The Castle Doctrine Forums

I don't mind slower growth rate as well, just wanted to counter the argument that it'll be less favourable to the rich
Now, if initial bounty was $200 with tool sale price reduced to 1/3 or 1/4, that'd be change that favours the poor (and more effective at curbing value growth?)

I do not think this at all. Most of the benefit from robber kills come from value of the tools - and $2000 starter kit robbers who are aiming to strike big will only aim at the houses whose total are, at minimum, $3000. So the houses that have sufficient funds will still benefit from the tools robber drop, while when houses less than $2000 manage to get a kill.... what, they are likely to only get measly $50!

Remember it's fairly hard to start off when you are down in the pits, and in such situation $200 influx can be really valuable. I fear this initial bounty change is going to make climbing up to mid-tier ranks more difficult...

Oh I LOVE the idea that more tools = less robbery time.

I thought we were mostly talking about the chill effect, but if you don't make it major and have it start take effect after first 3-5 minute into robbery or so, I guess it can be tried out.

Still, it'd be appreciated if game client clearly communicated the time effects in such a case.

Posting house I tried today for fun. It went up to $30000 before dying to self-test as usual.
The theme I based the entire house around was 'Door Maze'.

Note that the giant white box on bottom left is the trap I deleted, since I plan to re-use it in my future houses; it has absolutely nothing to do with the way to solve the house.

So it's pretty self-explanatory, you need to navigate the wooden maze, press the switch, come back and use the dog present at the entrance. At beginning it was just attracting one of the dogs that were defending my wife and daughter, but since some monster killed them, I created a tomb and 1/3 guess door with a freed up space as tribute. The entire former portion is deliberately kept wooden and free of threats to entice the cautious robbers - except a random pitfall I hoped might catch someone off-guard (you can see another one of these 'oops' pits at end of the latter portion hallway).

After you cross the inevitable commit gate, you reach latter portion of my house which is entirely devoted to the Dog U-turn puzzle.

More specifically, you would have to make a U-turn at bottom right corner, with pits placed on such a way that dog would fall into the pit and die without following specific pathway. Then you would need to pick which hallway is the right choice - astute robber would know by now that correct path is the one where dog was initially at, but to obfuscate them I utilized the 'similar looking hallways' trick. This trick was what killed me at the self-test

Should robber happen to pass straight forward choice corridor for 1/8 odds, he reaches the final room - and I really like this room because I placed cats and pits in such a way that if robber do not move 3E 3N 1W upon entering, cat falls into the pit in such a timing that it would block the pitbull from following you to the switch. To be honest, nobody survived to reach the later portion so I haven't seen it in action, but it should work in principle.

Fairly confident the house was enough to repel $2000 starter kit robbers, but as I said, it's a design for fun and not defense because it lacks lethality and strength. Larger portion of former maze is deliberately kept harmless to encourage exploration, and because the entire puzzle is based around the dog following you throughout the maze, I couldn't utilize basic commit traps like electric floors which encourage invader to burn through their tool. The entire latter puzzle can be bypassed by $3000 (gun and the ladder) which is woefully insufficient against robbers who actually come prepared, I think.

Speaking of the complete utter devastation, what happened to the discussion about potentially decreasing the backpack space to 6?

I hope the chill hour is kept at 24 hours, or maybe 12 hrs, to be decreased under consideration if the number of houses decrease once again. I've come across number of houses I would have been able to beat with starter kit had I been allowed to try the same house multiple times.

It also allows housekeepers to visit only once a day to switch things around if necessary, instead of having to check in consistently to prevent repeat-offenders from robbing everything in single day.

I've run into battery-switch-electric floor-trapdoor several times, and love the ingenuity of it since first impulse of the robber upon seeing the dog is to drug it immediately before the dog moves into inconvenient position. So it combines with other mechanisms absurdly well. In one of the robberies, had safe just two squares away from me but had to suicide because of that accursed combination.

I really should incorporate it into my design as well after my current house falls.

I wasn't sure about 5 minute lock out, but I really liked 24 hour chill timers. Hope the latter keeps around assuming number of players do not decrease

IS IT OVER

So no epic crazy last minute feeding frenzies among the top houses I guess. Too bad. Can't expect any new robbers to come into my house either.

Does that mean I only have 4 minutes to rob someone's house?

Oh God, you're making me remember yesterday when I successfully robbed someone of ~$15000 using starter money, went to Castledraft to do basic design for my house, clicked back to the client to see I've been logged out due to inactivity.

So bad.