The Castle Doctrine Forums

I know was for these changes initially, but with v16 it just means that you have a longer period to survive through where your house is vulnerable to suicidal $2000 wife killers that don't give a damn how much is in your vault. It takes so long to time build enough money to properly defend your wife now.

I know it would be harder to implement, but a salary that you can vary yourself would fix this issue (even it was just a choice between a full wage and a low wage). Then you could use the full wage to get your house somewhat safe to $2000 raids and then leave it with a lower wage overnight so it doesn't become easy money for those rich enough to brute force you. Also, I think the income should be based on how expensive your house is, not how much you have in your vault. Otherwise rich players can just keep spending down to $0 and then leave there house for ages before it is worth robbing.

I would have loved to see you try, through, as she was already dead! Ludicrosity got her and my children on his rampage. Also, how can you be sure you had enough money to even get to her body?

Bey Bey: I'm glad I decided to tackle your place just before the reset, it was fun .

I started up the application before I realised V16 was out and it cleared my stdout file so I can't post my most old house (Mr Johnson) . I'm also sad I can't see the final attempts at my house before the reset.

Interesting buy Mr Cawley (Bey Bey?) - "One of two". Kind of relevant at the moment...

Maybe once you shoot those dogs an intricate mind bending maze awaits to get to his wife... or maybe not.

Ah, ok, I didn't get it was a pop culture reference. I just googled 'Mr Rodgers' - and found "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and now Blip's song makes sense. We don't get it down here in Australia.

Scrap that, it looks like I've been robbed by a Mr Rogers solving my dance (I'm not sure if it was luck or whether his previous lives figured it all out). I haven't seen his house though.

Did you miss my earlier post and just happen to think the same thing as me? Or are you just agreeing with me here? It was a pretty fun house, it's hard to think of how you can encourage that kind of design though.

For those interest, here again is my incomplete map of Mr Cortez's house: http://castlefortify.com/c/50368d3

The proposed changes would certainly shake things up. You would have to dramatically increase tool prices to compensate for the dramatic reduction in house safety. Mazes are currently particularly easy to brute force as would anything else with this set up and current tool pricing. It's certainly hard to think of effective security solutions, even pit-bull mazes won't be nearly as effective with the new movement rules. Here is an early attempt at a $2000 house: http://castlefortify.com/c/009322e.

One of the most interesting houses I remember tackling was Cortez's, it looked something like this: http://castlefortify.com/c/50368d3
The thing that made it cool was that with only a cheap set of tools I was able to make my way through safely, though this required quite a lot of time figuring things out to make sure that I wasn't about to be trapped. I think it took me a few hours to solve but it was very satisfying to do so. The reason that it was interesting is because I was able to figure out when things would remain powered/unpowered so I didn't have to always leave ladders/cut wires/stopdoors behind me to ensure I could exit. For instance, with the row of trapdoors along the left side I knew that I could cross safely and be able to return because after the sticky switch is pressed they are guaranteed power. I still had to figure out how to effectively use tools to get around the pit bull though.

The problem with the way the game currently works though is that this is a bad house design because it is particularly easy to brute force and also possible to solve with minimal tools (also it is full of doors that cost $6 to disable and $100 dollars to replace).

The thing that causes you to *have* to brute force through well designed houses now is that after you pass a numbers of pit traps you cannot be sure that some cat at the end of the screen or dog that will see you isn't going to flip a switch that removes power to the doors, even if you figure out the initial magic dance. I guess you can take along a gun to shoot animals before they can kill you but I think currently you can set up situations where 2 guns won't save you so by the time you start bringing in 8 guns you may as well instead bring 16 explosives.

One idea that would completely change things up would be an expensive tool that allows you to place your own power source. This would make rows of pits less useful and allow for more interesting solutions than simply placing lots of ladders.

Blip: I'm a bit confused by your design idea - http://castledraft.com/editor/BznObk. If this works it seems that the current electronic setup is broken - power shouldn't be able to go through a voltage inverted switch if the same power will also trigger it (turn it off).

In terms of scent trails:
You could make dogs follow you when they see you and otherwise follow the most recent trails. This would allow dogs to still effectively corner someone. As long as scent on each tile was stored as an integer that decreased over time this would be history free.

An example mechanic that comes to mind:
All tiles start with an initial scent value (SV) of 0
Whenever you move over a tile its SV is set to 20 (or some other value)
Each time you move, for each tile with a SV above 0 this value is decremented by 1
If a dog sees you it will move towards you
If a dog cannot see you it will move towards the tile with the highest SV within 2(?) tiles (and possibly line of site?)
If a dog cannot see you and no nearby sqaure has a SV above 0 it remains stationary

This would mean that dogs follow the most recent path nearby that the player has followed.
This would have some interesting effects, including allowing dogs that had have never seen you follow your trail after they are released. It could be a bit tricky for new players to get their heads around though.

Another interesting thing you could do is have dogs chase cats. It would be best if this could only be triggered by player action though to avoid things happening behind the scenes that the player has no effect on. Perhaps you could make dogs and cats that see each other from the start 'friendly' and not chase each other, but this would violate the whole 'no history' rule. Still, I like the idea of pressing a switch that sets off a 'mousetrap' like mechanism in the background that leads to you being surrounded by pitbulls.

Cent: I have created a number of traps using cats that do not leave your line of sight. If a cat suddenly appears outside of brick range it can step on a switch in one move that can cause all sorts of havoc.

I'd be up for this, I'll send you an email.

I'm not sure about the validity of the two steps to the vault idea, at the very least if lots of players do it it makes it less interesting for other players as there are less interesting houses to rob (and having a wife surrounded by dogs isn't interesting). I think it has been a springboard for number of top householders. On a different note Mr Anthony's house has been consistently easy to rob, and yet he remains in at the top with his rich wife. I just think it's too easy to put all your money into wife defence and this pretty much makes you invulnerable to all but extreme brute forcing. Still, as I said before, at least this lets you have a bit more fun with your house as you don't have to worry about your vault as much. So, I'm not sure what should happen here.

Hmm, if you can't store money in tools some of the behaviour I've seen is a little odd. Players robbing me with a $32,000 kit after I've never seen their value at over $20k. I guess they could have had a few successful robberies before hitting me?

I'm not sure it's true that a lot of people quite before they die, otherwise I would see more deaths without videos (perhaps I don't build the types of houses that trap people). It would be nice if a quick restart (within a couple of minutes) would put you back in place, but I imagine it would be a technical challenge.

Maybe 9 has just been a problem for me. It made sense that wasd worked after I killed myself with it, but before then I felt fairly secure thinking that the only way to die was to press an arrow key. The auto-repeat has almost got me a few times, could be something to do with my laptop keyboard. I really don't want to have to press 'enter' after each move in fairly safe houses. I guess when you lose a house you've put time into for something so petty it makes you wish it couldn't happen in the first place.