The Castle Doctrine Forums

I think a bigger issue is the abuse (intentional or otherwise) of abandoned starting money.

During a busy period there are numerous ~2k houses popping up with unprotected family and vault. A robber can grab one or two of these and easily take out one of the top houses with brute force.

Makes sense. The crowbar is an amped up multi-tool at the moment.

I've seen some rather vindictive robbers. Someone went to the effort (after finding my vault) of backtracking through my house to use up as many of their bricks on switches as they could.

The current prices seem to be working rather well.

Starting offence has a slight advantage over starting defence, but I don't know how much of an issue that is. Especially with more players — a new house with little in the bank is unlikely to be a target for the career criminal.

I've been craving hot keys too.

Say you have $1000 in your house. Cash/items. Robber comes in, robs the lot. If they have anything in their backpack, they leave it. Your house now has the value of whatever they left in it, so it continues to earn a wage based on Jason's new rules.

This loophole has been around since v5 though, right?

Starting with a 'Starter' set of tools and a 'Materials' voucher seems like the cleanest fix.

Jason — that was a great post, thank you!

With v9 I've seen a definite return to the style of gameplay found circa week one of v5. Lots of amusing mistakes, creeping, mazes, etc. Good stuff.

There was chaos for a while as the money from v8 bled out of the system (hello, 16 ladders!), but it seems to have settled down now.

Two things I noticed:

The family are much harder to protect and often a hinderance when building a house.

In v8 this wasn't so much of an issue because the starting money allowed for you to stick them behind 9 pitbulls and forget about them. In v9 I see much more scope for actually incorporating them into the house in a fun way, except for one problem: they can't walk over wires. I think this is one of the main reasons why the family is traditionally segregated from the main house design — it's just too much bother to to include them within it. Is there a reason why they couldn't safely walk over wires?

Starting money — house vs tools

Perhaps we were spoiled with the $6k from v8, but it now seems really tough to make more than a cursory defence with $2k. Especially vs $2k worth of tools. How about your starting funds are split into two vouchers, $2k for tools and $4k for building materials? Any money you receive from theft or sale of tools can be spent however you wish.

As I recall, v5 houses were largely funded by the free money left lying around by persistent robbers. We don't have so many of those now!

Toppled Leif Peter Hibbard. That was a lot of fun — really good house.

I'm interested to see if my solution is the same as yours!

I shot the dogs to make flicking the rotary simpler. Otherwise no shortcuts.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/429 … ibbard.mp4

But if there was little in the house worth robbing, and everything to lose, why would people bother robbing? If everyone decided to stay home and there was no wage there would be even more of a cash drought then there currently is.

Yep.

Although it doesn't necessarily mean that the house is broken. The owner could have added new pets and left the misplaced/dead ones where they were.

Tbh there's not too much detail stored in those pixels. Pretty sure you could project whomever you desire into either role.

A few thoughts on unlimited backpacks:

Firstly, I think that, if combined with a moratorium on blueprints, an expanded backpack could go a long way to balancing out the game and recapturing the 'spirit of v5'.

However, an unlimited backpack wouldn't be any help vs an 'L' shaped electric floor (triggered when you stand on it), as you could still place all the vital elements of the puzzle out of reach of the player.

Prices would have to be balanced so that your starting money wouldn't give you a free pass for house griefing. (At today's prices it would cost only $3000 to cut straight across a map of steel walls — the most costly item to cut through.)

Would a truly unlimited backpack be necessary? If the vault is never more than 45 tiles away then maybe an item cap around a similar number would make sense.