The Castle Doctrine Forums

This is decently secure; a reasonable robber looking to brute-force would have to spend a minimum of $5,200 to reach you vault by traveling along the expected path, like this.

A lucky robber, or one absolutely set on bruteforcing, however, could get through for only $3200.

What I would recommend changing:

• Don't use massive amounts of powered electric floors. Bypassing those is too easy for brute-forcers. At the very least, hook them up to a magic dance, so they get powered sometime after the robber steps onto them; at the most, use a clocks and have your robber traverse a floor of alternating electric floors and trapdoors - also hooked up to a magic dance that will kill them if they make the wrong move.

• Don't let bypassing the electric floor section make the rest of the trap less deadly. In this case, if somebody waters over the floors, the dogs are no longer a threat; they aren't waiting behind that door to kill you instantly, because they haven't aggro'ed yet. It would be better to find a way to make them see you no matter what.

• I disagree with LiteS on your late Chihuahua trap. Many a well-armed bruteforcer has died from a trap like that; the dumb ones barrel in and cut the wrong floor (the one behind them - they want to escape!), the ones who think they're smart cut the first wall (and die), and the lucky ones cut behind them to live. Rarely are players smart enough to disable the trap by cutting the electric floor connected to the powered wall.

Not a connection icon specifically, but there had been threads discussing the problems of a spotty internet killing you after robberies. This specific fix was only a recent suggestion, though.

I like this idea. Sent my painting in, I might do another one as well.

Yeah, I often have trouble keeping the changes I'm making to my house stored in my head. Once I have a lot to lose from death, I usually take a mapshot before a self test and compare that to my previous mapshot, just to make sure I've only changed what's necessary. Of course, after two weeks, I thought I knew this house like the back of my hand. I clearly didn't.

Exactly. Nobody could bruteforce my house without simply destroying everything on their way to the vault. And even if they got there, they had better hope that they have a crowbar as well. Also, nobody made it to the disco floor. The furthest somebody made it was three tiles to the right of the top left corner. They sawed the wired wall, walked up, saw the dog, walked left, and were trapped by two electric floors. They chose to die by stepping forward, placing them at the forefront of robbers in my house.

Thanks! I'm really bummed that my house fell before a long stint on the front page, but I think that this remembrance was at least fitting a house that killed so many.

I fixed it; I had accidentally used a voltage triggered instead of a voltage inverted in that design. This one works as intended, though it's a couple tiles wider. Note: the missing electric floor is intended to that the two loops don't mix. Also, note that those second set of electric floors aren't on at any point, so it's safe to cross.

I liked the idea of the voltage detector, but I agree that it turned out pretty useless. It's the type of thing that I would bring along if it was free, but wouldn't be willing to pay for. Also, it was phased out before signed sprites, and it was redundant because people already had put lit-up wires in their sprites anyways.
I also remember wishing that a "battery" existed a long time ago, back when trapdoors used to conduct, and people just made long lines out of them as their defense. Now, with non-condictive trapdoors, the battery would be much less useful; I rarely have built houses where something like a battery would have had much effect. The one use I could see is disabling clocks by forcing an "on" output, but I'm not sure it would be that useful (you would still have to water over lots of electric floors) and probably wouldn't see much use in that situation anyway.
Anyways, I think the game is, for the most part, properly balanced right now and that adding new tools might just mess that balance up.

I agree with this; a "middle class" has developed, sitting at the 12-22k mark and, more often then not, waiting for bounties that rarely come. Personally, I use this time in my house's life to upgrade. Spend your money on new trap systems until you fall in the 2-7k range, then wait. You'll be in the prime suicide robber range, and shoot back up to the middle class in no time. After a couple times though this, you can get a really nice, well-defended house capable of surviving on the front page. Then you can wait and slowly rise there from bounties or try your hand at robbing a super rich dude; don't worry about spending most of your cash on tools, because, again, you'll easily get back to the 10k+ range after going offline with 2-7k for the night.

That's my advice on meta-stategy. As for house design, the best way to get better at it is to rob and see what everybody else is doing. Even if you die, that's one trap idea that you can use, and you know it's effective: if it killed you, it could easily kill somebody else.

I remember my first big robbery, way back in v5. I took down the 2nd richest house in the game with under 2k of tools by using a Chihuahua in one of his walls to protect me as I stepped through a door with a pitbull behind it, allowing me to bypass his magic dance. A house that had stood for weeks went down to a couple explosives and a crowbar, and I was much, much richer.

I just wanted to add that I love this trap. It gets even better when you put it in the very corner of your house, so that, once you step there, there's no way out unless you did something else previously.

I wish there was, but there isn't, without a modded client.