The Castle Doctrine Forums

I've done it!!!

Henson robbed!

It can be done...

That being said, after analysis.. I got somewhat lucky.  I also think that is probably the BEST possible design, the best I've ever seen... much better than my own combo lock clock design in just about every way.  Also, much better than I actually assumed it was.  What threw me off was that the vault was NOT in the upper or lower right; therefore, it could be anywhere in the power door grid.

I could be wrong, but after seeing how the front works, without completely understanding the dance, I can at least understand the concept.  The entrance is designed like a intrusion detection system.  The chiwawa prevents the robber from moving up or down.  If you happen to step up or down, the cat runs into the bunker.  I believe that a double paradox circuit is used to power the door that blocks the cat- or possibly a signal is used to maintain power to the door.  The reason is that if  you cut the electric floor while unpowered, it opens the door- which essentially sets the map into brute force mode.  The only thing you can possibly do is dance on the electric floor and hope that you get it right- which you probably won't because it at least somewhat, if not extremely, complex.

It is a much different design of any other house.  Basically, the front is an intrusion detection system with the majority of the map being a grid of cell cat bunkers.  I've seen this technique before but never with so many powered doors.  Also, all other parts of the map revolve around the entrance which has a priority dedicated towards detecting when the robber uses tools or deviates from the dance.

I assumed that the vault would be at top or bottom right through a series of cat bunkers.  After getting to the top and bottom right, I thought I had messed up and lost all my money.  For no particular reason I thought to start knocking doors down and I found the wife.  This was really the flaw in the whole thing.  If I had not found the wife it would have been very unlikely that I got the vault.  Basically, beyond the first part is a huge grid of powered-door cat bunkers.  The vault could be anywhere in that grid and therefore the worse case senario is that you have to break into each grid cell to find the vault.  That could be VERY expensive.  For some odd reason I was able to step up to her without her grabbing the gun.  This was a huge risk to me as if she stepped onto the shotgun I would have been killed and henson would have received the bounty. As a result, I took 120k from her and then when I left the state was "saved".  This is the flaw in the design that allowed me to rob the vault, because I opened doors straight back, causing the cat to run this way, the cat didn't close the original path.  Because I had saved the state, the cat no longer ran down the corridor right and followed my path, leaving the path to the vault completely open.  This way I was able to return on a 2nd trip and follow the path to the vault.  In other words, because I broke the cat bunker path and saved the state, the vault path powered doors remained open.

I'm going to go ahead and share my map- minus the combination.  Actually, it is nothing useful to a robber because it does not technically give any more useful information to a robber than what can be gathered from a tool-less death run.

http://castledraft.com/editor/28YFCx

Interesting thing here is that- no matter what, if you enter the clock floor- you are trapped and must know the combination or you will die.  Only one combination can be tried each run.  Given there is only 256 combinations, it is just a matter of time before somebody guesses it!  It is also a very effective killer and typically retains a large number of tools.  It is designed to always cost the same to brute force it no matter which way you go.  It is impervious to all the weaknesses that plague other combo lock maps.  It is a single puzzle that is backed up by numerous layers of protection- something that was thought impossible in the game and promoted a multi-modular design.  Although this is all true, it is much more costly to defeat henson, and any robber with around 30,000 should easily get to my vault.

This is a non existent example house, but I've had a bunch of these. It is so easy to mess up self test due to accidental bugs in the map.  Going through and replacing with lights is the right thing to do but it is easy to get confused changing it back.  I've had like 5 different of these things with over 90k put into them, but in the end usually it is an unpowered trapdoor or a electric floor that is in the wrong spot that gets me.  Specifically, what I mean is the 1 bit clocks and alternating floors.  It seems with this method you can reinforce a door with more than just a powered door and wood.  For example, this house would require like 7 ladder, 1 crowbar, a crapload of saws/wirecutters/water.  Although I suppose you could ladder across to the magic dance area, but this part could easily be improved.

It seems that this is the only way to do this.  For example, for each modular trap, you can realy only protect one module with a single trapdoor/powered door because the rest can just be sawed through.  This resulted in a lot of maps that have many modules and very thick wooden walls to protect on combo lock maps.  However, using multiple single bit clocks to power alternating floors makes it so it is impossible ot use tools without doing it from the doormat.  Anybody else tried this?

http://castledraft.com/editor/B7ULzp