The Castle Doctrine Forums

Yeah. The robbing aspect translates very well to the iPhone, and I can't think of a comparable puzzle platformed.

I hope there's a mode where you don't even have a house, but just rob.

I fully support this campaign to send dead houses to the grave.

Yeah! it was kind of a gimme, being able to walk around the outside so easily, but it was very cool (like, I never saw inside the magic box in the southeast corner, but I got to deduce it just by looking at the map). And the 'cat alarms' were really an awesome surprise. I think I secretly love finding mechanics like that, which were neither meant to be seen, touched, or ever even to be part of the solution. It's like finding an easter egg, or some part of a game that you weren't supposed to ever reach, but somebody was there and built something anyway.

Yeah, concrete. It's not mine, though, and I have no idea who built it. I might post my draft after a while, I just want to test my wife-hunting tactics on a few more dead houses first.

Just a quick note: it's possible to get straight through into the 6-dog room with a 2K scout, just with a few meat. I was going to do that on my next run, actually.

Well you were alive for only, like, two runs.

And I've messed up the Malone house before, too. It's a nice guessing-game house, and for some reason I still haven't drafted it.

People love magic dances, right?
(Note: for a slightly harder, but still deduce-able challenge, replace all but the first windows with walls)

…and combo locks?

Okay, now I'm getting a little carried away…

Unrelated: this one's surprisingly fun to solve w/o tools. Give it a try!

Very exciting. Love the proposed ideas, and I agree with Pohaku about the theme being cool but immaterial.

I think I'm also pro-getting rid of sight-shift traps. With respect to the people that first implemented them, I think they're counter-intuitive in a bad way. Like, you can clearly see that buttons are available in the house build, and can intuit that they're part of a house even if you never see them in a magic dance. There's no explanation for how robber sight works (and why would there be? the robber isn't supposed to be a house mechanic), and only hardcore nerds (and not the mainstream) would really want to figure that stuff out.

2¢

Ok well, it's finally done. I might go back and add pictures, maybe not. Been extremely busy lately, and will be for a while.

Anyway, here's my contribution to this promising thread!

...presenting...

HOME INVASION 110: The Art and Joy of 2K Scouting

All right, class! Now that we're back in session, we're going to go back over the material we learned in Professor Cylence's HOM101.

Everybody load up their homelog.txt. Lists up? Alphabetical by owner? Castledraft loaded?

Great!!

Now Let's Review…

• Rob! Rob again! Rob some more! ROB THEM ALL HAHAHAHA!!!! ….and do take notes.
   
    - The more you rob, the more you learn.

• Aim for PROGRESS

    - Every step is progress, enter the house and you've already started. Always try to improve on what you know.
    - Use tools to explore, not to escape.

• Tools 110

    - A balanced toolkit (e.g. 2 cutters or saws, 2 bricks, 4-5 meat, 4-5 waters) is best.
        - ... but look for clues that might weight your possessions (ie. into a house full of dog-doors, take 17 meat + 2 bricks)
             - … but you should know all this already from Professor Cylence's class.
   

• Always remember, EVERY HOUSE WILL FALL!

    - Every house has a tool-less solution. Ruminate on THAT.
    - Every house also has limited space. Meaning: the more you reveal of a house, the less there is to solve.
    - Many tool-less solutions are EXTREMELY complicated… and yet many houses are extremely easy to rob, and cheaply. There are many skilled home-builders, but none are perfect.

Okay!! Now on to more advanced topics!

Traps Revisited: Tips & Tricks

After a few runs, every robber comes to the realization that most traps are of the same basic type. These are the successful traps borne of devious innovators, and have proven to be effective, efficient killers. The basic forms are easy enough to understand & implement yet quite difficult to solve.

Nevertheless, each class of traps has its weak spot, and the skilled robber rejoices at the identification of each successive trap, because he then immediately knows where to start. Here's a roadmap to solving the most common traps in The Castle Doctrine:

Combo Locks

The bad news: a well designed combo lock may be the only trap that is both impervious to 2K scouting, and impractical to guess. It's also perhaps the easiest trap for an owner to modify, which instantly erases any significant progress made on mapping the house.

What? Already a house that defeats 2K scouting?? Oh noes!!!

On the FLIP side…

Combo Locks are by FAR the easiest and cheapest trap to brute force!

All combo locks necessarily require a trail of wooden wiring, which can always be surpassed by a metric ton of saws and meat (easily the cheapest and most readily available tools to even the lowest of the middle class). And if the lock is so big that it is impractical to scout the button combinations, then the vault itself is likely easily and cheaply reachable by many saws and a few ladders (and an explosive or two might save a ladder as well).

THEREFORE, your goal should never be to crack a combo lock house, but instead make note of it, note how to cheaply reach the lock, and scout where the best place is to blast into the lock mechanism. The very first big score you make will then cause EVERY combo lock house you've found to fall like dominoes, and that's how a 25K payout can easily be 100K from just one day of robbing. (Did I mention I <3 combo lock houses?)

