The Castle Doctrine Forums

Summary

These are just my thoughts on my experience of working towards a completed house.
I'll make updates if I feel any are necessary.
Note: you should use http://www.castledraft.com to map out a house. I refer to it in this post and you should know what it is and how to use it.

This post goes hand in hand with Home Invasion 101.
The better houses you design, the better burglar you become.
The better burglar you are, the better houses you will design.

update 2014.04.08 - added thoughts on repeat scouters, common traps, self test, eventual loss section
update 2014.04.09 - simplified title, linked to Home Invasion

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Know Your Customers

There's different kinds of robbers out there and your building plan should reflect that.

A. 2k divers: They start out with 2k tools and don't scout.
B. 2k scouters: They will scout a place within their 5 min window and then bring 2k tools.
C. 2k santas: These dance when they find the vault then gift you tools with a suicide.
D. Chain robbers: They have a low budget house, since they use their last score to fund their next one. These ones have plenty of robbing experience but eventually go broke or die trying.
E. High budget thieves: They have the bankroll to afford tools, effectively scout, and eventually rob you through brute force.
F. Repeat suicide scouters:: Their main purpose is to visit your house and map out enough on each visit so that they can eventually figure the house out, or share the map with a high budget thief who will brute force the rest of the way.

We can also subdivide them into 2 groups: A-C are impatient and D-F are patient.
The impatient thieves are likely to not use castledraft and only visit a few times.
The patient thieves will map out your house and save that information for later use.

In order to make a profitable and safe house, you must attract and kill A-D.
I haven't seen much of D lately (2014.04.08), however you should still build to kill them.
You don't want E to visit. You deter them by making it very expensive for them to stay alive and/or move forward. You want to be able to kill F and prevent them seeing too much of your map.

Myself, I'm usually a F type until I can break a house on my starting 2k, which will then give me a good nest egg to build a home. Then I become an E type after the build progression finishes.

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Space Constraints and Valuation

Tiles
No matter how much money you have, you will always have the same amount of space/tiles to build. You should plan to use that space as cost efficiently as possible. Most of your house should be dedicated to slowing E down. A small entrance designed to attract and kill A-D coupled with plenty of space to build up defenses against E is your goal. Your design should be flexible so that you can deal with F by making small changes here and there.

Tool Cost
"2k proof" is a term that means that a robber would need more than 2k worth of tools to brute force your house. What is 2k worth of tools? Most people think about what they buy when they spend their initial capital on robbing tools.  This term only applies to Robbers A-C and F. Valuating D and E Tool cost is much different.

You have to consider that they have recovered tools (half the value) from successful robberies and house kills. I have found that saws, meat, water, are usually collected in abundance. This is because of the nature of the tools. People don't usually die with bricks on them since they can spend them turning switches off and on. They also don't die much with guns still on them. Wire cutters are on the rise but are usually used before death. From this we can get a sense of a different value on tools.

I value meat and water as $0, saws at $200, with wire cutters being about $300. Big ticket items like Crowbars, Ladders, Guns, Explosives hold their sale value since they are rarely collected.

Also, you must consider the "cost of living." This refers to the idea that E wants to stay alive as much as possible and that will have a cost associated to leaving a safe path back to the exit. Everyone but E will be suicidal and so they don't think about the cost of living.

Cost per Tile
Ask yourself how much does it cost to reveal/get past X tiles of the map. You want to have a high average cost per tile. It may be easier to think of it in sections. As you plan your house in castle draft, think about the brute force cost to enter/exit each section. You want to make it expensive both ways.

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House Design

I usually like to build my whole house design in castle draft before I actually start, so edits are quick and you can minimize demolition costs. To start, I also recommend building sections of the design in cheap materials (wooden walls and indicator lights), to test out the house to be sure you didn't make any mistakes. You can do this with your initial life. I'm sure you'll die to self tests a bunch, but you'll be learning and not really risking anything. Be sure to review camera shifts depending on where you expect the robber to be coming from. Remember you want a fully working house all mapped out before you start.

