Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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The game balance seems pretty good right now.
The only problem I see is that the top like... 8 houses all have combination locks. Some with 2 or more sets of locks, some with like 15 bits lol. Weeee? Suicide lives are very powerful right now too, more so than a decent earning house to supply scouting tools.
After this change was made, I noticed the game speed has slowed down about 10 times. Which may or may not be a good thing depending on how you think the game should be. Having a slower game allows more people to play without having to babysit their houses so much. They can leave for a day or more and not worry that they will have $80k built up. But on the other hand, with the $500 starting bounty, seeing the houses change so fast was crazy and there was high cash flow, which was a bit more thrilling, and there was always money to attempt a robbing spree on other houses. But $500 was probably too much.
So in conclusion, the speed and cash flow of the game can be finely tuned by changing the starting bounty parameter.
I would love to see rotatable objects. This would be good for my idea of the crossbow-wall, that shoots an arrow when it sees a robber and the arrow moves one tile with every step of the robber. Obviously deadly if it hits you!
A starting bounty of $100 seems a bit low. The suicide runners get a free look at your house, and some can make it quite far. $500 was probably too much though, I could see $250 being reasonable.
I think this idea sounds awesome. There may be a few things to work out obviously, but I think a more in depth endgame like this would fit very well when balanced properly. It would be sweet to be able to buy like 10 security guards for a big corporate building, equipped with different weapons (that maybe shoot different distances and have different costs), and maybe even have them walk around on paths to make the game more difficult (and more fun to rob). After all it should be much more scary trying to rob a corporation than a house!
Ah yes, I must be Mr. Aguilera. So what happened was I got my house to a state where I felt I didn't want to change it, so I kept logging out without completing the self tests. What I am about to explain is something I have read in a previous post pretty much exactly. Since I couldn't spend money on tools or building supplies I tried to buy a painting, I sold all my banked tools before purchasing it (still had a broken house) when I purchased it I got it, and then logged out again without doing the self test. I had read that this was fixed, but to my amazement I came back to a balance with -12k or so. Couldn't build or change anything because my balance was always over budget. So I just left it that way. Slowly the budget seems to be building its way back to positive as people die in the broken house.
To deal with the issue of having to log in multiple times when starting a house just to survive, you could allow the player to pick the amount of money they make when they are gone, it can be a simple selection screen between different hourly wages.
So on days where you know you will play a lot, you can set it to the max (the current in game values), and when you know you wont be able to play for a few days, you can set it to the minimum, and know that when you get back, your house wont be 100% robbed because it accumulated $50k and your house only takes $4k to brute force, so obviously you know you will be robbed with the current system having been gone for that long.
I think this new chill/ghost effect will fix some of the issues for sure.
In addition to this, I think there are many more things that need to be addressed. In the current version of the game, is it insanely difficult to get started, even to make a single trap lasting for several hours(check it every 20 min or you wont make it). All of my house designs are being ravaged by random people with $2000 starting cash again and again. This is not so bad for me, because I like a challenge, the only part I don't like about this right now is having to save up money with a crappy house (because there are no houses to rob on the block) Just to be able to buy one or two additional small traps that even then can still be dominated by $2000 starting cash. And that is why there are no houses right now. I have seen other people bring up this issue in the past, and I think it will always be a problem with the current system.
So maybe Jason, what you are thinking is that there is this balance you are trying to achieve between the cost of tiles and tools so that this starting cash robbery is not a problem. While I don't doubt that is possible, a much more robust fix for this (and I have seen this stated many times before) is creating a different pool for starter cash that can't be spent on tools. You could call it House Loan: $1500, this money can only be spent on tiles, and once spent does not come back until the next fresh start, the other $500 dollars would be in your Cash: $500. So you can spend money on tools if you are intelligent about what tools you buy you can still rob houses off the beginning. --I think the only reason you are keeping around this starter cash ability to buy tools is because you want people who first start the game to be able to experience the thrill of robbing a house and risking their life. With the method I am proposing of having two pools of money, you get to keep this beginner robbery thrill, as well as balance the game.
I think the pricing you have for the house tiles right now is fine, but the amount of money given to make a house off the beginning should be increased at least double of what it is now. With a "House Loan" for this increased money off the start, you won't have to worry about people using it on tools just to ravage houses that people actually spent time balancing their tight resources to create. The proposal I am making is much more robust than relying on good balance of tiles vs tools.
Let me know your thoughts, thanks.
I designed my first house to have a lot of nice small traps, that were fun to make, and fun for a player to get through. Power doesn't need to transfer long distances to make a lot of little puzzles along the way through a maze type house. Here is my full house design in case you guys were interested (I must have been Cortez) and this was my first house in castle doctrine, unfortunately joshwithguitar robbed me with very few tools, but it sounds like it was a fun house for both of us!
http://castlefortify.com/c/34a5deb
If you want to encourage more house exploration to make robbing more fun, then I would like to propose the idea of making a colored door that can only be opened with a colored key (found somewhere else in your house on the ground)
Such a door and key could be cheap to place, so that new players could use it to force players to want to explore more to find the key before deciding to cut through the walls of beginner houses.
I agree that the issue is somewhat minor, but I also think the fix is easy too. Having the tape saved on the client and submitted whenever possible is a solution. In the case where the robber never logs back in, or not for a very long time, you, the house owner don't even care about that robber then, because the only robber that is a threat is the one poking around your house multiple times in a row in a short period of time learning lots of information and logging out to prevent you from knowing what they learned.
Well if that is the case, it may be more difficult, but there are always ways around it. You can send portions of the tape in whatever intervals you want, so at least some bits can be seen. Or have the tape's steps saved on the client and submit them next log in.
So I have discovered this missing tapes issue myself, and after reading this thread I see how it happens but this raises a problem for me. I have a top house which gets scouted a lot and one of the strategies I use to protect it (I'm sure everyone does), is watch the old tapes to see what people destroyed and where they went on their failed attempts, and then I go into my house and change or reinforce those areas. I have seen two failed robbery attempts now that I was aware of, where the robbery lasted a considerable amount of time >1-2 min, so I know someone is doing some very interesting things that I would really like to see.
But I can't! The tape is MISSING! So now even though I am a vigilant player, I can still be out done by people who do one time scouting events and log/kill themselves to work their way to my vault and hide all of their tracks.
I'm sure it is not so difficult to just send these tapes to the server and let people watch them even if they are not complete.
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