Clocks

Oh boy! I LOVE it when I encounter a house with a clock in it for two major reasons:

1. Clocks take up space. SO much space.

This is a HUGE weakness, because as soon as you reason out the source of the clock, you can safely rule out, like, 1/6 to 1/3 of the TOTAL HOUSE AREA!!! That's so much house, and you don't even need to see the mechanism to know what it does (activate every 4 steps. or activate every 8 steps. or whatever). It's like playing a mini-version of TCD, an even less time-consuming version of an already impressively casual game!

and

2. If you stop for 5 seconds to figure out the timing, then it's practically childsplay to dance through the corridors of scary death until you find another relevant part of the house.

If you can count to 2, 4, or 8, then you can reduce most clock houses to just a find-the-right-path maze. Sort of like a doggie-death-door maze without dogs.

<3 Clock houses!

The Magic Dance

I could probably devote an entire class to this breed of trap, and it probably has more variations than any other trap out there.

The bad news is that a very clever builder can construct a dance that is… I don't want to say 'impossible', but still pretty damn obnoxious to deduce.

The good news, of course, is that most people aren't very clever builders. So let's start with the basics and upward for attacking Magic Dances:

First: Can you see the dance?

The easiest way to beat a dance is if you can get right to the hidden toggle mechanics with a few bricks and meat.  Do that, map it out exactly as it was unpressed, and you should be able to easily 'read' the steps 24 hours later. Next time, you can get by that section for free, and figure out the next. Piece of cake.

If that doesn't work…

Second: Do you even need to dance?

Clever magic dances involve trap doors, and often invoke leap-of-faith steps. Not-so-clever (but cheaper) dances will just use wired floors.

Some of these don't even use that many wired floors, due to space concerns.

So, like, why study some intricate series of steps when you can pass the whole damn thing with a few waters?

Just remember to note the how and the minimum cost of bypassing the trap so if you need to come back later with a few more tools, you know to the dollar how much you need

but if that doesn't work...

Third: Is it a fire floor of death? Can you bring wire cutters?

One nice weakness to linear magic dances is that they depend on toggle switches. Additionally, wired-floor-death magic dances suffer from a unique weakness, and that is: you can map out all the buttons if you can turn it "on" with out dying.

Procedure: find such a dance, and on your first life, count how many steps it takes from the first pet sight until the first step that turns on the wired floor and kills you.
Next time, go back to the house with wire cutters + waters, take the same number of steps MINUS ONE until you're right in front of the "death step," and cut the wire.
Then step forward. The floor should turn on. Now, go back on your tracks, and imagine where the dog or cat is moving (are you up on your pet movement? you better be!!). Find out what step turns the floor off, and then back on again.

At this point, you can pretty much take as long as you like to deduce where the toggle buttons are, and your best guess (easily refined later) as to what positions they're in when you first begin. When you're ready, turn the trap "on," and then water the next step. Try and determine whether that step invokes a button. Whether or not it does, mark it, then move on. Repeat until you've deduced the dance.

but if that doesn't work…

Fourth: Can you count?

Sometimes there's nothing for it but to go step until you die. But even in that case (such as a magic dance over nothing but trapdoors, for example), you have certain advantages.
Besides the clue that you know the circuit's being broken somehow, you don't even need to know how it works to just count how many steps until you die, and then with each next life, just 'double step' each tile once per life until one works. Pretend you know where the buttons are, and how they're positioned, and test your hypothesis. If it fails, rinse and repeat.

There's much more to be said here, and I haven't even touched the subject of cats much at all, but here's a few parting tips:

Keep in mind pet spacing (sometimes dog dances aren't straight across, but a step or two behind)

If it's extremely complicated and involves multiple (like, 4+) pets, the solution is likely constrained by these factors, and severely limited. In other words, you're more likely to guess it by trial & error.

Speaking of which...

Multiple Choice/Guessing games

Hallways. Lots of Hallways! Most lead to death… but some lead to progress! So how do you choose the right path?

These are far less nefarious than they may seem.

The common thread is the hallway, either aligned parallel or in opposite directions, and the difference is the type of commit used. Some examples:

Wired floor (often leading to a cat, a button, & instant death)
Powered door (often leading to just a dead end. Many of these are often poorly constructed, and easily negated with saws or water)
Doggie doors
Leap of Faith (everyone's favorite)

The nice thing about being a suicide robber is that you can confidently charge down these paths with abandon, without worrying about the cost of backing all the way out. Still, some of these houses can contain many, many guesses, so in the interest of efficiency, the smart robber will try to maximize the amount of guesses they get per life.

The trick is simply to bring the right tools.

Wired floor paths can often be defeated by one wire cutter and tons of water. Encounter one cat that turns on the house, and you can cut, step, and water your way around all the rest. Sometimes, if the house is cheap enough, you can saw your way across multiple hallways, scouting three or four at a time. Sometimes, you open a door and find a cat next to a death button…. 4 steps away. A few bricks will let you explore some more and die another day.

