The Castle Doctrine Forums

People will find a way to work around tools like this - there are already lots of houses that use multiple trapdoors without using any passable wired tiles. You would have to make sure that the battery can also be placed on red indicator lights, toggle/rotary/sticky switches, wires bridges acting in both directions and even voltage triggered and inverted switches. Even with all of this there would only be a very small amount of commonly seen traps that this would be effective against and all it would do is make these no longer appear meaning the battery would probably become redundant. There are times when I think "a voltage detector is just what I need right now!" but they are so far and few between that I would never actually take one into a robbery. I think the same would end up happening for the battery.

High GotABigTrap, welcome to the forums! Good luck staying in the top 8.

"my bounty is probably like 50k."

Unless you've either been alive for quite a while or killed every woman and child you've seen I'd be surprised if it were this high. People have a tendency to overestimate their bounties. $50k is 100 vaults or 50 family members.

I guess the faithful dog heroically jumps forward to protect his owner when you strike.

If you know what you are doing it is not random at all. In most situations you can safely walk along electric grills with wire-cutters or some way to bash into the walls. The exception is when the wired floors potentially form a loop. In this case you will want to cut part of the loop while not standing on electric floors that make it up to check whether it will fire up. This seems very tactical to me, the house owner can try to make it as difficult for the robber as possible to safely cut the loop and the robber can try to find the best and safest place to cut.

There are already lots of situations where dog food and clubs will not save you if you make the wrong move and a dog sees you. Sure, with enough guns you can back your way out of anything, but who brings that many guns? The best thing to do here is to ensure that dogs don't end up behind you by checking down each path before committing to one - often having to use dogfood to pre-emtively ensure safety. How is this situation different from paradox-wire floor traps?

Ok, I've split the first point into two so now it is:

- test your house replacing electric floors with red indicator lights, trapdoors and electric doors with green lights and pitbulls with chihuahuas. This way you can know if your traps are working as intended without risking your life.  Be aware that pet behaviour may be different as real traps may effect pets differently than lights.
- make sure to exit out the front door rather than reaching the vault when testing your house. Changes are only saved and paid for after you reach the vault in a self test. If you leave by the front door you will return to build mode and things will be just as they were before you started the self-test.

Some sort of notification during robbery when the connection is lost would be nice, anyway I had a pretty good run there.

I have been robbing a number of houses from different price ranges for their paintings and I can tell you that many will be very glad to have had wives - with the amount of money that is currently in the game it is very possible to keep them alive and they can really help when you are robbed. A large number of players are now getting the hang of wife defence and are able to keep their wives alive up into the top houses. So I think the argument that "the wife is useless" and "the wife is too hard to defend" fall down flat. If you feel that the best thing to do is leaving your wife at the door to be killed then go ahead, but it is flying in the face of what most of the experienced players do or recommend.

Well, the point of the wife and kids is a bit more complicated than "improve your gaming experience" - they're there to put you in the position of being the protector of the home and family, to give you something to care about. The reason the wife is given some material value is to encourage this kind of behaviour, even amongst those who see it purely in terms of game mechanics. The hope is that even those players will eventually get attached to their wives and children and desire to protect them as an end in itself.

colorfusion:
I just tried out your design, it turns out the cat doesn't kill itself in time and the dog can be clubbed. Even if you make the cat kill itself properly you there is still a tricky way I have found to club the dog. But yes, the idea still stands that it is definitely possible for under a grand.

I decided to go have a look to see what all the fuss was about - it turned out to be a pretty easy 32k overall and I ended up overdoing it on the tools. There were some clever little traps around for those who let the cats run amuck. I ended up just bashing straight through to the bottom right corner with 2 saws and a brick to get out of the dance hall I ended up in. After that it only really cost some more water to take out electric floors.

Added:

Q. Jason, can you please remove permadeath from failed self tests? This would make the game so much better!

A. Jason has made it very clear a number of times that death during self tests is an important part of the game and will not be removed. The game is mean to be punishing - (see: "Why is the game so punishing?" below) - and the feeling of suspense during self tests and the crushing feeling of falling to your own traps are important parts of the experience of the game. Also, as you'll be subjecting many others to your deadly traps, it is only fair that falling to them yourself will have the same consequence.

To prevent yourself from dying in your own houses there are a number of measures you can take:

- test your house replacing electric floors with red indicator lights, trapdoors and electric doors with green lights and pitbulls with chihuahuas. This way you can know if your traps are working as intended without risking your life. Make sure to exit out the front door rather than reaching the vault. Be aware that pet behaviour may be different as real traps may effect pets differently than lights.
- create back doors that let you escape if things go wrong and close them up before the final test. This lets you test out electric doors safely without having to replace them with lights allowing pet movement to be more accurate.
- don't make your house overly dangerous/difficult to self test. If you make a house that requires 20 unique magic dances don't be surprised if you get one wrong in and end up dead. Make sure you are very confident in the correct way to solve a house before you test with real traps.

This suggestion has come up so many times now that I feel negligent for not including it in the FAQ. I'll add something now, it would be helpful if people could remember or find a good quote from Jason on it.

I think the main point is that the game is supposed to be punishing. The feeling of suspense during self tests and the experience of dying to your own traps are really important aspects of what Jason wants you to feel with this game.

Well, technically the way things are resolved is a bit more complicated. Each cycle the the program checks to see if the state of the entire house is identical to a previous state (by comparing hashes). Now it runs through the entire loop again from the repeated state and sets each powered object to the lowest seen state, so if something has settled to "on" it will remain on but if at any time during the final loop it is "off" it will remain off. So, technically there is no difference between how "settled states" and "looping states" are resolved but because of the way it works any unsettled state will always be off, while those that settle to always being on will always be on during the final loop and so their lowest seen state will be "on". The final loop could simply be a settled state that repeats itself.

So, in answer to 4) a paradox circuit will continue to send pulses until the entire house repeats a state or reaches the upper limit of 32 cycles. It is easier to think of it as continuously sending a pulse every odd cycle.

Nice to meet you too, it's always good to see people interested in exploring electronics in the game.