There's plenty of trap designs out there, I just wanted to share some general tips with the goal of high cost per tile in mind:
1. Multiple choice ... The robber knows you have to be able to walk to the vault. They use this info to rule out any possible paths a non tooled robber can't take. So, you should make multiple paths where you can walk with out any tools. Design it in a way so that you change dead ends into paths and adjust your vault location cheaply. This will allow you to update your house easily when F has penetrated too far.
2. Learn how pets move completely. ... It will open up new paths of walking and obscure them from robbers not in the know. Do not make it easy to find a chihuahua.
3. Learn the camera shifts and robber vision. ... Shifts can allow you to walk where vision would kill you. Pets seen at the edge of a screen in parts where someone just needs to walk fast by are often missed.
4. Powered trapdoors ... The best and most expensive trap. Make sure getting around them costs the same as just buying a ladder. Don't spend too much on triple thick concrete walls when buying a ladder will just solve it. Also, the most you can chain together effectively will be 2. Anything more will just require more saws and not ladders.
5. Powered doors ... These are better at keeping players out then trapping them in. Use them to hide your seen pets. They can also be effective walls.
6. Electric floors ... These cost more to disarm when they are not on. Try to make sure you aren't creating paths that robbers can just water through.
7. Cats ... These are great at the low price of $8. Electric floors are scarier when there are seen cats wandering around. Have a cat disappear behind a powered door (make sure he isn't brick-able) and it will make robbers have to cut electric floors or risk a possible magic dance death. Or get a crowbar to find the cat. You don't even have to have the cat actually do anything.
8. Pit Bulls ... Position them so that they aren't clubbable. Make them required to press buttons so that killing/drugging one will cause another tool to be used. Use them to block paths and require a gun or knowledge of the electric floor that will kill it.
9. Power ... Use multiple power sources and understand where your wooden wiring allows access to. Saws are only $200. I've seen a bunch of houses where a bunch of saws can locate the vault easily.
10. Walls ... In addition to concrete, use steel walls and pits, it will force the robber to bring in more tool types and wondering if he's brought enough. If you have space and money, powered doors are also another layer.

Thoughts on common traps (search the forum for more examples).
A. Clocks - these take up a lot of space. I don't use them for that reason, but if you are going to, make sure it still keeps to the high cost per tile rule.
B. Combo Locks - these also take up a lot of space. I would not use these. They are very effective and keeping low budget thieves away, however, they are weak against any one with the means to saw to the solution. Making them impervious to saws only makes the situation worse since, they can just spend the money to bust through whatever it controls and you have less space to distract them.
C. Magic Dance - you can build these to whatever scale you want. I keep them small and plentiful. Don't have a couple control your entire house. Remember to try to keep electric floors short and off.
D. Leaps of Faith - these are my bread and butter. You can do them with dogs and cats. They are compact and require that pets don't die. These are cheap to enter if you know the way, but expensive if you don't. You can also come up with creative ways to trigger them from magic dances or clocks.
E. Fire Floors - relatively cheap. Decide whether you want the pet to be brick-able/drug-able. There's always a space tradeoff.
F. Sight Traps - These can be very hard to figure out, however, be sure that it doesn't throw off the rest of your traps depending on the direction the robber breaks through. These can be combined with dead ends that are mandatory to visit to uncover a safe path.

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Building Progression

You've designed and tested your perfect home. If you haven't, go do it. Map it out completely. Done? Now it's time to work on completing it in the game.

Self Test
You should have already worked things out in a 2k life with cheap components. However, you will still need to do this a lot. Write down your safe path and update it when applicable. Use safe confirmation movement! Don't forget to back out to the exit when testing with lights! Before every self test, I take a map shot (press +) to review in case of death. This is my process of re-validating a house:
1. Make all necessary changes. Then mark your place by putting panic buttons somewhere. I will eventually do an "undo" back to this state and the panic buttons will let me know when to stop "undo"ing.
2. First Safe Run (lights for traps, windows for pits, chihuahuas for pit bulls) and make sure the button presses work. If something goes wrong exit and go back to 1, else undo all changes back to panic button, and adjust for the next run.
3. Live Pet Run (same as above, but all pits (with required dead animals if necessary) and any trap meant to kill pets are active, doors in appropriate walls to allow a path back to the mat and allow escape if trapped). If something goes wrong, exit and go back to 1, else undo all changes to panic button.
4. Final Test
I've still died at this stage by not following my written down path exactly or letting a finger slip. Mistakes happen, they suck.

