The Castle Doctrine Forums

Currently, there are only four significant houses online, two of these are wife centric with nearly impassable defences that rake in the most cash when their safes are broken... another has been smashed for almost two days, and the owner hasnt bothered to repair the damage because it's actually made his defences stronger... His house is currently impassable and will remain so as long as he doesn't fix it, and he wont fix it until hes benefited three fold from having been robbed... Only the last house is solvable, and it relies almost entirely on magic dances, but at least you can poke around and figure it out. The rest of the houses are either cheap attempts at the wife strategy, which are easily bursted through with starter cash, or admirable attempts at design( that are as well just as easily bursted down with starter cash. )

Alot has been made of magic dances and electro/trap door defences, but these things while certainly frustrating arent hurting the game nearly as much the following.

1) Broken houses working better than active ones.

2) The easy safe/ impossible wife strat.

3) The power of starter smash!

Alot of people have said that perhaps some of these problems will resolve themselves with more players, I disagree entirely, players like to win, almost as much as they like to see other players lose, even if it's in an unfair regard, if one strategy is clearly better and easier we will see the same bad habits take shape on a much larger scale, and then the game will simply die because of the resulting stagnation. As for broken houses, It makes no sense to reward a player for not playing the game, this can only hurt the players overall enjoyment in the long run.

Enough whining though! Onto solutions!

For the whole safe/wife strat and broken house advantage is see a couple solutions that could be used separately or combined.

1: If a safe is broken, the entire household should stop generating cash. This would immediately kill the boring easy safe strat, and would encourage players with broken houses to immediately resolve the damage done to their homes, seeing as every moment there house remaines broken they would be losing money, not gaining it.

2: Make the wife vulnerable to pitbulls and add a second safety test wherein she would have to escape from the inside of the house. Currently the wife is far and away the most boring part of the game, there is only one way to defend her at all, pit bulls pit bulls and more pit bulls, you have this enormous kit of interesting traps yet they cant interact with her in any way. As a result the player with the most money has the safest wife, not the player who creates the best defence. I really dont see two ways around this, either make her interesting or remove her entirely, right now she is detracting from the interesting part of the game (safe defence), she also hits new players the hardest because they end up spending all their money designing a pit bull tunnel for her instead of learning how to design an intricate web of malice( since she makes more than the safe and doesn't respawn). So yeah, fix her. Moving on.

Before I discuss the whole 2000 starter smash problem, heres a simple concern. Children. Cmon, why are these things in this game right now, their only purpose currently is that robbers can kill them one by one, so that they can smash as much of your house as possible.... What? This game isn't very big right now, so it hasn't seen a lot of multi account abuse or cooperation between friends yet, but if it does lauch with children as they currently are I could totally imagine someone, ie myself, (dont hate the player) leaving thier kids at the front door and asking a friend to kill them so that they couldn't be used against me...I mean them...

Two solutions, a) get rid of them. b).. why not use them as scouts or guinepigs? ie you could house test with them, or you could use them to scout out an enemy house, the catch being that kids would be unable to use tools. You only get two, and of course if they die they're gone and so long as they live they can still be used against you. This might give new players a bit of more rope, and there could of course be an option for better players to play without them. In this sense choosing to have kids at the start of the game would become a big choice( like it is in real life! XD), with risks going either way, which sounds fine to me, sure beats them just being forced liabilities that your better off without.

Now the big problem, 2000 starter smash. I'm sorry  Sir Rohrer, I know you want the the money system to remain clean, but you yourself have said it might be necessary to divide aggressive and defensive income. I'd like to suggest though that it wouldn't necessarily have to be more confusing than it already is, because you already have two forms of income coming in, wife money and safe money. You could assign defensive cash to safe income(Which would start at 4000-6000), and agressive to wife income(which would start at 2000, but would gather faster than defence income), and if the wife dies you could task the safe on making one type or the other.

Separate income would encourage players to both robb and build, not just one or the other, as things stand we either have fortress kings, or starter smashers, who scuicide over and over because building a house is a waste of time, seeing as it can oh so easily be smashed, (after all the only way for poor players to really kickstart thier house is a big heist, and starter smashing is the best way to do that). This would also encourage rich players to go out more as well, (because if you own a gun you are far more likely to use it right?).

While it is a concern that rich players will robb poor players with this agressive income, they currently do that and will continue to do that either way, because it costs them virtually nothing to do so, they currently wont rob other rich players though because the gross amount of money they spend risking thier lives could just as easily be spent securing their fortresses/income. A pool of solely agressive income will more so encourage rich players to attack other rich players, because they'll have no other profitable way to spend it other than on a big heist.

Thats all, anything worthwhile in dem blocks of text? Or any other thoughts on the highlighted issues?