The Castle Doctrine Forums

Another thought, this time on deceased estates.

On the main server yesterday I had a house that was starting to take shape nicely, maybe $20k to rebuild. Then I made a dumb mistake while scouting another house and died. The problem here is the "content eating machine" intrinsic to the design of TCD. Fair enough that I died and lost everything, but a perfectly good house I'd spent days on, with a living wife and untouched safe just got lost to the void before anybody ever beat it.

What I think could work nicely in this situation is for those houses owned by people who died while robbing (or the last known working version when someone dies during self test) to become deceased estates.

Instead of appearing on the list as a name, it appears as an address, so that it is obvious to all that it is a different category. Tapes from this address are still sent to the owners "next of kin" but they can no longer collect bounties or edit it.

As an aside, any house of significant value in this category is probably not a multi, since multi players would not be risking the life of their primary in the first place.

Anyway, the idea here is to preserve that content for as many other players as possible, in a way that is difficult to abuse with multi accounts.

So, for deceased estates you get one shot, "permachill". If you rob the safe, or die in there, it is gone from your list forever. On top of this, if you manage to rob the place you take only 10% of the vault. ie deceased estates are listed at 10% of their "real" value. As more people successfully rob it, it gets progressively broken down as it slides down the list in value, giving players at all levels a chance to have a go at it. And as long as it is still killing people it is still collecting bounties too, albeit at a rate of 10% so good houses may last a long time as deceased estates.

Awarding only 10% of the vault will in most cases make these places not worth robbing as soon as they transition into a deceased estate, so when a player dies the value of the property should be taken into account, let's say 50% - before it is further reduced to 10%

eg I have a house that costs $20k to replace, with $1,300 in the vault and die during self test.
In my next life I see the deceased estate 23 Franklin Street, it shows a vault value of $1,130 (20,000 * 50% + 1,300) * 10%
I rob that house for $1,130 with no tools, it belonged to my "uncle" so I know the layout.
The "real" value of the house is now 11,300 minus my 1,130 = 10,170
That same house is still listed for everyone but me, but it's displayed value is now  $1,017
Another player comes to rob it, he has a $6,000 bounty and dies, leaving behind tools with a resale value of $500
The house vault is now worth (10170 + 6000)*0.1 + 500 in tools = 1,717.
3 more people die with bounties of 800 total and no tools, house value is now 1,797
I'm kicking myself at this point. Watching the tapes from 23 Franklin St. I see that if I'd waited a few days to rob my "uncles" house, I could have made more from the bounties and tools it collected after he died.
5 people in a row successfully rob it for 1797, then 1617, then 1455, then 1310 then 1179 dropping 10% off the value each time.

Because of permachill, eventually, the house runs out of robbers. Maybe it is deleted after sitting idle for a week. Alternatively the vault could award 10% rounded up to the nearest $10 so that it can get robbed down to zero while still giving diminishing returns.

This wont stop people with 10 accounts, but it will seriously hinder those with 2 or 3, and by allowing someone to rob their previous house for a fraction of it's value, gives people a chance to recoup a fraction of their losses after a catastrophic death. But most importantly it keeps the content alive for as many people as possible.

Yeah, I understand the problem, but can't say I like the solution. I can't play the way I did on the main server which was to build a house that kills people and progress almost exclusively via bounties.

I know that Jason, cullman and yourself have put a lot of thought, time and effort into fixing things, but bear with me a minute while I think this through myself, not just sockproofing but addressing a few other things as well.

The biggest problem over all is not enough houses to rob in a small player base.

As someone who played before, then drifted away, but would like to play again now, my problem is quite the opposite. I want to make more content, but I can't.

I have a bunch of starter house ideas I'd like to try out, but on both servers I am limited to building 1 house and waiting. On the main server nobody is coming in anymore after 3 or 4 kills - my mistake, I added an obvious scout killer that scares most people away, so I either suicide or I'm stuck waiting for what would have to be either an idiot or someone very new to the game.

