The Castle Doctrine Forums

Well, since I died I might as well give you the whole thing. I don't want to reuse the design again anyway.

http://castledraft.com/editor/rLSEcy

I've really taken a liking to cats.

Well, jere. You're going to be safe from me for a while now. I just died in a stupid way in a house I had practically solved =[. Although I wonder if welkin would be interested in the map I've compiled... he likes to stream himself breaking into top houses...

Panda: I suggest also including traps that robbers can accidentally disarm without realizing they did so. They will be less careful when they know it's safe to cross those grates; they never activated before; they must be a bluff.

Information still leaks out with every visit, and you can't really prevent an attack by someone who stockpiles maps (instead of pooling everything in their own house). It seems like the game was deliberately geared toward houses getting crunched.

The chihuahua moves into brick range because it moves on the same turn the cat does. The corpse blocking wont go into effect until next turn.

3 bricks, 2 water. Consider placing the chihuahuas out of brick range. Also, you can save money by using fewer power supplies.

Not to be trusted? Pshhh. Name one hundred ninety thousand reasons I would use that information for evil.

Yes. Please. Tell us more about it.

Oh! I'm the one who robbed you, Mr. John William Hanley.

One problem with your house was that the sightseeing cost was really low. I was able to leave and come back over and over for really low cost. Once I saw enough of your map, I was able to guess that the upper combo lock had a wire leading to your vault and sawed my way in.

Once you have a enough money in your house, it isn't enough to just protect your vault. You need to also protect information about the layout of the house. You should force every scouting trip that a robber makes to have a high minimum cost. A good example of this is the entryway of jere's (Mr. Charles Jeffrey Penn's) house. http://castledraft.com/editor/tTqh2D Leaving the house costs at least one ladder. Every time. This makes multiple scouting trips much more expensive.

Another problem is that it looks like you didn't plan for tool use. That bottom combo lock only takes 4 saws and 1 dog food to circumvent; the effective cost of bypassing it is $850 (it's better to consider sell cost rather than buy cost for the really common tools: saws, dog treats, water). That takes up a lot of house space for a mere $850 bypass cost. The pit and and door in the same hallway are redundant; either by itself is more expensive to get through than the saw route. Reinforce the weak parts instead of the strong ones.

I like the line of inactive grates toward the end. It forces the robber to have lots of wire cutters to go through that way safely, and wire cutters aren't one of the most common tools. It would be even better if a robber was forced to activate an off screen animal before stepping on them (even if it does nothing). That way there's an activation threat on every step.

Hmm. I must have messed something up. I'll debug it when I have the funds.

*Edit:

I figured out the problem. The oscillators running the thing were on/on/off instead of on/off/off. So each of them had at least one cycle of overlap with the others and set off everything.

This one is tested and working:
http://castledraft.com/editor/ww4G0z

I'm starting to realize that this is an awful defense. The most valuable resource in this game isn't your own house full of cash and tools. It's your collection of maps of vulnerable houses full of cash and tools.

While I don't doubt you could break my house if you wanted (I'm not even using the full map), it isn't much of a defensive measure and it won't earn you money. I only have $4k in cash + tools; well below the break-in cost. If you want to hit my real resources, you'll need to guess which houses I've mapped and preemptively rob them [=.

That said...  my goal in the game has become collecting tapes of good robberies (or good bloopers). If the small prize pool isn't a problem then take a look around .

P.S. Unless the thing I found is a decoy, you should probably make some changes to your house. The orientation of that trap is really suggestive; a lot of space must have already been used leading up to it. I have a strong suspicion about where your vault is.

If you're assuming the bot has full information of the house layout you're assuming you already have something that extracts the full map data from the game. This by itself is an enormous advantage. Enough to render a bot moot.

A bot that deals with limited information would have to guess about unrevealed areas of the house; there's no guarantee that every house will leak solution info without tool use. Designing a bot that plays in this manner seems like a really hard problem.

Also, the way you are throwing words around is extremely suspicious. A depth limit won't matter for the breadth-first approach you spelled out. Minmax is completely irrelevant to this problem; you don't have any unknowns to simulate.

Well, the idea was to reduce the number of wires that need to lead somewhere important. The control room can be farther away since the space/distance cost goes down. But with this big of an upfront space cost it's not worth it.

Jere: I'm confused. Are we using the same meaning of the word multiplex?

The reason I started using safe move.