The Castle Doctrine Forums

Well, after a week and 500+ kills my house has finally fallen to a robber with 58 saws, 40 bricks, 4 guns, 16 wirecutters, 6 ladders, 10 explosives, 66 water and 54 meat. That's a cool $81,200 in tools to rob me of $73,721 and my 7 paintings. Honestly I was starting to get a bit weary of this house anyway, hence why I allowed it to float onto the first page, but it just means I now have to go find my precious pitbull painting again

Anyway, here's the house. Unfortunately my last map shot was four days out of date, so you're only getting the destroyed version:

Follow the red line, yellows are doubling back.

1.) Secret pitbull master, who controls both the electric floors in sector 3 and the final trap doors before the vault

2.) Clock / Cat Track combination. The clock driven grid and trap door system had an astonishingly large number of two step kills, and the cat trap caused no end of people to suicide. 80% of kills were made here, I'd say.

9.) The cat you have to chase. Muck about in the clock section for even a single tile, the powered trap door to the north goes unpowered. I forgot about this guy in the numbering scheme.

3.) The usual scrolling electric floors. These were controlled by both the dogs at the end, and also the pitbull master. Probably another 14% of my kills were here. The secret to these is that they actually light up at the very moment of screen transition, thanks to the pitbull master. As in, the same turn the pitbull first sees you.

4.) Need to go back to pick up the pitbull, and have the secret pitbull master turn on the powered trap door

5.) Need to aforementioned pitbull to get past this commit gate. Only three people ever did.

6.) Need to expose yourself to the pitbull here to open the powered door, disable the electric grid and close the second powered trap door to the south.

7.) Need to move to this electric floor in order to turn OFF power to the vault room. If you don't, when you enter the vault room the powered trap door beneath your feet will suddenly lose power.

8.) Enter this door and this door only to get a dog 2 steps behind you for the commit gate.

Now, time to take my clock based plans to fruition, rather than just retrofitting my old wife defence system after someone with 12 guns slaughtered her!

Crowbars used to be awesome, now they're just far too expensive.

My vote goes to the humble club, the best way to get rid of dogs, window, and other pesky vermin.

It's been suggested a fair few times before, but long term stat tracking or leaderboards would be one of my most wanted features for the next few releases. You could even do it in classic TF2 style - This life you robbed $40,756, a new record! Get people trying to one up themselves even after they die, and give a bit more of a reason not to rage quit the game.

Also, I just kinda want to know if my current house has closer to 400 or 500 kills

EDIT: Hmm, let's see...

Take her out clubbing - Most wives and children murdered
Dog lover - Largest number of pitbulls (cats are too cheap!)
Griddled - Most electric floors
Master thief - Largest robbery amount (lifetime)
Kleptomaniac - Largest number of robberies
It's a trap - Largest number of trap doors
Structural Integrity - Largest number of steel / concrete walls
Pittance - Largest number of pits
Defend this house - Largest number of dead thieves (wow that's an old reference)
Caring Husband - The most people who have entered your house before the wife is killed
Butcher Bay - Number of players who escaped your house
Persistent - Largest number of times a robber reached your vault before you committed suicide.

You get a score per-life, along with a leaderboard of the all-time greats.

I'm sure you guys can come up with some more.

Although this amuses me every time, I'm going to let some of you guys in on a secret.

If you're standing in a house where the electronics seem to be running on some kind of clock, do not stand on a powered trap door and attempt to use a tool. No, not even if there's a pitbull one space behind you about to eat your face.

Fairly sure that's already in place.

I just came across this trap, which I thought was quite neat: http://castledraft.com/editor/Y40dNs

Essentially, because of the number of steps the girl moves, if you don't double back on yourself she's on the same tile as the pitbull when it first sees you. At which point the pitbull is essentially invisible.

It's not a particularly complicated house, the odds of someone getting it right might be 1/20 (I'm too lazy to watch the video and calculate ). You get enough people through the door, someone will manage it.

Nothing to do with cheating, there's just a bug at the moment where you can duplicate the wife if she has a shotgun and is next to the vault when it's robbed.

If the churn time was two or three days for a top house, I wouldn't have a problem with the current tool system. It worked perfectly well in Alpha.

Problem is, you're not in Alpha any more. The sheer number of players changes the economics, so that a 'top' house essentially won't survive more than a few hours. I've literally rebuilt my current mid-range house three times in the last 24 hours, each time after being brute forced with $30-40,000 worth of tools.

2 saws, 5 meat, 5 water and one club normally. The lack of wire cutters is a bit of a pain, but the saw is more useful on average. Bricks also don't give enough utility for me to swap out $300 of meat or water.

You probably know this already but for future reference, when you get all that lovely lucre from steam sales, the solution is a load balancer and two servers. Drain one node of all its players, leave the other up. Make your change. Bring that node back up, take the other down. No interruption in service for the players.