The Castle Doctrine Forums

It's good to see a club introduced, this will fix some things up, but...

...we now have the problem back again that there is no way to build a $2000 house that will protect your wife against $2000.

This is because you can only put two dogs in the way of your wife for $2000 (for $1600) and they can be taken out for the same amount leaving enough money for a club to kill your wife with. So, currently a successful start in dependent on a) getting lucky with a robbery early on that allow you to buy 3 pittbulls or b) not starting your house at a time where there is someone destroying houses with starter cash.

Even with 3 pittbulls, if you don't have any money to defend your vault someone can easily come in, take out 2 dogs and your vault with a couple of guns, suicide and return to take out your wife.

Yeah, it's sadly not a great time to start Leopoldfrank as Rohrer has been experimenting with a few things over the last few, changing prices etc and so the game is not particularly well balanced at the moment. One time robbable houses are too powerful and so everyone is doing them. It is also hard to do anything else effective with starter cash which means that it's really the only way to survive early on.

Just sent you a reply email .

What I mentioned in a different post about adding a new tool that only attacks close ranged targets could work, perhaps a bludgeon? Crowbars could retain their multifaceted role but be primarily for opening electric doors.

Just took your 'sorry' money Jason - sadly it is too expensive to take the wife's money as well.
(Ok, out of context that sentence is odd ).

Hmm, looks like crowbars are now only useful now in breaking open doors as guns and bricks are cheaper. This makes wife defense much less interesting - just pile pitbulls next to each other. Maybe there needs to be a new item for killing things up close?

haha, looks like we had the same idea at the same time gumshoe .

Sounds interesting . Could be hard to get right though.

One problem with varying tool prices is that as pitbulls are currently the only way to defend your family, so there will always be demand for guns, food and crowbars. If this causes the price of those tools to drop it will make wife killing even more viable and so even more people will buy them, and the prices will drop even more.

So you're Mr Jones bey bey (with the owl painting)?

It might take some time before interesting house designs come up. Mr Jones's house is not particularly good because it looks like you can brute force it with two ladders (and figure out the electronics with one). Houses that require large amounts of money to brute force are hard to think up in v16 (without relying on having a broken house) but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Hopefully the best designs won't just be combo locks (though I suspect they will be until guns are made cheaper).

On that note, Jason - please don't decrease gun prices without advance warning .

With 4x tool prices we are starting to see a lot more interesting houses - . I guess one pitbull now is a pretty good wife defence on its own.

One time robbable houses have become completely OP now though: "What's that? There is a pitbull and a broken pit trap in the way of my vault? That'll only cost $6400 to bypass (only to find my second pitbull, bring $10,400 next time!). Oh, and yes I do plan to leave my house like that while I happily earn my salary."

Perhaps once broken houses should get a smaller income?

Cool, thanks for this and the salary changes. I'm sure this will help a lot! (I suspect gun prices will have to come down - it's going to be pretty easy to defend your wife now - but I guess we can see how things go).

Your running on the assumption that we live in the same time-zone gumshoe, this is probably not the case .
Also, there were a lot of doors to look behind, there is no guarantee you would have picked the right one in time.

Here is my final house:
(thanks to ukoko for letting me know about recorded games).
http://castledraft.com/editor/XqzjPz

I built this one mostly as a way to mitigate brute forcing by allowing the vault to be in many locations so just "following the trapdoors" wouldn't lead you there. I'm glad I got to implement this before the changes came in, a bit sad that no one gave it a good brute force attempt once it was properly completed.