Level 1
Hopefully you've just landed a nice score, and you are starting out with more than 2k. But even if you aren't, the same goal applies: Work towards building an entrance near the welcome mat to be "2k proof" in the smallest amount of tiles possible. I usually like to surround the whatever I build with a 3 tile thick wooden wall (5 saws can get out to the rest of your map, but can't get back in).
You may not be able to do accomplish this with your starting capital, but hopefully you get some lucky kills and you can build up. Make sure to keep an attractive balance (1k or greater) to get more visitors.

I don't recommend starting from $2k. You should always start with a successful heist. Try removing everything in your castle draft map except the entrance. Note the cost and aim for houses in with $2k-$4k above that cost. This way you can jump straight to level 2 after building.

Level 2
Once you've gotten your starting entrance to be 2k proof and compact, it's time to save some money. You want a house listing with a $4-6k value. This is the optimal house listing that will attract your 2k robbers. While you save up, do some scouting around the neighborhood, you might find an easy score.

As you kill robbers, maintain a 4-6k house listing by selling off the tools that float above and start improving and building out the rest of the house. However, I usually keep big items like guns/ladders because when you start doing more robbing, you'll want them. You want to keep doing this until you've built out your house.

You may have to change or redesign your front entrance to prevent it from being stale. Be wary of scouts that make it pretty far into your house. You should make a edit (even an empty one of just lifting your vault and placing it back down), just to cause the scout to check again. Also, some tapes may show a 1 step suicide with tools. These probably died from cops and spent a lot of time in your house. You'll want to make an update.

Eventually, you'll complete your house. Don't forget, you can also reinvest the money/tools you are making into successful robberies.

Level 3
Now that your house is pretty much complete, you can decide if you want to attract more attention by buying paintings or moving into the end game, where you can start saving all those tools and making big brute force attempts on wealthy/painting laden homes. Have fun!

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Eventual Loss

Someone will eventually rob you if you don't die to a self test first.
If you get robbed be sure to check out the tapes before doing anything. If you die during an edit, you won't be able to review the footage. Make sure to note any misplaced pets or broken wiring when repairing. If you get robbed to $0 dollars, don't commit suicide. Wait for a santa or a friend to jump start your house again with a little cash. Hopefully your multiple path design will make this easier. You can always redesign the house, but you won't have to pay for all the pit bulls again. You could always keep the trapdoors in place and build around them as well.

Self test deaths suck the most. Your bounty goes to no one and you know it was all your fault. Double check the map shot to see where you went wrong. On the upside, you probably haven't done much suicidal robbing in awhile. Time to go check out other houses.

Your first loss will suck. You may die from your own mistake, someone's patient planning, or advantaged player(s), hacker, or disconnect. You'll want to blame someone or something, rage quit, vent in the forums, etc.

Stop. Take a deep breath and understand that loss and paranoia is an INTENTIONAL and EVENTUAL experience of the game. If you didn't understand it then, you do now. Decide if this game is for you and worth playing again.

Also, you can check out the other servers where the loss and grind may be different.

Summary

Many players will benefit from having a place to test tools.
This will allow for better houses and better robbers.
It also is in some way, a "learn it yourself" replacement for the lack of a tutorial on robbing.

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Tool Option during Vault Test

Current behavior:
When performing a vault test, you don't have access to tools.
Suggested behavior:
Allow an option to use tools in the vault test, but that run does not validate the vault

Details:
Check box option to use tools when pressing "Done" (Off by default).
When selected, you receive 5 of each tool to use (every run).
Backpack only hold's 8, so not sure how to display this or if you need to select the tools for the run.
During this run, death still applies.
On conclusion of the run (vault reached or exited), no validated vault.

Thematic reasoning:
You want to test your vault protection with items that are available to the robbing community.

Real World Effect:
A place to try out tools without having to buy them (the crowbar is unattainable at the start).
This will allow people to test out and see tool effectiveness and limitations.
Things like range and vision and timing can be learned in this mode.
You will not have to grind for money just to test these things.
This will lessen the amount of vault test deaths (i.e. run with tools first just in case, before doing a tool less vault test).
More complex houses requiring more than 5 of any tool to escape will still be at the same risk level.
This will increase awareness of how to build better homes by allowing you to see how damage affects your house.

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Conclusion

My current method. When I start fresh I look for a house with the situation I want to test, and then buy the tool to do so. However, it takes long and sometimes I can't find the exact scenario.

I like indicator lights for testing out electricity. There's nothing I can use to test out tool effects. This change will at least allow players to understand tool usage and tool prevention without having to grind for it.