The Castle Doctrine Forums

I totally agree with you the game is a little hard to see on a phone but very playable on the tablet. Personality, I don't do any big building or big robberies on the phone. I play single player mode, watch some tapes, tweak my house/move my vault, or if I have nothing to lose rob some.  It's much harder to learn what our tiles and tools are as they are made up compared to TCD's every day items..  We should have the wiki up in the next week and that should help in the mean time here are some TH tips :

- Single player mode doubles as a tutorial

- Mobile if you press and hold on a tile or tool in the selection screen it'll tell you the name.

- Colors matter quite a bit in the game and help you remember what tiles and tools do :
  - Droids (TH's pets) with red eyes chase you, droids with green eyes run away from you.
  - Tiles that have yellow on them take electricity and conduct it
  - Tiles that have dark orange on them take electricity and don't conduct it
  - Tiles that have blue take electricity and are currently under power (this is only for tiles you're mean to see are
    powered, like powered doors, pits and electric floors. A wire does not change color based on whether or not it
    currently has electricity flowing through it.
   - The tools colors matter too. The saw or plastic wrench is mostly the same color as the type of wall it takes
   down. That goes for all 3 of the wall taking down tools, they match the colors.

- on mobile, if you press menu then help on the robbery screen.  There is a sort of quick ref card that has all of the tools on it and the next to it lists the type of tiles they can be used on or the type of tiles they can defeat.

- until the wiki is up, this post might help as it has some internal spreadsheets that we used that tells you what the TH equivalent of a TCD item is.  Ie, a powered pit is a trash chute, a wife is now a sentry bot, etc. : http://terminalheist.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=11941

Thanks for checking us out.

Zed,

Thanks for your generosity.  I might take you up on that.  The one thing we did (against my wishes but the labor was free is we replaced all the PHP with Java.  However, we still use the headless client so perhaps we could use yours as a replacement and be done with that.  If you would ever want to join the TH team you are welcome to, so far it's done nothing but lose money, but like you I can't get this crazy game out of my head.  Send me a message if you are interested.

-Cullman

I'm not teasing the game is free to play and available right now : http://www.terminalheist.com

I'd say it's about as active as TCD at this point. It's free to play, and we are in alpha going to beta shortly. I know you think I've missed the window on this, however, I quit my day job last week so this has my full attention for at least the next 6-12 months fail or succeed. I'm not worried about the window or the timing as once we come out of beta I plan to spend money on marketing the game, something TCD never did. In fact, I want to appeal to a much broader audience, ergo the theme change and android and iOS support.

Sorry for the delayed response, mail gateway was down.  It should be back up now.  Try again.

Thanks!

Yes I have multiple accounts, though, I would argue that I never used them to further myself in the game.  I was mostly trying to figure out how other people cheated.  Though, truth be told I did abuse it once or twice.  I definitely, map hacked CrazyAce after I was certain he was a dual accounting and I was sick of his talk on the boards.  I also map hacked one other guy that clearly used multiple accounts to attack my house, that might have been you GotABigTrap (oops sorry!).  That's the extent of my cheating career, mostly research to try to make Terminal Heist harder to cheat at and 2 counts of revenge for which I will now apologize formally.

Speaking of Terminal Heist (http://www.terminalheist.com), we are in alpha over there if you guys want to join us.  Our server is written from scratch.  We don't have all (or even most of our anti-cheating stuff out yet), but we do have mobile clients going and fixed usernames.  There has been much discussion on here on how to detect multi-account usage.  One of things we have done is getting rid of random names, you will use  one chosen username.  Right now you can have as many accounts as you like over at TH, and it's free to play.  Eventually, we will make it single account only, and actually enforce that as a rule (there has been much discussion on here about things we can do so you can still enjoy the game while sitting on a big house, that I see coming later down the road). 

I'm not sure why I didn't think of this earlier, but we are looking at employing a graph database to detect multi-account usage.  Graph DB's are very good at detecting sort of hidden relationships, the sort that would show up if a person used the same n accounts to attack the same houses and die within each other's etc.  For instance, neo4j is an open source graphdb and discusses this on their home page  : http://neo4j.com/use-cases/fraud-detection/

I'm still alive!  Sorry got busy with the holidays and the day job etc.  The game is basically ready to alpha.  Again, if anyone has any good game file footage (in recorded game file format) that would be great as trailer and greenlight are the next steps.  I know I have made many promises and there have been many delays, but the best and new biggest development is that in late November I was able to raise a considerable amount of money to market the game and serve as launch prizes.  There will be tangible news in January.

Ok the forums at terminalheist.com finally have a captcha (of sorts) thanks to the always helpful Jason for pointing me in the right direction.  I only had to delete 12,000 spammers and posts to get the boards back under control!  More news coming soon!

Yes, lot's going on.  New website coming, Steam Greenlight page coming, Video game trailer coming and Alpha version of the game coming all before the end of August.  I know I have made promises before, but we just raised another chunk of money to pay for our marketing costs and the last round of salaries.  The game itself is done, we just need to bang on the server which was written from scratch.  My hope is in the next 10 days, we will have the website completely up and running and the alpha going, where people can download the game, create an account.  It might take a little longer for the mobile clients to get into the stores, but the code on themselves is basically done.  We are going to add some anti-cheating stuff first and then we will be on our way.  My current thinking (I know I change a lot) is that the game will cost $5 to make a ban due to cheating painful.  Unlike, Jason, I am going to come right out and say dual account collaboration is cheating, and people will be banned for it at the admin's discretion.  We are planning on having a free alpha/beta period.  Anyone that signs up during that period, their account will turn into a paid up account once the game becomes for pay, so there is an incentive to join up and help out during the alpha/beta period.  Once the we are through the beta, greenlit on steam, the mobile games are in their respective stores, we will do another round of advertising and likely run a real money robbery contest.  My hope is that we will be there in the October/November time frame.

-cullman