(Gym21 seems to feel this may actually be a bug with piety messages... although I know precrowning very well and I'm pretty sure it's genuine decay. Here's his post for reference anyway. http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...767#post105767)

See also #1353, #2506, #2661, and #3560.

Personally, I think it just shouldn't be possible to get more than 1 precrown (or you could get it as a postcrown later). You need to do a ton of grinding to even do that and crown, anyway.

It is worth noting that piety decay is a percentage of your total piety. 2nd precrown requires a very large amount of piety, much larger than first precrown, so your piety loss will be proportionately higher. If you aren't in a cavernous level, getting a second livesac precrown can be very inefficient.

I did 3 precrowns on the Steam version (i believe r63?), the piety messages did change to favors, favors greatly, and extremely close as expected.

I'd guess the above 3 messages occur at target-10k, target-5k, and target piety rather than a fixed amount like the regular piety level messages, since the very close status lasted a very long time but as soon as favors appeared it moved quickly through the other messages.

It's worth nothing there may have been no change and this may be an observation error on my part; this is the first time I've done precrowning since the favors / greatly favors messages were introduced and it's possible I'm just seeing the effects of regular piety decay for the first time.

I'd assumed that there had been a change because someone in my general thread about this said there had been, but it's possible they were mistaken.

I failed to get second precrown with my new dark elf paladin. I found chaotic altar in VD:1, good spot, lots of low level creatures to sacrifice. I had 3k gold to buy tons of food to run back and worth. I got myself precrowned pretty fast. I played thru VD and Puppy Cave and was high enough level to get second precrown for sure.

I got myself to "Your deity favors you." Then when I went to get food from town I was back to "Very close" status. Tooks me all my food (20x large rations) to get back to "Your deity favors you."

I also noticed when I got to "Your deity favors you." I sacrificed another creature and got "Very close" message right after, then 3rd creature I sacrificed got me to "Your deity favors you." So it dropped down a lot between waiting for one creature to walk on the altar. So it's a bug imo. Or I would also like to know if it's intented feature.

I have to try it with another character. Normally I'm just fine with 1 precrown and don't go for the second one. This was with chaotic dark elf paladin.

Edit:

It's bugged probably or piety reduce rate is absolutely huge. I'm on new character L+ precrowned dwarf paladin now. I was trying to get crowned with live sacrifices. I never got to "favors you". I sacrificed 40k gold and got to "favors you" then I kept sacrificing live sacrifices and I was quickly back to "very close" it seems to be impossible to get extremely close with live sacrifices now.

For the record, my 3 precrowns were done in the putrid cave. It's much easier there (or PC5) than anywhere else.

The old numbers for precrowns were something like 30k/80k/180k, I believe, with decay being 1% every X (200?) turns. I'm not sure how much piety each sacrifice is worth (based on satiation value?) but without increased generation from a cavernous level you'd need to save up a large amount of gold/valuables to hopefully get over the last hump.