Gosh, it's too bad you couldn't just not use this one minor feature that you didn't like. Thomas shouldn't have made it mandatory.

Except it wasn't a feature, it was a bug. I don't think piety granted by food being proportional to nutrition was intended for people to farm and sacrifice humongous quantities of herbs. I've always liked that word. Humongous.

I learned from the radio that BBC reporters will use the word "ginormous" without meaning to make a joke at all.

Anyway, without fairly extreme play tactics, there's not much other way of achieving a second precrowning (something the game does offer) -- the one game where I tried live-sacrificing my way to precrowning number 2, I gave up, due to the incredible length of time and the fact that I hit level 17 (starting at probably level 13 or 14) just by sacrificing on altars. When you consider the tiny amount of XP you get from sacrificing, you can imagine how many things you have to sacrifice to get there. I still don't know how close I got.

Herb farming is basically the only practical way to get multiple precrownings. If getting multiple precrownings is taken as unbalancing (I can't, for the life of me, see why) then take that feature out. If not, well then, players who don't want to farm stomafillia don't have to. It's not like you're losing a ton by not getting a second precrowning.

I guess I don't get why it would be a good idea to remove mechanics just because the really experienced and obsessive few disdain them. We're already talking about a very difficult game. "Balancing it" by removing tactics because the player can use them to their advantage seems like a bad angle to me.

The fact that something is theoretically possible in a game doesn't mean that it's meant to be easily achieved.

It is still entirely possible to get multiple precrownings without herbs. I can think of multiple methods that would allow it, including using pets to kill monsters and then sacrificing the loot, for example.

Precrownings, postcrownings and crowning shouldn't be trivial to achieve. Stomafillia sacrificing was a method that made it very trivial, compared with the relative difficulty it is supposed to involve.

And don't forget, if it does become simply too difficult to achieve precrownings, etc, it is equally possible for the piety necessary to obtain them to be lowered to a level that rebalances the game. I assume that that is something that will be considered after some playtesting - that is, after all, the whole point of having new versions prior to the official 1.2.0.

Would you kindly demonstrate that in video?

Cause being as bad player as i am only option I see is - farm stoma for food>>do lots of livesack. Same boring gameplay, same result - more wasted time. For one I think adventurer running arround with shiny piece of equipment at arround lv10 is fun and not something which should be exterminated.

So, would you guys support having an in-game command called "Precrown" (say Ctrl+P) giving you an artifact when you press it?

If you don't support such an absurd way to get precrownings, I don't see why you would support another equally absurd way. Because no one has argued how farming and saccing stoma makes any sense thematically speaking (and that's normal: it doesn't make any sense).

If you want precrowns, why don't you suggest alternative ways of getting them that could be added, instead of clinging to a bug? I don't know, maybe your god could give you a precrown if you managed to sacrifice a corpse of a monster that is out of your league in terms of DL, for example. Or if you sacrifice anything at an altar that is surrounded by quite dangerous stuff in a wilderness location that can only be entered before level X. That kind of thing would be interesting.

As once per character meassure - yes.

The rest of your post is somewhat absurd - how it makes "thematically" more fitting for gods to accept gold? Ban that too - clearly dragging to some ressellers ton of loot is not better, than showing devotion while picking herbs, right? Gods you know there believed to like incense and myrth. Well, blood and torn out hearts too. Gold being very godly I have problem recalling.

On more serious note however the whole piety system is so so in Adom. For example most stellar part of precrown/crowning is getting like 6+ emergency prayers. In lot of times prayer is prefered to like drinking pot, since - hey, praying is renewable source is healing.
The only roguelike which i recall having decent god/piety system is for example crawl. In ideal the whole saccrificing thing could be replaced by stuff like code of behavior [with god stating mentioned code at some point], in practice I fail to see how gold/mobs is any better than stoma.

I think most non-artifact items just pale in sacrifice value compared to what stomafillia of any B/U/C status was worth prior to this "fix".

The change is in, you're all wasting your breath (finger fatigue?) Play it and see if you don't like it, or if it should be tweaked. Not sure what the new limit is, but even if it's 10 stomafilla that's 10% of a precrown and a nice amount of prayer piety.

How much play you need to see it how it works?

I know how my games will go -
herbalism - establish alraunia/curaria sell these especially blessed sac money.
no herbalism establish stoma endure live sacks.

Overall it is like discussing about improvements on air conditioning in car with shitty motor. In my opinion whole piety/prayer/whatever system needs severe overhaul or there will be always way arround it.
For example I do recall doing precrowns via pumped gemology and mass blessing of sapphires. Without mining on hurthling - so lowish St too.

With a tweaked casino gold probably isn't going to be that easy to get anymore, and it does force you to make choices; spend it on Garth, new items from shops you may find, other training, or do you sacrifice it for some emergency prayers? Of course, you can wait around and sell sis, or straight-up sacrifice sis.

