The Castle Doctrine Forums

Nah no worries lol. I just left it there to confuse others. If you think about it, if the power source is working those chihuahuas can't be alive anyway - or - if they are alive there is no power in my house anymore

Now this is really interesting... that's exactly how I would do it The current design is weak against full visibility, which you pretty much achieved by mocking it inside your own house. I knew exactly that if someone does that or if someone has a modded client with no fog it will get breached fast. But that's ok, it gives me more motivation to improve it.

Nah don't worry, you can go for it. I need to start from scratch anyway, since I plan to protect the family on the next try.

This!

It's pretty much the new way of doing guessing games (= combo locks). Of course it's harder to pull off than it was in v5, but it's potentially more powerful and more rewarding, because you can trick people into death when they are sure (based on the map) that they are playing it safe. The design decision to not show the damage status of tiles basically moved the uncertainty from "invisible" in v5 to "unreliable" in v6.

It's still early to tell how this will affect the metagame, because at the moment players are still not (ab)using this trick, but given enough time I think we will see more of it. The idea is interesting though, because it gives you a reason to develop your house further after a robbery (I actually like this part of it). The house becomes stronger (because of misleading info) if you rebuild instead of restarting. And now that the family can be protected (with the right design choices) rebuilding is actually a viable strategy.

Source: link

Well... the amount of power that the robber has is determined by your house design. Yes, every house design can be solved, but that doesn't mean that all players will be able to solve it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can make your house in such a way, so that it can only be robbed once between your login/rob sessions (I am not sure if the timeout exploit is fixed already but let's assume no exploiting). You can also make house designs where tools are useless (it's a bit hard to do this with the whole family alive, but once gone it's quite easy to pull off).

Sooner or later people will realize that there are some ways to make houses mechanically too annoying to rob for most other players out there to even bother trying. Let alone figuring it out and pulling it off.

So I guess given some time you will see more and more houses pop up with this type of defense in place. Of course those players who will figure them out will probably just make similar designs if they prove effective. The hard part is coming up with this kind of design, building it ingame and not dying during the confirmation run.

I would love some game mechanics in that direction.

Also the husband would be able to rescue his wife for free if he manages to break into the kidnapper's house.

It's live!

EDIT: I have also been experimenting with greenish colors and lower opacity (like 0.25 - 0.3). Check it out and tell me what you think visibility-wise.

You can still do this with a really small change to your style definitions. Works on all decent browsers... so yeah that might exclude IE 7/8, but since your page is written with modern browsers in mind, I don't think that's an issue at all

Change this rule

.square:hover {
    background: #333;
}

to (don't forget the :after part)

.square:hover:after {
    background: #333;     
    opacity: 0.7;          // <-- tweak the opacity value to your liking
    content: "";
    display: block;
    height: 28px;
    width: 28px;
}

A solution that works in all browsers would require you to clutter the HTML markup with extra empty divs inside every div.square and then applying a similar CSS rule (without the :after and content: "" part) to those empty divs.

Or, once maps get introduced, make a change so that the initial $2000 money can't be used to buy tools. After the first successful house test reset any unspent money to something like $100-200. That amount can then be spent to buy tools.

Maybe change the income to only deposit into the vault when the player actually logs into the game, so that abandoned houses don't auto generate money anymore.
With that change in place the "money while offline" rate could be increased to compensate and still keep a good rate of money coming into the game.

All these together should prevent $2000 house farming and abandoned (no risk) house farming, while still keeping a set rate of money coming into the game from active players through log-ins. The rate could always be tweaked server-side based on the amount of active players.

Why not make timeouts house specific?

You die.  You start again instantly.  A server timestamp is saved to the database bundled with player + house id.  You can't access houses you have recently died in for some time, but you can work on your house + use menus + rob other houses without restrictions.

That's a good point. But that's also why a scout-mode is not even close to being equal to buyable maps.

Buyable maps are definitely a safer bet. Maybe even easier/faster to implement.

Probably.

Maybe there was some other bug that left houses of dead characters behind at some point in the past?

Yeah this pretty much sums it up.

Like I said in the other thread, preventing players to build such houses would actually require changes to a bunch of things and maybe some of those changes are not even reasonable. The game would be even harder to understand.

So maps it is!

Well, if you decide to go with this solution, let me share a few things.

I was thinking about having 2 modes as well and I got to the conclusion, that having that many tools, would mean that the GUI would just display one tool icon per tool type with a number next to it (for example "[crowbar icon] x 12"). Clicking on the icon would select that tool type. If used, the number next to it would decrease. On the security tapes a tool being used would be displayed in the same way as it is now, showing the blue border around the icon.

You do have a point about the family and saves states. I didn't think about that. First thing that comes to mind: let the house auto-repair itself, even if a family member is killed during a scout attempt. Any killed members stay dead, maybe. Or maybe, the family is not at home when robbers scout

Good job!