But on your server, my house made only one kill but it meant nothing at all - because the guy robbed me anyway, and my balance is negative. I guess I could make 10 accounts on your server, but if none of them can progress by fooling robbers, what is the point?

In both cases I am locked out of playing, unless I go robbing - which I do, but I don't take risks. There is no case where I would value one saw over 200 wood walls or one wirecutter over 20 electric floors - with the exception of coming back with a club if I see an unprotected wife in the entryway of a house worth over $500.

What would suit my playstyle is letting players build multiple houses on one account, but rather than permadeath, have "permachill" - so that if one of my houses kills you, that's it, you're done there. You can try rob my other houses, but you can't come back to the house that killed you until after I've reset it manually via a new self test - probably after I've spent the bounties to upgrade the house.

Another thing I see as a problem with the original game design is allowing players to spend practically unlimited amounts to protect very little left over in the vault. My current house on the main server is an example of that. It's most likely going to sit idle for a long time because I spent too much on defences. From a robbers point of view, the relationship between risk (house cost) and reward (vault contents) is an extremely variable unknown. It would be better if a certain percentage of all earnings must go in the vault - unavailable for defences or tools. it would not have to be a lot - maybe 10%.

This could carry over to fix yet another problem I have with the game - where a $2k starter house might work as intended, but one guy it kills has a five figure bounty meaning that while you are away your house moves briefly to the top of the list, before other players (or a multi of the same player) comes in with tools worth dozens of times more than the original house and contents combined.

So, you force players to maintain 10% in their vault, but when someone does get a bounty - only 10% of it goes straight to the vault. The rest is held in reserve (at the police station?) until the house owner logs in and has the opportunity to deal with their new wealth. That way it is not possible for player A to trash players B's house in order to transfer funds to player C who may or may not be collaborating with, or a multi of player A.

Anyway, just some ideas. I am actually considering making a mobile game in many ways similar to TCD, so I see this forum as the ideal place to work out solutions to some of the problems built into TCD.

Only did a couple, there's only a few on there. The lag was noticeable but short enough not to be a problem playing from Australia. You *could* ease the sense of lag by playing a short animation, just sliding the robber to the tile over 100ms based on client input before playing out the results of the move from the server. But really, 100 - 200ms delay is not a problem in a turn based game.

Seems the rules are quite different here, I had a guy come in and die in my "one trick pony" starter house, only to have the same guy come back 5 times until he eventually robbed me... If he had died a second time would he have been reset? Or can you just keep wailing on a house until you break it? (money for tools allowing)

Made an account and had a look around... the competition houses are weird, some of them clearly have no path to the vault, like one with a metal wall on the doorstep that must be cut through to enter, or an open pit in the same 1st square. Cool stuff though, looking forward to seeing how it works online, assuming the competition bounties are enough to let me go rob.

Aaargh, 2nd day back and I remembered why I stopped playing this game!

So I have a $2k starter house with $668 left split between the wife and the vault, I log regularly for the first few hours, then every few hours, usually there are no tapes, occasionally there's a guy having a scout around.

Then while I'm away someone comes in with $850 worth of tools, breaks a window, kills a dog, gets $334 from the vault, this is not so much of a problem, the whole setup is designed to lure and kill people who go after the wife, and that happens next... even though my house is broken and not working as intended, a guy comes in, makes a stupid mistake, the wife shoots him and he drops a $21,300 bounty.

Probably wrecked that guys day and he probably deserved it. Awesome.

Problem is, that $21k bounty puts my $2k starter house with a dead dog and broken window on top of the list, or top 3 at least. More than worth the cost of a pistol in any case. So by the time I log in the next morning, my family is dead and safe empty, because I built a starter house that successfully killed a serial murderer.

An email notification might have kept me in the game. Or not, I was probably asleep when it went down anyway.

