The Castle Doctrine Forums

I just started playing this game again yesterday after a several month hiatus, and I have to say that chain robbing is really addictive.

I just finished knocking out the entire front page of top houses (at least, all the ones that were visible to me, i.e. not editing their houses). I was careful to kill all family, shoot all dogs, ladder over every pit, and blow down every wall, so they likely won't be back. I did die in one house while I was literally standing adjacent to their vault due to slipping and hitting "right" instead of of "up" on the keyboard by accident. Their house value went up to around $360,000 after that, I guess due to my bounty. I think they must have died themselves though, because they vanished from the list and some other house later on suddenly had around $460,000.

One thing I have noticed is that after a few hours of mindless robbing and destruction, you just start to get careless... After I died, I was somehow able to get up and going again and robbed my way back up to the $100,000 houses. I died again a couple hours later. This time by running into a dog as I walked down a corridor. I had already cleared a path to the vault, killed the wife, and knocked out most of their stuff, so I wasn't expecting anymore dogs. I thought I had killed them and was just running down the corridor without paying any attention.

What is apparent is that once you rob a house worth ~ $70,000 you can just load up on so many tools that no house stands a chance. When you barge in with 30 of everything no possible defenses are enough. I probably shouldn't say this now that I just died and am no longer at the top, but it seems like - given that this is the case - the best strategy is to play "king of the hill" and simply use all your money robbing the next richest guy. Over and over, until no one is left. Because so long as there is just one guy out there with ~$60,000 or more he could come destroy your house. Oddly, it doesn't seem like this is really how it's playing out. But I don't know, because I've only been playing today and yesterday, so others' input would be interesting.

I'm definitely interested. I don't have as much time to play at the moment, so I may just get destroyed over and over, but I'm still very interested.

There goes Mr. Temple.

What an interesting bug you found!

And now it even has a favicon!

These crowbars are obviously made from pure platinum.

Man, v16 is pretty rough. I've been working hard on trying to build something sustainable, but there is either one very dedicated person or a group of people who seem to have made it their mission to destroy every house as soon as it pops up. This is the first time I've ever been greeted with "None found" at the house list.

Fortunately there was also someone who intentionally left some free loot in their vault, which I was able to grab a few times. They spelled out "free" with wiring. Thanks to whoever you are. I really needed that to protect against (and repair damage from) the multiple attempts to tear down my house.

I can't remember when exactly this was, but I don't think it was a starter robbery. It was a nice house design though.

Wait, when you say "house value" do you mean the amount of money spent building the house or the amount of money in the vault?

Come to the dark side of simply putting your vault by the door. He tore down my v16 vault-by-the-door house #1, but I just immediately built another (#2). And as soon as you pile up a few extra layers of concrete, it's beyond the reach of fresh starts with only $2000.

Bey bey, that is one of the best Castle Doctrine screen captures ever!

Haha

Haha

Yeah, that was me. I don't remember how much $$$ in tools I had, but I can say with certainty that I never had anywhere near $70,000 in cash at any time. I did get a bunch of tools while robbing houses though (see below).

No, I robbed the first house with money I had in my vault (I don't remember exactly how much that was now, but I think it was close to $30,000. I know it was not a really large amount of money). Every robbery after the first was funded entirely on the loot from previous break-ins. I think people tend to overestimate the cost of the tools robbers use on them. However, the other key issue here is that I got a lot of tools from the vaults of those I robbed. And remember that tools are valued at half-cost when in a vault. One of the houses I robbed was listed at something like $30,000, but only had a few thousand in cash. All the rest was in tools (meaning almost $60,000 worth of tools). That kind of thing happened a few times.

With regards to the "house check fail" issue, I did get this another time after starting over, but that was obviously before the v16 release. Glad to hear it sounds like it was fixed though.