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#526 Re: Main Forum » Thread on current game issues and possible solutions » 2013-08-09 00:59:26
Some solution suggestions: (I'm not sure all of them would work)
1. Make animals not move if they can't see you? This is tricky, as it could get rid of interesting things like trapping people with dogs... maybe add a 'scent trail' that dogs can follow even if they don't see you?
2. Always lose 1/2 of your household cash when the vault is robbed? This would stop the wife amassing vast wealth while the vault remains empty.
3. Hmm, have rules against multi-account abuse and deactivate accounts that continuously do it? (It might be hard to distinguish this from just a good player exploiting a bad one)
5. Add a timeout, anything in the backpack after 10mins of inactivity goes back in the vault.
6. Allow paintings to be dumped or auctioned off (perhaps the householder gets the auction money if they are still alive?)
7. Allow reconnection within a certain timeframe with connection errors. Crashes are more difficult as progress through the house is lost - but you could possibly save an active account of the current move sequence to a file as each move is made (this probably already occurs?) and after a crash if you reload the game within a set time it will simply reopen that house and play out the move-sequence to get you back to where you were. I can imagine it would be hard to stop players abusing this though by simply saving an early version of the file and if they get trapped 'crashing' the game and replacing the move counting file with an older one. Maybe this could be worked around though with regular and simple check-ins with the server?
8. Allow income to be actively lowered for people who wish to log on less often. One suggestion that keeps coming up is to give players extra money to start that can only be spent on building.
9. Allow players to disable keyboard auto-repeat and make it clear from the start exactly what buttons will cause you to move.
4&10 - These are difficult as they approach the question of what the game is about and whether things should be compromised simply to make it accessible. I personally enjoyed not having a clue to begin with and how punishing it was, but I also wish more players would stick around. At the very least more work into the wiki would help.
#527 Main Forum » Thread on current game issues and possible solutions » 2013-08-09 00:22:08
- joshwithguitar
- Replies: 14
A number of different issues have come up in separate parts of the forum and I thought it might be useful to have a thread for people to list current problems with the game.
I'll make a start:
1. Monoculture of magic dance houses
It seems the only viable strategy to build a house that cannot be brute forced for less than $10k is to build a house with a magic dance and an extremely long path of trapdoors. These houses are not particularly interesting to explore and don't require much effort to construct. Further, in terms of optimisation there does not seem to be a lot that can be added to make these houses better, giving the feeling that part of the game has been to a certain degree 'solved' and leaving little room for innovation.
2. Not enough impetus to protect your vault
At present you can put your vault two steps from the doorstep and just put effort into protecting your wife and be fairly well off. This leads to uninteresting houses. (Though at the same time this makes interesting, non-magic dance houses more viable as allowing clever people to get to your vault does not lose you the game and can even save you in repair costs).
3. Susceptibility to multi-account abuse
It is hard to tell whether this actually goes on, but at present it at least seems possible in theory to get a significant advantage by using two separate accounts in a number of ways. The easiest seems to be simply to rinse and repeating starting a new house with one account and stealing the $2000 with the other. You could also use one to (suicidally) scout houses before attacking with the richer one.
4. Lack of players
A lack of players means that there are less houses to explore and so makes the game less interesting, especially to the newcomers we want to stick around.
5. Ability to store vast wealth in backpack
I'm not 100% sure of this as I haven't tested it but I'm pretty sure it is common. If you put your income into tools, store them in your backpack and leave the game running it seems that you can easily store vast amounts of wealth with no way for people to steal it. By doing this you can easily build up a ridiculous amount of tools to take on any house.
6. Inability to get rid of unwanted paintings
Currently the only way to get rid of paintings you don't want is to let someone rob you (and thus also lose all the paintings you do want to keep). Robbing houses that hold paintings you don't want becomes an issue.
7. Instadeath on crash/connection problems
This can be extremely punishing, especially to new players and discourages exploration (the more time spent in other houses, the larger the chance that you die because of a crash).
8. Difficulty of playing the game casually
It seems that to start a successful house at the moment you need to continuously log in through the day to spend your money. If you leave a starting house for a full day without spending your income by the time you get back to it will inevitably be robbed and your wife killed. It is very hard to play this game on a 'log in once per day' basis making it only accessible to people with lots of spare time.
9. Easiness of dying for non-game reasons
Two of my most recent three top householders died for stupid reasons. One because I accidentally pressed 'd' in someone's house, not knowing that 'wasd' could be used as controls (and so fell into a pit). Secondly because I accidentally held an arrow key down for a moment too long, running me into a pit because of keyboard auto-repeat.
10. Difficulty for new players
Currently the wiki is not particularly good and it can take quite a lot of figuring out before you can make a house that won't be sacked ten minutes after building it. I imagine this is disheartening to new players (though some would argue this is part of the experience).
