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#1 Re: Main Forum » Destroying houses for fun? » 2014-02-15 18:29:47

he'd have to accumulate rather a lot more than $2k to buy a painting, and sit with higher risk of brute forcing in the mean time. I'd be more inclined to spend the money on my house; if there was  nothing left to improve and no space to expand, then just altering it, shuffling things around so people who've seen it already might be caught off guard by changes. But just burning the money is also an option, and a less time-consuming one.

#2 Re: Main Forum » How are these powered? » 2014-02-15 13:34:57

scary looking is not without it's own virtues, too.

#3 Re: Main Forum » Simultaneous buttons and unstable buttons » 2014-02-14 17:13:22

on the wiki you'll find examples of pulse circuits, which send only a single quick pulse when first powered. One of these on each button, with the outputs connected to an AND gate, may well work. Not intimately familiar with the way circuits are updated, so more fiddling and wiring might be required, I'm not sure.

#4 Re: Main Forum » Suggestions Page » 2014-02-14 15:29:10

There could be some reason it's difficult, but as a programmer myself, it's non-obvious why it would be. In any event, my expectation of new build items in the near future is incredibly low.

And yeah, I'm aware of the recordedGames thing. Even editing configs to enable fast forward controls, not always practical, since the recording is for an entire game session and can't be trivially cut into shorter segments because the state of your house is cumulative through the playback, so nothing affecting your house state can be removed.

As for the 3 clicks, I live in a remote area with spotty internet some days. This makes robbing at all on those days highly risky for me in general, nothing to do about that, but even reviewing tapes on those days can be a tiresome process, since the first click says "ask the server for this replay" and, depending on my internet's mood, that can be instantaneous or can time out repeatedly, then it re-loads the list of tapes again after I exit the replay, which again can be instantaneous or time out repeatedly. Not sure my crappy internet is a common enough problem to justify the feature, particularly given it makes fully half of the game virtually unplayable in a non-addressable way, but that's why it seemed important enough to me to suggest, anyway. If nothing else, it would decrease load on the server, which may or may not be an issue, I dunno.

#5 Re: Main Forum » Suggestions Page » 2014-02-14 15:07:04

Smegskull wrote:

Is a non sticky button plausible? we have switches to toggle on and off and we have a once on stay on button but no button that is only on when stood on. an example for use would be a powered trap-door that will only let you through if some thing is following you or a cat running from you to the button you have to be the correct distance behind it for it to be up when you walk over it

^^^ this. I've wished for a button that was on only while stood on, turning off when you step off, since my first hour or so playing. I don't know how likely any new components or tools are at this point in the game's life, but Jason, if you decide to add more at any point, pls, this.


Another suggestion, more of a ui tweak, the ability to mark tapes as viewed without actually viewing them, from the list, would be very nice, or even just a "mark all viewed" button if per-tape is too much hassle. I hate going through and "viewing" 20 3-steppers just to un-green them in the list (and obviously, leaving them green is just not an option, because compulsive.)


I suggested it in another thread, but to reiterate it in this collective suggestion thread as well, the option to watch a replay on self-test suicide would have, on a few occasions, greatly reduced my negative frustration levels with the game when I screw up somehow, and doesn't seem like it would be terribly hard to implement?

#6 Re: Main Forum » Unsolvable houses » 2014-02-12 04:10:13

Changes persist after successful robberies or family murder, including things like position of pets, so that's how the pit bull wound up right at the door like that, someone fled after murdering one or more family members with the dog on their heels.

As for the empty vault thing, I agree you should still exit the house if reaching an empty vault, and there's at least one other thread about the issue, but for now, it is what it is.

#7 Re: Main Forum » Cheapest house protected vs suicidal robbers » 2014-02-12 03:06:54

those doors are closed when powered, not when unpowered. So the door by the entrance is open initially, until flee down from the dog, which closes it behind you, shutting out the dog. Then you're free to hit the right set of buttons to open the second door.

#8 Re: Main Forum » [suggestion] self-test suicide post-review » 2014-02-12 01:40:01

joshwithguitar wrote:

You can adjust the speed of playback by changing the "enableSpeedControlKeys" flag in the settings folder to 1. This allows you to use the ^&*() buttons to adjust the speed - ^ is very slow, & is normal speed and ) is as fast as possible.

Excellent, ty. I'm doubtful it'd be much help with the nearly 48 hour playback file I wound up with, but will be helpful in the future.

#9 Re: Main Forum » Player Logic and an Idea » 2014-02-12 00:23:50

eeeh, I see what you're saying, but where it seems to me it crosses from the violation that is, by design, part of the game and into something that feels irrational, unfair, and exceptionally frustrating is for starter homes. Almost any starter home built within the initial 2,000 budget ca be quite easily raped by a 2,000 starter tool kit. The starting robber might not benefit, and the builder can just rebuild, but the difference is the robber going into a house with $500 or less in total value carrying a $2000 starter tool kit expects and intends to die, whether to carelessness during a robbery or suicide when their spree exhausts their tools. The starting builder, on the other hand, is trying to crawl out of that starting position, and while they certainly shouldn't expect guaranteed success every time, they also don't intend to be bankrupted and start over without making any forward progress every time, either.

