The Castle Doctrine Forums

Probably because there is nothing else to do.

There need to be other changes made to give enough content. Roguelikes are usually endless but TCD doesn't have an endless supply of houses worth robbing, yet.

Both of those are perfectly valid and supported ways of playing this game. However, none of those enables you to rob a really high-end house, unless you know the solution in advance (for example from your previous life).
This is exactly how it's supposed to work, while enabling you to scout low-end houses quite safely with no tools or with a few cheap tools.

However to promote that "initial scouting" the robber could be allowed to flee with 2 tools -- not 2 stacks -- just 2 tools chosen by the robber from his backpack (maybe this could be increased to 3 or 4, idk). I thought about 2 initially since you do have 2 empty hands when fleeing with no loot so it's thematically consistent as well, I think.

Here is how it would look like:

After choosing some tools:

You confirm by pressing the Flee button.

Of course this could be further improved so that if the robber has less than 3 tools the game automatically picks any tools left and puts them in the "flee" slots.

Yeah, I know... happened to me many times as well. The system could still be in place for those other cases where the attacker is still alive. I think that the revenge option would be a nice feature, but it's hard to tell if it would work as intended.

When you decide to attack a house you would have to pay a small amount of money. The same goes for the "move" to the next house button. Without that (or some other clever restriction) it wouldn't serve its purpose because it would just be a random list with a tedious navigation interface (next only) that anyone could "scroll" through.

If you want to have a random selection system that allows the player to skip houses that he thinks he can't tackle, then the "move" to the next house action really needs to be the same as "cancel and attack again" functionality. Having "skip this attack" work in a different way than "cancel and attack again" just means that the system can be abused in some way (using one to achieve the same effect as the other, but not paying the same "price" or be subject to the same restrictions).

Even if someday impossible houses won't be an issue anymore, there are still other reasons why an attacker might want to skip a house.

Yes, if a system is put in place where houses can't be targeted directly at will, then robbed houses can start earning money again.

A random house selection system needs a large supply of houses to work as intended, so even if we combine active houses with robbed houses it still won't be enough. So the "NPC" houses would really be just "restored" old player's houses. Sometimes you will attack a house that no one plays anymore, but you won't really know that. And active houses will still be attacked all the time.

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Before Jason said in this thread that

I didn't know that he hoped to achieve that with TCD. But since he made that post I thought I'd share this system that achieves the same effect in some other games that could be regarded as similar in terms of the attack/defend gameplay.

However, I don't know if the random house selection system is really suited for TCD at this stage. It also depends on the direction that Jason wants to go with his game.

One issue is the amount of houses that the system can choose from. Another issue is that you need to have enough strategies and viable counters for this cycle to keep going or else the meta just settles with an optimal solution that doesn't have a viable counter and the cycle stops (at that point games usually perform balance fixes). Another thing that might happen is that it won't achieve the same effect in this game, due to how this game "works" and how it's played.

There are many reasons why this can fail.

First you would have to get to that $100,000

Another strategy is to make a house that is not worth robbing for the amount that a robber would have to invest in tools. Of course it will happen that sometimes players will just rob you even if they lose the money, but this  happens now already. The challenge for the robber is to find the cheapest tool collection that makes it possible to get through the puzzle or breach the house.

If the right price balance is reached this could actually be quite fun, but it definitely won't just work right from the start.

And why wouldn't that be a valid strategy? If it makes players play the game it's a good thing.

You could still buy tools with the money you get from the salary when you return to the game.

Well we all know that a modded client can display any info that the game knows about so I don't think that extra time spent on obfuscating any of this is worth it.

Just make sure that this information is not available outside the client (debug output etc.) and that's it.