#528 Re: Main Forum » Random thread on preferred paintings » 2013-08-08 18:23:22
Looks like the race is on to secure the most coveted paintings. I wonder how much the Zeppelin will sell for (people seem to like it). $77781 is probably a bit steep...
#529 Re: Main Forum » The Place to Post Your Break-ins » 2013-08-08 17:50:14
So you're Castro, Bey Bey? I guess I must be Mr Desai. I didn't end up getting any of your tools.
I see you don't have the paintings any more - did you set up your safe like you said you would and let some suicidal steal them (who has since died)? If so, $32684 is a lot to spend for $1133 thousand dollars from my vault and releasing the paintings into the wild 
. I'm surprised given the amount you had to spend on tools you didn't just steal the paintings off Callahan - it only took me around $16k to get him in the end. Sorry about all the ugly paintings, in an earlier life I decided to make paintings valuable things by buying out all of the cheap ones (some were about $4). Callahan then sacked me, and so I got them all back again. It looks like my plan worked - there are now only 4 paintings < $5000.
Interestingly, before I got Callahan, Montoya attacked my house with an extremely similarly priced set of tools. ($32384). After reaching both my vault and wife (and not shooting her) he left through my front door. Maybe he thought I'd get the leftover tools? With that kind of money why not attack Callahan? My house was a bit of a façade back then as I was saving up for tools.
#530 Re: Main Forum » Not enough players » 2013-08-07 08:29:16
I have only been playing the game for only a couple of weeks but find the game quite playable and have been able to get myself into the set of 'top houses' in that time. Most of what are current the top houses are owned by in-game people who only spawned in the last few days. It is indeed viable in the way it is currently set up to start from nothing and build up to the point where you can brute force through expensive houses in a few days, without using exploits.
My suggestion for starting a new house:
- protect your wife - 2 pit bulls along a corridor is generally enough to deter people. But keep adding pitbulls and wall layers as more money comes in.
- make the entrance intimidating - many top houses simply start by building the entrance hall making the house look expensive, but to start with it is just a façade.
- don't leave a $2000 house for too long. This game requires you to log in more than once a day to start up. If you leave a cheaply built house to earn an income for a day it will inevitably get broken into. If you spend it on securing defences your house will eventually get to the stage where you can safely let yourself earn a few thousand dollars.
- don't worry too much about people getting to your vault - as long as you protect your wife you should be able to rebuild. Have you noticed all of the houses with a vault two steps from the welcome mat? They are taking this fact to its ridiculous conclusion.
A couple of days ago starting from scratch I built a house which started very simple (it just had a dog maze to get to the vault). From this over time I built up my defences, had a few successful robberies and ended up getting extremely close to the vault of one (very wealthy) top house. If I hadn't made one bad decision I would have gotten there. This was seriously in just a couple of days of playing, so it is indeed possible. (I ended up dying in another house simply because I held a button for slightly too long and it ran me into a pit 
).
#531 Re: Main Forum » Show me yours I'll show you mine. » 2013-08-03 12:47:20
Colorfusion, the house you died in as Mr Smith looks an awful lot like one of mine around that time, maybe I was Mr Nash? I wasn't checking names at the time. Did it start with a fairly rudimentary running cat triggering a trapdoor as you pass it?
If so Mr Nash died fairly soon after that walking on a sleeping dog .
#532 Re: Main Forum » Alt-Tab Crash » 2013-07-29 23:38:10
Thanks guys, I'm just running it in windowed mode for now and haven't had anymore issues. Deaths are purely my own fault now .
#533 Main Forum » Alt-Tab Crash » 2013-07-28 10:15:56
- joshwithguitar
- Replies: 19
Hello, I'm new to the game and have been having a lot of fun but I have one bug that has become an issue.
Whenever I press alt-tab to go to a different window than the game the game crashes. Also, any other activity which shifts the screen to the desktop does the same thing. This was not too much of an issue until I was doing quite well (compared to previous games) and suddenly my laptop gave me a warning that my batteries were low crashing the game whilst I was in the middle of a robbery. This of course led the server to kill me off for exiting the game whilst robbing.
I am running Windows 8 and when it crashes I get the following report from windows:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: CastleDoctrine.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 51eebdce
Fault Module Name: ig7icd32.dll
Fault Module Version: 9.17.10.2817
Fault Module Timestamp: 5009cc64
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 000189e8
OS Version: 6.2.9200.2.0.0.768.101
Locale ID: 3081
Additional Information 1: 5861
Additional Information 2: 5861822e1919d7c014bbb064c64908b2
Additional Information 3: f3d5
Additional Information 4: f3d5be0cad2787556264647dc02181c3
Has anyone else come upon a similar problem?