Just dropping in to say "Hi"

I absolutely loved Castle Doctrine back in the day, it is the game that gave me the single biggest emotional reaction of any game.

I was playing during a period when there was a massive class division, a few people with successful houses that regularly killed people were (I guess) getting bored with their success and these guys had no problem taking thousands of dollars worth of tools in to rob starter houses for whatever change they had left from $2k, which kinda sucked for anyone trying to get started. Some of these guys though were real jerks who would kill the wife and kids as well. So, I set up a house to deliberately target and kill these jerks and it worked, it collected several five figure and even six figure bounties. I was literally jumping around the house with joy, punching the air watching the replays. Then, after making massive upgrades to the house, I died on my own traps.

Anyway, to those like myself who have come back for another look after Jason's mailout, I want to say - be careful out there, I took a screenshot of my jerk-killer house back in the day, and now it is rebuilt and back in action.

That doesn't quite work on the house he posted, the solution is a bit different. I'd post it but it's my new starter house now.

Suedo, I will tell you what behaviour ruins the game for me:

*Respawn.
*Validate an empty house.
*Find a new name in the list.
*Load up $2k in tools, either wife killer or vault breaker, very few <$2k houses can defend against both.
*Wreck a new house that cost less to build than your tools.
*Suicide.
*Repeat.

It is not so bad lately, but these guys were the majority of players for some time when I started playing, with at least a couple of very rich players in there masquerading as these guys as well, except they had massive bounties, which I found out by designing a griefer trap.

Though my new house, a scout killer that scored 6 for 9 overnight had two $2k toolers in a row today, taking ~$450 from my vault using $4000 worth of tools between them.

edit: I should not say majority of players, rather majority of robbers, since one player could go through every new house once per day, so it only takes a few guys doing it.

Now I do, and godammit, I went to say hello, did a little dance in front of your dogs, forgot everything was deadly and died! Totally ruined that wife exploit I had going!

The wife already gets bumped if she is spawning on a corpse, I haven't looked but I am sure the code does not bump her inside a wall or other obstructed tile. Shotguns should just be treated as obstructions in that code, that's my guess.

Yeah, that's why I didn't post the original layout that enabled it, I'm sure it's not that hard to figure out tho.

Well, it had to happen eventually. Thomas John Bowen killed my wife for the $3 she was holding. I tried replacing her with a cat, but it just wasn't the same without her greeting folks at the door, with her sunny smile and hair trigger. Nothing to do now she's gone but use this vault full of tools for revenge....

This was my house that got those ridiculous bounties... I'd done a couple of small scale robberies to get going, guess it cost a bit under 5k.

Then everything changed, and I had $100k burning a hole in my pocket and endangering my wife. I call it "The Folly of the Nouveau Riche" poorly planned out with more money than I knew how to spend, I was busy with other things when the windfall came in and had to burn the cash quickly.

The entryway got most of the kills. First thing you see is the wife heading south. If you scouted south first and then tried the door, the wife gets in position behind it, or if you rush through that door and run the gauntlet to the second door, she hasn't opened the door behind it yet, and you get sandwiched between two dogs and a locked door.

The solution was to open that first door exactly on the seventh turn, which gives you a window of opportunity between the wife opening the door and the daughter closing it a turn later, any sooner and it never opens, any later and the wife will beat you to it. Then all you have to do is make sure you are standing in front of the pit 42 turns after you opened the first door (3 loops around the eastern pylon does it, dog's gotta get his exercise!) and take a leap of faith on the one turn when it switches. Simple!

Or, you know, bring a meat, a dynamite, a saw and a ladder.

What's surprising is that nobody even got the first part. A couple of guys sawed their way in before I tidied the wiring and concreted up the powered doorway, but that was pretty much it. Held up surprisingly well for what it was.

I think future houses will use something similar, seems the odds against a robber fluking the timing of two pet/family sightings are just as slim as combo locks.