The thing is you only have 2 options. Make a game where it's possible to build houses that are too tedious for most players to solve with X tools or make a game where you can't do that (i.e. any house can be breached with X tools or X is somehow dynamic to achieve that). Those 2 options could be divided further based on the amount of information that's available to the player (e.g. limited vision, blueprints, full vision).

v5 was about making tools obsolete and limited vision with no blueprints
v6-8 is about making tools obsolete and limited vision with blueprints displaying the starting state

Now some players suggest a change to animals where they would only move when they see you. So what they really want is just being able to see things move at all times. Hardest houses will just shift from electric circuits and animals to electric circuits only (animals will still be used to trigger security/trap switches, but not so much for the magic dance effect).  The next dominant design will be 9 trapdoor chains with their logic inside a room walled off with a steel wall that is at the same time the only source of electricity for the trapdoor chain. Probably the next related suggestion will be to make it possible to see or somehow get info for all other things that "change state".

I think that doing small changes like that is not the right thing to do at this point. Now the changes need to be drastic (like introducing blueprints was) until we find the right kind of gameplay. The kind that Jason envisioned for this game. From the point of view of a hardcore logic player the current state of the game already has the right kind of gameplay. It can't get much better than this... equal starting state, no randomness/unpredictability, consistent rules and update propagation, obsolete tools (so no randomness/unpredictability there either), but all that means nothing if Jason wants a different game.

I can't speak for others, but I started playing this game because I liked the idea to be able to use tools to break into other houses. I thought this was the core gameplay but I was wrong. Most houses are unbreakable and in v5 they were also unsolvable. Now they are technically solvable but the puzzle is often something that most players wouldn't even call a puzzle. This strategy is effective because it totally eliminates the unpredictable part of the robbery, i.e. what tools will the robber bring and how will he use them? But for the robber that's part of the game. Without tools the game changes from a burglary step-movement arcade to a scrolling electric circuit and Manhattan movement hardcore puzzler. Players playing the game (solving puzzles) inside 3rd party programs or on the blueprints instead of ingame already says a lot about the issues with this.

So one thing that could drastically change the gameplay is changing tools in a way that prevents house owners to make tools obsolete in any way. Of course the aftereffect will be related to the way this is implemented, but we won't really experience it until we try.

Like I said in the other thread, tool prices will have to be tweaked a lot (maybe, thematically, this even means that some house tiles prices will have to be changed).

This would help keep tool prices at about the same price levels without the need to change prices too drastically. However, if we don't increase tool prices the money you get from a robbery will allow you to buy many tools and the problem will just emerge there. So the starting credit is only part of the issue. But anyway, implementing this would make it possible to fine tune the impact the starting credit has on building power and tool power separately, which I think is a good thing.

Yes jere, colorfusion is right. He already pointed out most of things that I was thinking about, but I would like to add one more thing. Tools. You can't use tools inside this "sandbox", so it's not a real sandbox. New players need to figure out what tools do and what they can be used on. They also need to learn about the aftereffects, because they can affect other things inside the house.

Yes, how fast this would be implemented is indeed related to how well the code is written.

However this

is pretty much not related to the quality of the code. This is a different kind of problem.

For example, if I show you a specific house and tell you to place 3 policemen inside you will probably show those 3 spots right away and you would probably have no problems explaining the logic/rules behind it (i.e. why you placed them exactly where you did). But image that then I change the "challenge" slightly and I ask you to tell me those same placement rules for an arbitrary house. You would probably list the same rules and add a few more that would be suitable for other house designs, but there is probably a specific house where all those rules would fail (i.e. no policemen would be placed). The hard part is coming up with a non-trivial ruleset where it's guaranteed that it can be applied to any of the possible houses.

Just to be clear, if the ignored house owner successfully robs someone, his house doesn't get off the ignore list?

Well the "balling up" part happens because:
#1) a vault can store unlimited paintings
#2) the only way to get rid of paintings is to die

So it will happen again sooner or later.

Prevent/change one of the reasons above and painting resets won't be required anymore and at the same time it would open some new ways to get (rid of) paintings.

I understand that maybe animating it is not viable, but having a third state and a special sprite for such a state would be consistent. After all, the switch is in a new (unstable) state. Since the 3rd sprite would be a static sprite it could be used on the blueprints as well, if showing unstable IVTS on the blueprints is desired.