The Castle Doctrine Forums

I recently learned that if you mouse over the wife it shows you how much money she is carrying.  I know this may not always be relevant but it is good to know and not immediately obvious.

Different people play the game for different reasons.  Not all are motivated by cold cost benefit analysis and cannot be relied on to refrain from causing harm when an opportunity presents itself.  This must be taken into account when designing a house.  After I had someone kite all my pets into various traps before killing an accessible child I realized that I had to change the way I designed my houses to make them not only financially undesireable to attempt and scary for established players, but also emotionally unappealing for the destroyers.

We will use the power of crow-sourced clicks to generate the tools and then, as trickle down economics predicts, the material wealth will naturally accumulate at the top.

Any data visualizations on the money flux in the game would be super cool to see.  Even raw data sets would be sweet to have so that someone can make the data into beautiful pictures.

Congratulations ukuko.  You are the first person to successfully rob Mr. Mccoy.  You also showed me several ways to improve the house design that I will implement whenever I get up the gumption to bring the house back online after the trashing you gave it.  I wish that I had put my safe one trap further into the house. 

The safes current location was merely supposed to be a decoy which would have made the actual safe un-assailable (I think) depending on your remaining tools but I had spent 2 hours on my post-competition edits already and the 'safety version' self tests were taking for ever to do I called it good enough finally went to bed.

When I checked the house list some time after you robbed my I couldn't find any houses bulging with >$400,000 or your robbers name.  I hope there was no untimely demise of the servers richest player.

Once you have an okay house the key design feature is to make it so the you need >$2000 tools to learn much about it.  This means that an alt can scout, but not far and may learn some things but not enough to make a fully informed decision about the level or risk or the tools required.
With that design parameter accomplished the next design stage is to reduce the likelihood of lucky bumbling.  There are many ways to do this, magic dance for example.   I think that scouting with alts can be abused but no more so than playing cooperativly with a friend and the benefits of alts can be minimized through good design.

Thoughts?

That was amazing.  That was one of the most intense protracted gaming experiences I have ever taken part in!  Thank-you so much to everyone!  I think I made it through without any last minute robberies but how can I know?!

Super kudos to jasonroher.  This is a fantastic game you've made and a truly compelling event you've run.

When I died, stupidly, the first time after putting the finishing touches on a $15,000 upgrade to my house and lost $60,000 worth of tools after playing for 5 hours strait after work(I forgot to eat) it destroyed me.  It was my own damn fault, hubris, greed, and regret.  So much regret.  There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Literally, I scared my cat with my anguished howls as I tore my shirt of and hurled myself at the floor.  When she nipped me, concerned by my unusual behaviour, I pulled it together and within 15 minutes was back climbing the ranks again. 

On my third house I stopped taking stupid risks, leaving that task to those that chose to enter my kingdom of doom.

While my houses weren't the fanciest I would like to take a moment to brag and say that nobody reached the safe in any of the versions of my house.  In one of them the robber killed my wife and escaped with some money though.  I know luck had as much to do with my un-robbed streak as skill but I am still very pleased with the accomplishment.  (end brag)

Iceman:  Is that how chills work?  That explains why I keep getting names popping up on the list that are still chilled when I haven't died in over 48 hours.

Welcome to Castle Doctrine.  Have fun!

This might have been me.  Did the death involve one scouting visit.  One visit with a club to take out the son and block the door.  One visit by a $200 dollar bounty (they snuck in while I was getting my next club).  Then one visit where I demonstrated that I hadn't played much in a few versions because I learned something new about wife shotgun interactions by getting shot in the chest as I approached her with a club as I expected here to cower in fear and she reached for her gun and blew me away. 
 
Does that story match with your tapes?

I love the change.  It works really well and solves all the problems that were associated with being able to use gamma adjustment.  In fact I think it makes the gamma adjustment downright hazardous now as it can give a false sense of security because it looks like you are seeing empty tiles when there are not in your line of sight an so aren't fully filled in yet.

Fair enough.  I think that those are all good counterpoints.  Thank-you all for the solid discussion.