The Castle Doctrine Forums

Likely people who go out robbing for the experience of learning traps and getting ideas, or just enjoying the game, rather than trying to get money and build their own home.

As a basic check you should make sure your house can withstand at least $2000 worth of tools. If your wife can be killed with a meat and a club, and you don't want her to die, then you should improve her security.

He'd lose all of his paintings and half of his money (assuming he has a wife) every time he does that. Possible to be very crafty with transferring money, but unlikely. The reddit post is just using the fact he has animals in pits as proof that he is using an alt to leave his home in a broken state, and calling him a cheater.

Curry (Who I think is JWG) robbed my house with tools just a day ago, which isn't possible with a broken house, and I think he's robbed more since then. So the reddit post is definitely just someone whining.

Even if he did have a broken house, it's hardly "cheating". You can't go out and dump tools to keep your value down, you can't go out and rob other people approaching your value, you just have to sit and watch while your house is inevitably brute forced.

Clocks are pretty much all of the advanced electronics you ever need to know, and they're not too hard to understand. Even if you don't understand them then it's incredibly easy to realise that a house is using one simply by not rushing ahead; it's a mistake you only really need to make once.

The game does have a pretty steep learning curve, but I'd hate it for depth to be removed simply to cater for new players; the game is really unique as it is. House design would be pretty boring and limited if we had no wiring, the majority would probably be "guess the right route or have a lot of tools". Keep in mind that magic dances require just the very basics of wiring.

I have no doubt that there are less people playing now than there were at launch date, that happens with every game, but it won't be as dramatic as it looks. The new list mechanics will now spread out robberies more evenly, new players that were throwing themselves at everything will have learnt how to play better, and it's almost been a month since launch.

Keep in mind that, really, you should be expecting a 1:1 ratio for an average player. Every house you die in, you have one person dying to your house. The super accelerated bounty gaining where you could just sit back and wait was only existent because of the huge amount of new players just starting to learn the game. When you are getting robbed less that doesn't really mean there are less people, because 100 houses with 100 people should get robbed roughly the same amount as 500 houses with 500 people, what it means is there are people who are dying more than they are claiming lives.

I think the full order of things that happen goes something like this:

- Robber moves
- Pets/family move
   - Starting at bottom left corner, going to right then moving up a row
- Switches toggled
- Electronics calculated
  - Power propagates, then VTS are switched, repeat 32 times or until a repeated state
- Death calculated
- Vision calculated

The hard part would be going on a clubbing spree. You need a lot of money, and it's probably pretty hard to find suitable houses where there's no commitment trap and there are children out in the open.

- A single bottle of water costs the same as 50m^2 of wooden walls
- A pistol costs almost four times more than a shotgun
- You can only get close enough to club a dog if there's an even number of spaces between you
- Nobody has a job or pays taxes, but the the state can afford to constantly pay out $2000 for every new citizen and occasionally massive bounties.

The permadeath is a really essential part of the game, Jason has given his opinions on it multiple times. It's most likely not going to be removed because new people dislike it. If you keep playing past the initial shock of losing everything then you can begin to see that removing it would really ruin the game. If Jason gave in to every demand of new players then the game wouldn't be worth it for more experienced players.

As a tip for any new people reading, don't spend hours building your house straight away. It's exciting to get building your dream trap, but you will lose it, and probably on the self test from misunderstanding game mechanics.

Also Jason doesn't really seem to care about the money, or at least not to the extent that a lot of other game developers do. If he did, then smoothing out the first part of the game would probably be top priority to get good reviews, rather than sticking to what the game's meant to be and making it something unique.

I like the idea of being able to choose where the family goes, although I think it would need to be named something that makes sense thematically in the game rather than "family blocker".

Perhaps even having it work in the opposite way, placing escape route points and having the family go to all of them in order of the shortest path which is the next closest from where they are standing.

You can make a 2000$ design, try to scout, maybe get lucky and do a little rob with no tool. Get off line back 24 hours later and not start over.

Being robbed doesn't mean it's game over, getting your first house to survive overnight isn't something that will happen straight away very often; but you can do some small robberies and rebuild. I think I was about a month into the game before I got mine to survive that long.

You can also change your house design to suit how much you're going to be playing. If you want loads of bounties have hidden commitment traps and lots of pitbulls. If you want to survive long times then focus on defending your vault and wife rather than killing people.

Playing the game often can speed up progression, but it's like that for almost every game.

Pretty much. For homeowner=>robber it would be easier to have a string of random tiles representing different letters, or just massive actual letters in tiles.

Might not be an in game feature, but perhaps we could agree on some kind of robber step code.