The piety system itself, especially with the precrownings, heavily encourages grinding; perhaps a bit too much. Getting rid of the safest, simplest and fastest grinding method doesn't change that. On the other hand, simply removing precrownings or making them impossibly time-consuming to get eliminates of one of the ways players can get their hands on random artifacts, and Soirana rightly points out random artifacts are pretty fun. That's a separate issue though... Random artifacts could possibly do with higher accessibility through vaults, surges of power and certain monster drops. Gathering stomafillia for an hour is boring - fighting Skruya Ubb, the doppelganger lord, for control of his treasure is much more exciting. For that matter, the player-created encounters from the fundraiser are probably going to increase the artifact/excitement count to begin with.

Would that be a fair compromise? Precrownings getting harder in exchange for more surges of power?

Don't know why everyone mentions Casino - basically one does not need money after getting where. Rob it and use stocks to finish game. Any money afterwards usually are spend - "pimp my char" style. That is on top you have too much guaranteed artifacts to generate any via piety.

I'd suggest player bosses leave trophies - heads/tails/whatever apllyable. Certain number of these could be turn to dwarftown priest [if matching allignment] for random gift from heaven vaults.

I think the current fix for this is too harsh. It basically combines both of Grey's ideas--stoma is now worth diddly-squat when sacrificing, and you can only sacrifice it once. It used to be a nice, relatively non-grindy way to get a crowning before you got too far into the game (before water temple, if you wanted), especially if you had herbalism. Now you're forced to grind for at least 25-30k gold and sacrifice 3 guaranteed artifacts (sword of Nonnak, Big Punch & Moon Sickle), or use other even more grindy tactics to get to 100k gold before ToEF (granted, you can get crowned after ToEF, when you get to casino, but for many classes, it's worth it to get crowned before). If you can't find a friendly shopkeep as DE/Troll/Orc etc, you're pretty much out of luck.

Have you heard of life-sacrifices? Especially with tension room of orcs, or an ant hive... mmm...
But I agree that restriction is kind of unfair.

I always get crowned before ToEF and I never sacrifice stoma, grind in any way or sacrifice guaranteed artifacts other than the si. In the village dungeons, puppy cave, upper CoC, pyramid, Griffyard and (optionally) TotHK there is more than enough meat to get 100K gold without grinding. You can believe me because I've been playing all the time without farming herbs. It's curious to see all these posts about things that supposedly can't be done without farming and I've been doing all these years :)

I think the current fix is good.

I am aware of live sacrifices, of course. They are so far from guaranteed, that I don't consider them worth mentioning.

I think it's very possible if you're on a race that doesn't get totally boned by shop prices, Al-Khwarizmi. I honestly have no idea how you'd do it on a Mist Elf, for instance, since they seem to get terrible shop prices from everyone (30 g / si, for crying out loud! from a high elf, dwarf and troll!). I barely managed to scrape together about 30k after going all the way through water temple and all of the above, including TotHK. Likewise, if you roll badly with the HMV shopkeep, dark elves, orcs & (I think) trolls can get shafted really easily. Of course, you can always sell-rob the racist shopkeepers, but I don't know why we'd want to force people into that kind of gameplay.

Moreover though, it kind of does require you to pick up all semi-valuable loot, which I personally find irritating, and rather akin to grinding.

P.S. I've crowned many times by saccing some combination of 30k+ g, Nonnak, Moon Sickle, Big Punch. In fact, my favorite way to get a quick crown when I was trying to do some Drake Barb speedruns [for a generous definition of speedrun ;)] was those 4 combined.

I haven't tried on a mist elf, since they have only existed for a small while and I haven't played one long enough to crown. But if you get bad shop prices, sacrificing stuff directly is not so bad. Lately I sacrifice gold, but until not too long ago I used to get crowned by sacrificing items (I didn't know gold was better) and I always did just fine. The si does help with this.

Strange that you consider that taking the loot from monsters that you find in your way is grinding, while farming for herbs is not. For me, it's definitely the other way around!

It's not necessarily the loot taking that I consider grinding, it's the entire process of: having to look through all the loot and pick out the good things, managing your inventory [this could bear repeating as it's easily the worst part], creating stashes on the way to shops (because god knows your strength isn't high enough to carry all this stuff [even when not picking up everything] if you run into a few vaults or tension rooms), and, of course, the utterly horrible shop interface when you finally sell all your junk. It's exhausting and I really abhor it.

There are a few other guaranteed artifacts you can pick up. Personally I think crowning shouldn't come so easily, and you should have to make a little sacrifice if you want all the crowning bonuses.

Also many of your complaints seem very centred around Mist Elves, which is hardly fair.

I don't think the creator intended for PCs to be crowned early to early-midgame, suck it up.