Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Yeah, while I like the tool-purchasing idea, I don't feel like multiple people robbing the same house at the same time will work well.
Well, "spending it all" would have its upsides and downsides. If it turned out you did get robbed, the robber still gets his full reward, and at least you got yourself some tools before it was too late. If you didn't get robbed after all, it's too late to get your full balance back, you can only recover half of it if you sell your tools now.
In the majority of current houses, precautions are taken to make sure that you can't scout tool-free, by either making it clear that there's no backing out once you're in, or trapping people who step in too far.
Since it seems like moving forward can be done quickly enough, instead of going back a step you could just tell it to restart and then instantly advance n-1 steps. Either that, or just include entity state changes in the move list. So a cat dying would be recorded, so the step back would know to un-kill the cat. The former might be problematic in very long tapes, while the latter would probably have to record the movements of all entities, so drawbacks with both.
It also prevents robbers from blindly heading toward the vault with no possible exit path... there's always a chance that it's empty.
I do get that it doesn't make logical sense that a vault acts like a teleporter, generally. It just feels like the best end point for the robbery "story."
Most of the time, though, there is no possible exit path, because people don't have to build with an exit path in mind. They can make exiting as difficult as they want because it will never matter to them. The problem isn't that it doesn't make logical sense, the problem is that it isn't consistent. Not being able to exit at an empty vault seems like a missed opportunity for a lot of things, and it really adds injury to insult for those robbers unlucky enough to meet their death because there wasn't any money for them to take out of the vaults they reached. I feel like empty vaults not saving damage is a much better solution to the problem.
I feel like players should at least still be able to buy tools while someone's in their house. It wouldn't decrease the amount of money in the vault or held by the wife until the robber left the house. If the robber ends up stealing more money than should technically be in the house, he would get whatever money he'd get if you hadn't bought tools, and you'd drop to $0 instead of negatives. So the game would technically generate new money to give to the robber, covering the cost of the tools you bought while he was in your house.
I'll second this. I've had to restart a tape to get a replay a few times before.
Hopefully you made sure the pitbulls see them before they open the door, so you can get those instant kills.
. . . if a vault has been breached already, there are generally other signs around (like cut walls and such).
While that is generally true, there is the possibility of a player reaching the vault without damaging the house, as well as the possibility of a player damaging the house and then killing some family members, but never reaching the vault. So cut walls don't always mean an empty vault, and an empty vault doesn't always mean cut walls. Plus, it can be interesting to enter a damaged house and walk the destroyed path of a previous robber, possibly even picking up some indirect robbery advice in the process. However, this usually isn't possible because robbers have to make a round trip if the vault is already broken-into, as if every vault contains a teleporter that brings self-testers and robbers safely out of the house. Discovering an empty vault is dramatic enough without robbers then being subjected to an extra walk of shame, or often a walk down death row instead. Plus, if robbers can still exit a house by reaching an empty vault, then its emptiness can be presented to them in the post-robbery text, in whatever way you feel is best. This even opens the possibility of vaults not being visibly empty, so that robbers don't know how much is in it unless they actually reach it. After all, if you've infiltrated a house to the point where you can finally see the vault, you're not going to turn and leave right then just because you can see that the lock looks a bit broken. After all the work it took to get that far, you're going to take those last few steps, check it, and see for yourself what's inside it.
Why is it that you have to make your way back out of the house yourself when you arrive at a broken vault, when you don't have to when you arrive at an intact vault? I can see that having led to some unfair deaths.