The Castle Doctrine Forums

Indeed, the question is: How to entice people to make houses that are interesting to rob.

That means the "goal" of the game should change from "Make it impossible to be robbed" to "Make as many people as possible try to rob me"

Instead of trying to stop people from making NP-Hard houses, having an NH-Hard house should not make you "win" the game.

Though I think that would be hard to combine with the theme.

The problem with idea is that most houses have the power sources inaccessible, or only have those power sources accessible that are needed to get through the security. That means that if you fry that power source you lock yourself out...

How many people are actually active in the game?
Right now I see only 5 houses with more than 10K, and only 12 with more than 100.
Make that 4, I just robbed mr Rodriquez.

Those 5 include Christopher Norman Doe's house, which is very easy to break but is in an unrobbable state now, and has been for as long as V8 is out. When was the last time he checked his house?

So there are only very few houses worth robbing, meaning as soon as someone has money, he'll be robbed.

The problem is I think the set of two voltage switches. Without those there would be no secret dance and no combination lock possible. All that would be left is mazes with dogs and buttons that trigger pits/floors in a direct way. Button on means floor on, button off means floor off. You could have a floor that kills you if you step on it, but it couldn't have a bit lock.

Actually, it could. A set of buttons that have to be all on to close the door in front of the dog that would kill you if it could reach the button.

Hmm, this is a hard problem we have here...

One thing that might make it a bit easier would be treating the first attempt differently.
If you are testing a house built with just the starting 6K, after death you get the option to restart with your house already re-built.

It could even be that if your house costs less than 6K to built, you get the option of starting over with a pre-built house.

Sounds good!
I'm not sure what use electric floors are without switches though...

You could, after being robbed, buy new paintings and quit without revalidating your house...
I'm sure someone can also design a house that becomes unrobbable if a family member gets killed, thus leaving the paintings.

I would love to have a way to get rid of unwanted paintings...
Putting 'em up for auction seems a sensible way to do that. You could even associate a cost with that so one can potentially make a loss from it.

Wow, indeed, this opens up some really clever misdirections if you cooperate with someone else!
For instance, you build two vertical bitlocks above each other, with a wooden wall in between. Then you get your henchman to rob you, and during that robbery he saws though that wall. All your victims think those two bitlocks are independent, while in reality they are one large bitlock!

I've got a question regarding the maps:
Quit a few houses start out with a dog on top of a switch, probably after being robbed. Nicholas Robert Snow's house for instance has a "Sticking Pressure Switch / Pit Bull"
In that case, will the switch be pressed, or does the dog first have to step off it and then on it again before it is pressed?

It's probably not a hack at all, but a house that becomes impossible once robbed. I think the dog used to be on the other side of the switch, as with the dog there you can just walk over the traps. However, once 1 robber has done that, and reached the vault, the new position of the dog is stored, making the house impossible to rob.

Maybe instead of stopping income after a robbery, all income should go to the automatic repair of any damage done during the robbery.
That even gives an incentive to the robbers to do less damage, since less damage means the house will be robbable again sooner.

With bit-locks you can usually assume that any dog-activated switch you can see is a decoy.