The Castle Doctrine Forums

If there were repairs made on the house, wouldn't he have to make another self-test?  Doesn't the self-test automatically split money between vault and wife?

If you want to keep your house when you get robbed down to $0 your best bet is to rob some low value houses, 200-400.  Hopefully once you're at non-zero value you will attract robbers.

Every decision you make in this game has a trade-off.

Keep your wife alive?  Retain half of your cash but you need to maintain a free path.

Make your house look really scary and dangerous?  Less robbers but also less bounty money.

Use a combination trap?  Keep out low level robbers cheaply but reveals your vault location.

Keeping the wife alive in the early game is rather simple.  One properly placed pit bull and a shotgun should deter most would be murderers.  Once your house gets into the $60k range your family begins to become a problem.  You likely need the space they take up and it is very profitable for someone to come in and dispatch of all your pit bulls and take the money your wife holds.

Do you trade away some of your vault security for the insurance that your wife provides?  That depends on your play style.

I remember that house... it bothered me so much that it ended with the combination lock example from the wiki