The Castle Doctrine Forums

Hmm...  that sounds more like "homework" than "cheating" to me!

Well, when they're unsolvable for Me, I guess that counts as "unsolvable in practice"! 

I think it's pretty clear that a 3SAT instance with N clauses and K variables can be encoded in a house map of size NxNxKxKxM (where M is a suitably-large constant) in such a way that a path to the vault involves assigning True/False values to the variables so that the corresponding 3SAT statement true.

On a 30x30 map, obviously what can be encoded is limited, but I've seen some pretty hairy nests of wires and gates that require a heck of a lot of finger-tracing and mental stack space to make any headway with.  Even if we can't encode anything but tiny 3SAT instances in the 30x30 maps, what is possible still has that "think through all possible solutions" feel that is the hallmark of NP-hard stuff.

Yeah, that's the way it would work, a seed would go along with the map for all self tests (and all robbery tapes).

However, I think Ukuko means that the owner would not be able to count on a reliable "solution" to their own house!

Also, I should point out that, while random animal movement might help somewhat with magic dance designs, it wouldn't address combination locks.

Well, obviously it's not realistic. But thematically, it takes cues from the iconic family in the yellow pages ad.

This has been explained in great detail in a few interviews.

To sum it up:  this is an iconic family, like the one in the 1991 Yellow Pages ad on the website.  See that guy with the mustache in the ad?  You play that guy!

Gender and sexual orientation choices (or randomness) in the game would be distracting, since this is not a game about customizing characters.

Also, the wife earns twice as much salary as the you do...

Well, the problem is that there could still be an unforeseen "complexity leak" in there.  If there is some way to make a puzzle that is impossible, in practice, to solve (regardless of cost), then some players will figure out how to do it, eventually.  That idea will spread, and the game will break at that point.

We've come up with a bunch of little tweaks like this that seem at first to solve the problem (What if you only have ONE power supply?  What if there are no wires allowed through walls?  What if you have no voltage-controlled switches?  What if you have no animals?) and even huge tweaks (What if you can see a full map of the entire house?).

But the core problem is much deeper than that.  When people have any degree of freedom to design a "puzzle," and they also have the ability to force other people to solve it in only one possible way, you cross a threshold into a place where brute force (explore every possible solution) is the only viable way to solve such puzzles.  Obviously, those kinds of puzzles are not interesting to solve.

Ideas like limiting the potency of power supplies (a good idea!) chip away at the "design freedom" side of things, but I fear that no small chip will do it (the only solution would be to restrict house design so much that it would no longer be interesting). 

I'm now thinking about ways to reduce the other aspect (the ability for the owner to force you to solve the puzzle in their chosen way).

Okay, this infinite backpack idea is starting to gel a bit more in my mind.  (Obviously, all this assumes that blueprints would be removed from the game).

You want the robber to have to make agonizing tactical choices the whole way through the robbery process.  You want them to have oh no moments quite frequently, but strictly because of ill-advised choices, not through making some tiny mistake in the series of 100 tedious steps needed to solve a puzzle (that's not an "oh no" moment, that's a "dammit, this is ridiculous" moment).

Obviously, if the backpack is infinite, and there are no consequences for filling it, robbers are going to simply fill it with as many items as they can to cover all possible circumstances that they might encounter.  Forget scouting.  When you've got 100 saws and 100 torches and 100 explosive, etc., you can just mow your way right through everything.  Of course, these items are wasted in the process (using 32 torches when it's possible to get through the house with no torches), but I don't think that's enough of a motivation (since after all, they are *used*).  The point is, you don't have to think about what you might need when you can carry everything you could ever possibly need with you at all times.

But what about if the backpack itself was one-time-use only?  Like, you have to ditch it as you run out the door (when you chicken out), and you have to ditch it when you reach the vault (to carry the loot home).  So, if you bring 100 explosives with you and find no concrete walls, you lose them, and they're totally wasted.

So, you'd want to bring just enough of each item to get through the house, but nothing more than that.  Thus, you'd do some scouting with only a few items in your pack each time, trying to go deeper and deeper into the house to see what items are needed, looking for weak points that will let you save items on future scouting trips and on the final robbery.

Also, money for buying these tools will still be a tightly-limited resource.

In such a world, every house would go down eventually.  The question would be who can do it first and with the least wasted resources.  There would still be plenty of room for skill as a robber, but it would be tactical skill.  The kind of skill that we all fondly recall from the early days of v5.  On the house-design side, there would still be room for plenty of skill as well, crafting the right balance of obstacles to kill and slow robbers down in the scouting process for as long as possible (and also returning to the house to change things around).

Furthermore, the "one-time robbable" issue would vanish.  The over-protected family would vanish.

And then my job would be to balance the whole thing through cost-tweaking (so that every object and tool sees active use).  Which would be way better than what I'm doing now (banging my head against provably-unsolvable design problems, whacking the mole down in one spot to have it pop up bigger somewhere else).

Well, just like I never wanted to make a game that was extremely "solve this really hard, tedious puzzle" focused, I also didn't want to make a game with no interesting electronics in it.

So, removing electronics (switches) from the game is not an option.  Nor is removing animals.

