Farming piety and getting pre-crown and crowning gifts

[purge]

Early game/mid game the primary method I use to get my pre-crown and crowning gifts is passing turns and offering monsters which can be very tedious and time consuming. I also offer as much gold as I can and whatever item type is good for the race I am playing but those seem to make only very small dents. Here is how I feel about each alignment:

L - Barely any offering restrictions and not being able to be offered yourself make it the safest and easiest alignment to get your pre-crown artifact(s) with. Trying to get to L+ for crowning can be boring and time consuming though. Also taking an alignment hit for killing blink dogs to get teleport control(the primary/easiest source) is a down side.

N - Offering restrictions make this alignment very slow and frustrating to get pre-crown and crowning, I avoid it.

C - No offering restrictions, but when you are farming piety by offering monsters and trying to get them to move on the altar, I have died more than once by fat-fingering the wrong movement key and moving on to the altar and being sacrificed. Also, the crowning seems like a punishment with how much it corrupts you. I avoid this alignment as well.

As for getting offered by a monster as a C, this makes me rage to myself "So you 'force' me to sacrifice seemingly 100+ monsters which can take an hour of tedium and then kill me because I hit the wrong movement direction during this constant repetition!?". I put 'force' in quotes because it is how I feel, not technically true. I understand I am not forced to farm piety for an early pre-crown just like I am not forced to equip a weapon or armor and can try to beat the game naked.

TLDR; Overall, I think the mechanics should be changed to decrease tedium and also to avoid players asking themselves the question, "Well, do I feel like taking potentially an hour of my gaming time to farm piety and get an artifact or two so I will have a lot better chance of success in this game or I should I just continue on and actually play a game during my gaming time?"

[aerol]

These are all OK features and I wouldn't change a thing. I briefly considered submitting an RFE so that the pre/post crowning mechanic was changed to only allow one gift outside crowning per game, but then I thought to myself I can just make it my own personal restriction to not precrown more than once and live and let die. It is an intentional design choice to make the game easier to play as a lawful, harder as a chaotic, and give and take as a neutral. Chaos is a double edged sword and meant to be that way. Just skip precrowning if you're playing a neutral if you want to avoid tedium (or skip it entirely) - and if you think getting crowned by live saccing is too tedious, just do it a bit later in the game. By the time you're done with dwarftown quests you should have enough gold and artifacts to sacrifice to more or less easily get from "spiritually invincible" to "absolutely close" unless you're playing under some challenge or self imposed restriction. A precrowning gift can make your game easier, sure, but you don't really need one. Look for good gear in dangerous places and lady luck might just reward you. If you have prerelease access, also, it seems random artifacts will get more common in p9

[brim]

I only pre-crown under extremely rare circumstances. The idea of spending what can be extreme tedium getting enough piety to pre-crown in the early game and then to have your gift be something like Thunderstroke or Soaker is just not worth it IMHO. That said I think the current precrowning mechanics are just right since the possibility of getting Protector or Preserver at level 8 is such a huge (possible) boon that it should be very difficult to achieve under normal circumstances.

Your TLDR seems like flawed logic to me. Making an important decision like whether to play the game normally or farm for later is a core part of the CRPG experience. If getting precrowned was an obvious choice in every game, that would take some of the fun and excitement out of getting precrowned IMO.

[JellySlayer]

I pretty much never intentionally go for precrowns, myself. It happens, the odd time, like if I'm a hurthling and hit a bunch of vaults/summoners and can stock up on cooked corpses. Otherwise, not worth it.

I always crown with gold. Usually by the time you're thinking about the ToEF, you should have accumulated enough gold for a crowning fairly easily. Racial items are almost never worthwhile to sacrifice compared to selling them and saccing gold.

[anon123]

Personally, I rarely precrown - only when I can stabilize a patch of stomafillia and have an altar nearby, or are fortunate enough to generate one in PC: 5. Since stomafillia has been nerfed in the latest prereleases and the "altar in Puppy Cave" thing is purely luck-based, I guess that once 1.2.0 is released it's pretty much goodbye to precrowning for me.

[BenMathiesen]

I don't think any changes are needed to the system. I know it's theoretically possible to get more than one precrowning gift, but I've never done it. The first one is tedious enough that I only do it if I find an appropriate altar in a convenient location, e.g. next to a medium-large tension room or in a cavern level. Getting it done near Terinyo is convenient because I can sac to absolutely close (or a bit beyond, because piety decays), then talk to the cute girl to complete her quest to move off of N=, and get the precrown instead of the crown.

Crowning as a C or L character can definitely wait--the benefits are not huge enough that I'm ever in a rush. I usually reach L+ through normal play around the time I'm doing the water temple. And as JellySlayer mentions, by that time it's trivial to have enough gold and artifacts. Toss your god Moon Sickle, the Black Torc, and 50000 gp for example.

[Spellweaver]

As second precrowning is far easier than first, I usually do two. Sometimes it changes the game.
It's not hard to find a chaotic altar in UD and do it in the early game in a couple of minutes.

[Pim]

Racial items are almost never worthwhile to sacrifice compared to selling them and saccing gold.

I would love to see some evidence, or equations, describing the value of a sacrifice. Anyone have that knowledge?

On the other hand, seems a bit off to run tests during this period of constant change. Maybe just as well to wait until the pre-releasing is all done.

[Grey]

My testing in the past has shown that around 130k gold is needed for a first precrown / crown, or 120 livesacs, or 100 blessed stomafilla. Obviously the last option is now mostly closed off. For artifacts it seems to take about 10 - obviously they vary in value. Depending on race it's best to try to sell artifacts, limited by shopkeeper.

[SirTheta]

Those numbers seem oddly high from my experience with crowning (no precrowning). If your deity is at most barely very pleased (which is about 3k gold, as I recall), you can crown by sacrificing 100k or about 20-30k and moon sickle, big bunch & sword of nonnak. (which sounds like about 6-8 artifacts since they're usually worth a bundle. depends on your race, of course) [dwarf is lower obv.]