabled) implementation of a passive halo that's somewhat similar to Ledas' Liquefaction. It increases movement energy costs by 3 for all monsters in the halo. It's themed as vines that hinder the movement of all substantial, non-flying monsters. If enabled, it would start with radius 1 at 1* piety, increasing by 2 (for non-barachi) until reaching LOS radius at 4* piety.
This type of passive likely won't make it into the final rework since the idea has a lot of problems. It increases kiting and directly counteracts the movement limitations of slow species. Directly counteracting signification species limitations is something we do with other gods, but that's not to say we should increase this. Still, the basic halo implementation might be useful if we do find a good passive, and if not, this commit can easilly be rebased out.
The halo overlay in tiles is a transparent green overlay, and in console it colors the floor lightgreen. The lightgreen floor color is used only in Snake Pits, so it might be good to change the floor color in that branch if this halo makes it in.
This version would have a player movement penalty but the halo would have full radius (be that 5 or 7) immediately when it was available. We could have the passive activate anywhere between 1* and 3*. The player movement penalty would be smallish at 1 or 2, but would grant a full-radius halo immediately. It would increase monster movement energy costs by 4 or 5.
A major issue to some will be the loss of Fedhas' unique piety and ability food costs. I view these changes as a benefit, since turning abundant extra food into uses of god abilities leads directly to balance issues. Finding rations is functionally similar to piety on exploration or kills, and simply using surplus food doesn't give an interesting trade off; it just adds a limit that could just as well be made using piety.
The tentative ability set listed above still results in a ally-heavy god, and it's still god where kiting will be a thing. Stationary summons are less abusable than permanent stationary allies, but players will still lure monsters back to the location of their summons. Using short summon duration systematically, as opposed to just for Wall of Briars, could help mitigate use of luring even further, but this makes the abilities generally more frustrating to use.