One robber using starting cash to destroy starter homes could fairly easily crush dozens, if not hundreds, of starter homes in an hour.

No idea how this could be resolved in the general case, or I'd've suggested it before, but it does seem like a legitimate issue worth at least considering solutions for.

:edit: feel like I've exaggerated a bit, wanna add that it's certainly possible to build a starter home that can't be trivially brute-forced with only $2k worth of tools, at least not without some scouting first to select the right tools, but building such a starter house isn't trivial for the average player, either.

#10 Re: Main Forum » Question about Chihuahua Mechanics » 2014-02-11 23:22:12

chihuahuas, cats, and pit bulls can walk over anything the player could walk over with only a few odd exceptions.

The exceptions I can think of are shotguns tiles (even after the shotgun is picked up), panic buttons, and other pets, living or dead. Note they will walk right into pits, unless those pits contain dead pets already. Somebody tell me what I'm forgetting, I'm sure there's more...

But to your specific q, yes, they will walk over wires, as well as electric floors and pits (open or otherwise).

#11 Re: Main Forum » [suggestion] self-test suicide post-review » 2014-02-11 21:20:11

seems like it, but it's a single session file for however long the game has been running; my current one is 70 megs, the overwhelming majority of that lines of "0" meaning, I assume, "nothing happened"

doubly glad I've discovered this is happening, seems there /is/ a reason to quit the game when afk rather than just leaving it idling in the background, lol

#12 Re: Main Forum » [suggestion] self-test suicide post-review » 2014-02-11 21:08:33

Haroo? I was unaware of this possibility. Off to attempt it now, tentative thanks...
:edit: oh gawd. Gonna have to see if I can manually pare down this file, unless there are some fastforward options I'm not seeing, game had been running continuously without me exiting for a couple of days, lol. But thanks regardless smile

#13 Re: Main Forum » [suggestion] self-test suicide post-review » 2014-02-11 20:28:12

arakira, yeah, this is the infuriating thing in this case for me - I had just done multiple self-tests, and afaik, between those and the last one that I died on, I had changed nothing except switching the conductive lights back to electrified floors. I know I either accidentally changed something, or took a misstep in a magic dance, or something. Knowing exactly what I did wouldn't undo it, but not knowing what I did is driving me nuts, adding insult to self-injury XD

#14 Main Forum » [suggestion] self-test suicide post-review » 2014-02-11 20:16:51

Gopher
Replies: 15

New to this game, only been at it for a couple of days now, and so far I've been fine at managing the frustration that naturally comes with this kind of permadeath game, but just did something I haven't done since my first few hours, died during a self-test, and in this case I find myself quite a bit more frustrated than any of my many prior deaths. The reason is that I have no idea what went wrong.

Just before this test, I'd done a couple of self-tests with all but the last trap - a newly-installed trapdoor - replaced with safe alternatives (grids->lights, pit bull->chihuahuas), so I could make sure the trap door was working as intended in all cases. Having so verified, I walked back out, replaced the pit bulls and electric floors, and did the final self-test to put the house back on the burglary market, only to get to the end and find the trap door did /not/ work properly, forcing me to suicide.

Now, I'm sure I must've done something wrong, but for the life of me, I can't figure what it could be. I had literally just done the exact same walk through twice.

It wouldn't really change the game in any substantial way, and in this instance would have eased my mind immensely, if I could watch a security tape of my own suicidal run and see exactly what stupid thing I just did. Obviously you can't allow this for deaths during proper robberies, but after failed self-tests, I see benefit and no harm in having the replay available.

#15 Re: Main Forum » Player Logic and an Idea » 2014-02-11 19:41:59

yeah, no fix that's not a worse problem in itself, at least, that I've thought of. I can deal.

My main point of frustration with the game, really, is with my inability to monitor my house 24/7. When someone finally drops a sizeable bounty or pile of tools, it invariably happens when I'm afk for long enough that I'm looted by someone competent before I get back to do something with the money/tools. Grumblegrumble.  But I know that's not really the game's problem, and again, fixes would make worse problems.

#16 Re: Main Forum » Player Logic and an Idea » 2014-02-11 18:55:51

I see quite a lot of these, people coming in with far more tools than my house is worth - and, even more strangely, often dying in some stupid noobish way. I can only assume these people are throwing their starter $2k into tools and making no real effort to accumulate wealth, instead just having fun throwing their starting money away over and over again trying to rob houses. I'd make a suggestion for changes to the game to discourage this, if I could think of any, but I can't. In general, though, when my house winds up with a value of around $500 or less, the only two types of robbers I get are cautious people who flee at the first sign of, well, anything but walls, and these over-tooled, under-skilled players.

re: your suggestion, not sure about locking the vault for 24h, but there might be something to be said for capping the total value of carried tools to equal the total value of your house design. Ultimately, though, this would mainly affect poor players, not rich, potentially widening the power gap there.

#17 Re: Main Forum » Saws for the Poor » 2014-02-11 18:38:14

Depending on the house and the current attentiveness of the player, you may not have been doing them any favors by jacking the value of their house by a $2000. Nothing I love more than coming back after being afk for a whole hour to find someone died in a silly way dropping thousands of tools, followed by someone a few minutes later attracted by the new value raping my cheap starter house with thousands in tools it was most definitely not designed to withstand.

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