The Castle Doctrine Forums

Because jere is a horrible, horrible person. End of story.

Of course, I'm not serious. But really, it's a great point to show how exploitative these electronics bugs are.

You built a legitimate trap using this design? It seems like the only possibility for use with a normal house (to me) is forcing somebody to use a crowbar, but that can already be done pretty well with a cat.

That seems like a simple fix, as well. It would really just keep everything logical while also allowing for realistic circuit behavior. Personally, I find this wireless stuff hard to wrap my head around because it has no real world analog; in reality, you can't reach a "maximum amount" of steps and break all electronics in the universe simply with a big loop.

Wouldn't the electro-breaker break the clock itself? Unless you tried using the off-state from the breaker itself to force the clock to step, which may or may not be possible (not sure exactly what the crazy properties are yet), you would just end up with the clock unable to step after the breaker goes off.

Well, the game may have just changed forever. Now the weakness of wired walls has been overcome; switches inside a concrete box can affect stuff outside of it. And, with divided prime period circuits, also in their own concrete boxes, that would be very, very hard to crack.

Electronics have come very far since I built the latch-based press counter way back in v6, or the read/write lock in v8. And this is really crazy. But at least it's just one bit of storage...

I'm thinking of a way to use this for multiple bits now. You could have each bit be transmitted wirelessly on a different step, essentially performing a slow multiplex that then, in the reciever, stores the transmitted bits in latches. That could be then used for anything you want. I'll try this tomorrow, gotta sleep now.

Would that be just vault value or total house value? Because I currently have a house built with 20K, but with $64 in the vault.

Also, that brings up the strategy of spending arbitrarily to lower your value. I do it, as somebody who often has to not play for multiple days. What should we do about it? Is it a legit tactic, or exploitive?

The problem I ran up against was designing the trap so that the square of cables (here:http://castledraft.com/editor/8vrecj) wouldn't pass power between each other, so that the dog hitting the button didn't pass power to the output of the button, just only to the grate. Due to screen shifts, it wasn't really possible. I bet there's a better way to do the top left electronics to compact everything and make it work, but I didn't really have time to really do multiple revisions on this design.

Instead, I'm now using a spiritual successor that includes a new trick: the corner of inescapable death.

This is a great point. As somebody who has looked into couter-bruteforcing in depth, my standard is to first prevent a theoretical robber with infinite saws, infinite water, infinite meat, infinite wire cutters, and one ladder from breaking my house without actually solving any single part of it. From there, try two ladders, or one ladder and one explosive; or, instead, make them solve at least two parts of your house. Counter-brutefrocing is, at its core, that simple: forcing robbers who don't intend to solve your traps to use a greater number of more expensive tools to circumvent them.

Thanks for the shout-out. It's always nice to see something I put work into recognized.

The door stays open while you're on it. One you step off, it closes. The same applies to animals.

That's really impressive. As an EE guy myself, I find it really cool that you're applying real-world devices to the Castle Doctrine. However, it seems like this specifically might not be much of a help. It actually makes it easier to reach the core electronics room for a brute-forcer, because they only have one line of walls to cut through. While I love the electronic side of the game, and am working on some new, secret designs myself (CDHDD v2, anybody? Let's relive v8 with the massive block of wires!), it sort of seems like a lot of it takes up too much room for its worth.

I'm not trying to dissuade anybody from electronics, because its hella awesome, but personally, I prefer to stick to my sadistic doggy deathtraps.

After being away for the weekend, I would like to say congrats to the man who took about 50K (more or less) plus tools off me at some point. I returned to a wrecked house and a wife still holding the 1000-ish dollars she had when I left. It seems like it was not a good idea to post my entryway deathtrap here and still continue using it, as the guy who ended up brute-forcing my place did that part, at least, legit. I didn't check the name of the guy who did it, I just sort of rage-quit.

Now it's time to try building a really nice, clean, modular place instead of the crazy cat based stuff I had set up earlier.

I'm wondering... would a design like this function as indented? Because it seems like that would make a trap such that, once you step on the center electric floor, there's no way out even with tools.

If you spend all your cash on tools initially, you get dropped to $0 houses on the list because you have $0 in you safe. Its actually sort of annoying; I personally think that the old way worked just fine.