The Castle Doctrine Forums

Yeah I agree it is too big.  The whole point is, it is literally the only way you can prevent somebody from using a doorstop without pulling a ladder + water.

haha what happened blip

Yeah I like most of the design a lot, but I think I would have put more pits/concrete around the vault and use more powered doors for the protective cat.  The combo lock is a very customized and inventive way to make things confusing.  Even if you went across all the pits it would require  a lot of smashing and mapping to figure it out.

It does a good job of working around the limitations of wiring by putting several barriers between you and the vault, but the cat/combo lock all the way up to the vault is actually like one gigantic module;therefore, if you can get into the 6 dog room you can cut right to the cat, which only protects with some electric floors and a single powered door.

http://castledraft.com/editor/QKkQgR

Ya done good blip.  What I think drives me nuts the most is I really WANTED somebody to saw to the bottom right to find nothing, then have to saw back up to the top on a separate visit.  You ALWAYS seem to find the weakest points to my maps.  I had planned to use a single bit clock somehow to make it so that if you used an odd number of tools, solving it without brute force would be impossible, but I will probably work that into a future design as I wished to see how it would fall exactly. 

In retrospect, it would have been more effective to use a one time activation clock with like 64 steps or something, requiring the commit button be pressed on step 64.  I pretty much always know you are going to solve it, the question is how to make it more difficult for you.

I have a plan for my next map that should, in theory, slow you down.

By the way, did you happen to get Malone?  I swear I was just about to get that.

First, I would email Jason.  It is possible somebody uses a map hack.  It is also possible that somebody just got really lucky.  I have had a few times where I robbed a major house with no tools just through pure luck.  This sort of thing is becoming more and more difficult.  Usually when this happens I am thinking oh shit this person is going to think I am a cheater, but this has not happened to me for a long time. 

I understand that it was a complex design based upon your post, but any idea what the probability is they guess it all correctly?  You have to think, even if it is 1/1000 chance, somebody is going to get it right eventually.

One possibility is the player did not click return to house after robbing you; therefore, the money would still be in limbo.  So I would not assume that the money has been transferred to some main account until the house is completely gone.  Also, another player could have legit grabbed it.

One thing you can do to combat map hackers is, keep the implementation details of things out of view.  This way hacker must export the map to something like castledraft to see the secret details as opposed to a modified client.  Secondly, Obfuscate it such that it is difficult to understand even if the whole map is viewed.  People who need to use map hack to play this game may have a limited understanding of game mechanics- so take advantage of that. 

I hav't had it happen to me, but again, I know that map hacks are possible, so I try to build my map to make it more difficult and annoying to exploit.

ahah my little house is too rich now!!

30 paintings and nearly 50k and nothing can save it now

haha I've been on vacation but this stuff is getting hilarious.  For one thing, I've known the partial solution to Malone for awhile and was working on the full solution when a tooled method finally struck me.  Thils was awhile ago, but once chills wore off I tested it and it worked; however, somebody had already beat me to the vault by literally a few hours, blasting their way the last few tiles.  At this point, I was able to rob it one time for around 8k.  It seems Malone is still maintained by somebody because they had fixed some of the damage that I had done.  More recently, I have seen the dog in the path and that the required cats are now dead.  I would go in now as it has some good cash but I'm unsure of the risks.

I figured out that damn combo lock house that had the pit door commit on entrance (with low cash and a ridiculous amount of paintings).  This guy had a double combo lock, which the first I read the combo lock with 5 saws - big flaw right there.  After that I was able to force my way in with a few thousand in tools on my main.  This was quite the risk to my main because if I did not have enough tools, he would have profited big time.  Often I find that when I am getting very close to a solution to a house, next time chills wear off, somebody has beat me to the vault by just a day or so.  At any rate,  You should always make it so it requires more than 5 saws to read the combination of your lock (in most cases).  My current house is an extremely simple combo lock with a twist.  It is not a difficult house to crack or brute force and holds quite the reward with 19k and 30 paintings.

Yeah I got pretty far.  I got stuck at the upper doggie commit gate last night because I drugged all the dogs in the cement pillar hallway.  I've died trying to go up with a ladder before, so I put a ladder over the bottom pit and stepped on it immediately.  The flaw is that if you do that, the pit will open now on a certain step.  What I did was just count the steps till it opened and it was easy to get past that part in future visits.

As far as I know you can make a clock that goes as high as you can fit counters on the map, so if I did 512 with half the map, you could probably go WAY higher, but you would take up much more space.  Every counter bit you add will double the highest count, so if I could fit 9-bits on half the map, you could probably do 18-bits, which would count up to 262144 steps.  This is completely impractical because the police would definitely show up.  As far as the step limit, that refers to electronic states that loop in substeps before reaching a consistent state.  If an electronic system loops more than 32 times(during substeps that occur between each game turn) before reaching consistency (repeating), the game logic disables the power (AFAIK).

yes i'm trying to build out another one that only allows tools from the doorstep, then you'd have to dig all the way from the doorstep to the vault; however, it isn't quite there yet because there arn't enough trapdoors yet.

Here's my review...

1/5 stars.  First of all, this place reeks of animal cruelty.  From what I can tell, the cats are very unhappy as they will try to escape, potentially locking you inside the cage.   Extremely dangerous floors.  This park is not fun for the whole family.  I can tell you from experience that this place is probably plagued with poor electrical wiring.  The wires seem crossed and buttons DO NOT work as expected.