Powered doors fall to doorstops, obviously, and, somewhat less obviously, if the power source is exposed, they can be cheaply overcome by simply one water.

Leap of Faiths can be daunting, but instead of bringing a hundred ladders, one can often brick past the door(s) beyond. One subtle weakness of Leap of Faiths is that it takes a good amount of house space to make it seem like it leads somewhere important.

Finally, as I'm sure you're well acquainted with castledraft by now, you can also note that not all guesses are equal, and if you've only progressed about 20% into the house, and you see a path leading seemingly into the border (or into a dead wall), then the odds are quite against taking that route.

***

Those are the big guns. Nearly every house in the top 50 will have at least one of those traps. The ones that don't are innovative and AWESOME… and sadly they're probably easier to solve.

Now here are a few extra surprises I've come across that you may or may not find with any frequency:

Appendix A: Less common, but still interesting trap mechanics

The Circuit Maze
A few houses I've seen have wires that span across the entire house, and require a sequence of buttons to be pressed in order which involves walking back and forth across the house.

These tend to involve no more than a single power source, so that the use of tools to bypass any one area may break the whole rest of the house.

Sadly, these impressively clever houses are easily defeated by castledraft, as wiring is easily seen, and the mechanics, especially revealed, are quite simple to understand. Just do your due diligence and map correctly.

Pet Movement
A couple houses have combined pets and toggles to make interesting, easily-mappable yet difficult-to-solve traps that are in plain sight of the robber. These can involve any combination of cats, chihuahuas, pit bulls, and buttons, and can rely on spacing, timing, line-of-sight, and many other tricks to make them work.

The best way I can explain this is to simply say: LEARN YOUR RULES OF PET MOVEMENT!!

If you know the game mechanics as well as you should, the answers to these traps can be plainly determined by a few minutes thought.

Sight Traps
Likewise, it's important to study how sight-change works, as a number of recently popular traps have used this mechanic very cleverly.

Load up a test house, and figure out how sight-scrolling works. And/or look up a sight-change trap in the forums and figure out how it works, and you should be well prepared for any of these you come across in the future.

Look, the game only has so many mechanics. I know it seems daunting at first, but once you know what to look for, everything becomes easier for you (the robber), and harder for them (the builders).

Fire floors
This is probably already covered, but as I've seen quite a few houses with an extensive series of wired floors, it's worth mentioning that a pair of wire cutters and a bunch of waters are your friends. If you make an error, snip, scout some more, then come back and go further next time.

Appendix B: Freelove weighs in on house-building

It should be obvious by now that I don't believe in unbreakable houses. In fact, I haven't run across a house yet that's truly discouraged me from 2K cracking (except combo locks, which, again, are like free money to anybody with saws).

If you buy in, even a little bit, to my theory that every house can be robbed, and often more easily than people tend to expect, then you may be wondering: Okay, so what is the best way to defend a house?

Welp, here's my theory:

The best defense of a house in TCD requires adherence to these three factors:

1. Build a house you can modify.
  - The ideal house can be modified in such a way that the modifications require a minimum of effort, but inflict the maximum amount of confusion upon a robber who has made any significant progress on the house. The modifications must also take care not to open the house to any fresh avenues attack to which it was not previously vulnerable. Tactics include:
    * Changing the combination on combo locks
    * Changing the sequence of a magic dance
    * Changing the "correct" pathway for multiple-pathway mazes
    * Moving the vault to an entirely new location
    * Adding wrinkles to existing traps
    * Remodeling traps entirely

In short, the biggest exploit my entire tutorial uses may be that the puzzle stays constant while you chip away at the solution. Changing your house regularly will help deter a diligent 2K robber.

(the downside, of course, is that you have to pay regular attention to your house. And that's a lot of time and effort, which nobody short of an autistic child would be able to keep up forever)

2. Wreck the other top houses.
   
What's that you say? The best defense is a good offense?

That's damn right. The best way to combat brute-forcing is to relentlessly annihilate every house with any worth that might challenge you. If you're in any doubt whether someone may be dangerous enough to challenge you, just ask yourself: What would Nero do?

3. Be popular.

I'm half-kidding. But seriously, even if you do (1) & (2), you're still susceptible to crowd-sharing. An angry mob of 15 accounts or so, hell-bent on taking out a tyrant is nothing to be trifled with, and I hesitate to imagine how effective a team of even more than 4 accounts working in unison would be at taking down a top house.

So yeah, in order to prevent this, maybe say nice things on the forums or something. I don't know, ask a tyrant.

That's funny. I wonder if a core divide between pro/anti- dual accounters is whether or not people value robbing or building houses more.

Personally, I love puzzling out people's houses using only 2K tools, and I rarely build a house (mostly, I just don't have the time).

Also, weren't you the guy that made the electric skull house? With like a kitty combo lock or something?