The Castle Doctrine Forums

Congrats to Parham for blasting his way through. I did the math for the full retail value of just the ladders, explosives, crowbars, and guns and it came out to be $73200. I'm honored that my house prompted a thief to make such a large investment in tools, please enjoy the painting "The Keep," that I recently purchased.

iceman, you don't have an email option on the forums. Can you enable it so I can send you the map?

As stated in my guide, I design in castle draft and test in self test using wood/lights. As I'm working the design, I go robbing for my seed money. I like to have a full design as complete as possible. Then, I build out the minimum 2k proof entrance and as much as I can with the seed money and keep $4k, then do $6k upgrades every time I get to $10k. If I had the chain robbing skill you had, I'd build the whole thing at once. It's already tested so I don't have to worry about self testing issues.

As far as the design goes, I work out a family path that segments the house into sections and then build as many traps as I can into each of the sections, thus combining vault defense with family defense. I run multiple paths so it's easy to change up the vault locations. You can set up and unlock dead ends with small edits.

You've seen Geyer's house and that was an old design I did for a friend. It's basically 3 sections with one dedicated route to the family which wasn't involved in vault defense. I've moved away from the huge sections and try to design smaller ones. The Jensen house had 6 total start sections but I tried cramming as many paths into each section as I could. It's an evolution from Ponder's house if you ever visited him.

I know you use combo locks. If you get away from them, you'll find you have more space to work with.

I do also want more players. But specifically more players who are willing to learn and play the game with more investment than "lets hope I get lucky" when robbing.

I think I've had more fun with less of a player base. I'm the type that likes to watch people figure out the no tool solution to the house. Before, all I got was 2k people who were looking for an easy score and died quickly. There were so many that my house value would shoot up and those with money would just brute force the entire place. It wasn't until the last two months when all the easy money left, that I started to see smarter scouts.

Don't get me wrong I still get people who die easily and people who spend a bunch to brute force, but I looked forward to finding scouts that came back everyday trying something new to further in the house.

Playing as a robber was fun as well, even with the small amount of houses. I'd slowly build of maps of peoples houses and figure out how they worked. This style requires less maintenance, just drop in time from time, scout out a house, die. Repeat when I get 10-15 minutes free. As long as I take notes, I just recall it if I want to visit again.

I don't think you missed out at all =).

I said it is passable without a ladder, I didn't say you needed to activate the trap door or not. If you've seen the buttons and played around with it in self test, it should point you to what to do next.

I think iceman is the only person to have gotten to the next section tool less (not using tools until later to figure out the next sections) and he definitely knows what those buttons are. You can review his comments for hints on how. Also, don't forget there's a bunch of paths, some that seem correct and some that don't.

Its passable without a ladder. You just need to know the buttons and play in self test. Nice handling of the cat though.

There's actually buttons on the backside of three doors. Don't forget to press it next time.

Blip has been the furthest, although with way more tools and blasting through.

Not sure how far you went, how many cat's did you see?

Guessing that was you again, iceman, at the trident area?

I wrote an article on this awhile back but its definitely out of date (http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … hp?id=1015).
I have learned a bit more since then.

To be the most efficient, you should set the pits with dead animals. In order to do that, you either have to let yourself get robbed, or give up one of your kids (to a friend or random clubbing). Either one will save any damage. If you really want to protect your wife, you should not have kids. Having kids around will let you play with family button timings, however, you'll need a bigger space for them.

The two ways are: http://castledraft.com/editor/NSLKdT
You can build both in any direction.
The winding one takes more guns, however, allows more vision.
The straight one takes less guns, but blocks more vision.

For in game examples:
The Geyer house uses the winding method.
The Jensen house uses the straight method.

Whichever method you use, try to intertwine your family defense with your vault defense for maximum efficiency.

I went over the tapes to see which one this was. I remember now. It gave me a chuckle. Don't worry, you aren't the only one who fell into that trapdoor after seeing the dog.

Tiger,
Couple it with the button you have to setup above for the double dog follow, it gets complicated. There's also a way to separate the double dog follow into a single dog follow which opens up a different solution.

Iceman,
Ah. There's one of those somewhere in there (3pits, 1powered door, 1button, then dog), but it doesn't control electric floors. I think it takes up too much space already (i could have cut one pit). As you already know, I like keeping them as compact as possible and somehow reusing them in a different way.

Puma,
No problem at all. I think we all learn from each other and add our own flare or ideas to evolve the traps.

Any progress?