Anyway, I'm convinced that it's also possible to make a maze-like thing, with animals moving around, that is NP-Hard in the generalized (NxN map) case.  Essentially where there is one solution, and the only practical way to find that solution is to try an exponential number of solutions via brute force, even if you have the full map.  In other words, a "magic dance" with no switches at all.

So, the only way to prevent NP-Hard (i.e., tedious) puzzles with the current setup is to restrict all houses to being completely devoid of all dynamic objects!

In other words, looking for some subset of the current house objects that will solve this problem is a dead end.  The problem needs to be flipped upside down.

Wait, how are magic dance and the police suggestion related?

Police are a way of making all houses one-time robbable (or hard to rob a second time).

Magic dance is a problem with house design (very easy for house designer to set up a house where you have to move in a particular pattern to unlock something).

I have considered the "alarm" mechanic, maybe even with a separate alarm object that could be triggered by electricity and start a count-down to either reach the vault or get out.  However, I worry that such a mechanic would only strengthen an owner's ability to make a house that must be solved in exactly one way.  Imagine if the only way into a house set off the alarm, giving you 20 steps left, and there's some "magic" 20 steps that will lead you right to the vault, if you know what they are.  Pretty easy to design a house like that.  Not interesting to rob a house like that.  I.e., alarms would make magic-dance design even worse.

There's also the problem of the owner self-testing their own alarm.  Getting killed by your own dog is one thing (it happens in real life!), but getting "arrested" for setting off your own alarm during a self-test?  That would be pretty weird.

Oh, tape storage isn't an issue as we consider this issue (we're already storing a tape for every robbery that does damage, so that wouldn't change).

Hmm... yes, with unlimited tools, a rich player would be unstoppable as a robber.

But then again, a full cut-through-everything robbery would be expensive.  That means that it wouldn't be worth doing on a low-level house (you wouldn't spend $2000 in tools to get $400, would you?)  So, the rich would be able to afford to rob each other, which means that no one would be rich for long.

And as a fresh-start player, you'd have very tough choices to make about where to spend your money... beef up your house, or buy more tools?  And if you bring the wrong set of tools (assuming blueprints are gone), then you can still get trapped and die, which means you'd drop a ton of tools in the vault (instead of just 8 max).

Would it "ruin" the game?  We've got to figure out what the intended game is.  Right now, we've got expert players who sit at the top for a (relatively) long time, pretty much untouchable.  9 walls thick, solve my puzzle or die.  It seems that some players feel this is a necessary and desirable part of the game.  That, if you can't reliably protect your house for days, the game is broken.

Yeah, the slogan is, "PROTECT WHAT'S YOURS," but that slogan isn't genuine.  It's supposed to highlight the futility of trying to do that when everyone (including you) is out to get everyone else.

What I originally envisioned for the game is that everyone would be vulnerable, eventually.  Yes, there would be an arms race, but more along the lines of "what tools robbers are carrying these days vs. what I'm building in my house to thwart them."  If everyone is building wire-heavy traps, so burglars are coming in with loads of wire cutters, you could throw a curve ball by making a wall-heavy maze instead where wirecutters are useless.

The idea was that the limit on backpack slots would make this work.  But, duh, I didn't spend enough time thinking how the numerical limit would be exploited (if robbers can only bring 8 tools, just put in 9 obstacles), nor did I fully face the kinds of truly-hard puzzles that are possible (so that actually solving the puzzle is not really an option).

Maybe, instead, the balance could come from the cost of tools themselves.  This can obviously be tweaked to a very fine degree (if saws are too powerful, just make them more and more expensive until their cost matches their power).

The other option is to make all tools infinitely-reusable, but severely limit the number of slots.  Maybe you can only carry 4 things, but they can each be used over and over.  Now what if a house uses all three wall types plus wiring and dogs?  It seems like we'd be back where we started, with owners quickly figuring out how to make a puzzle house that requires X+1 tools to break, if there are X unlimited-use tool slots.  (Also, this would destroy the preciousness of tools themselves, which I don't want to do).

The goal here has to be to prevent players from ever becoming invulnerable, even to a novice player.  Yeah, I want the game to involve a good deal of intelligence, but more along the lines of "smart, tactical thinking," not the hardcore, IQ-test style mental crunching that the game currently requires.

I really like watching tapes where someone does something clever and simple to bypass one of my traps (like throws a brick on  a switch that is supposed to be unreachable).  And the visibility fog really matches the smart, tactical-thinking gameplay that I was originally going for.  Coming around a corner, and thinking, "Okay, how am I going to get past THAT?"  Not studying blueprints for hours to discover the exact set of micro-moves to make in order to bypass something (3-up, then 2-left, then 3-right, then 1-down, then press button twice, then....)

It seems like I've gotten myself lost in the thick of this arms race against player design-cleverness, but it's an arms race that can never be won.  I need to go back and re-think what the core of the game is about.

Having pets "turn on" only after they see you would indeed thwart magic-dance stuff.  But it wouldn't help at all with combination locks (so blueprints would still be needed).

The idea about police spawning it investigate the scene is a really good one.  It sounds like you're talking about this happening to the house itself once it is robbed once (so that all subsequent robbers will encounter police), but others in this thread are assuming the police only effect the robber upon returning (and not other players who try to rob it).

Anyway, in terms of solving the core problem (one player exploiting a house by hitting it over and over), it's easy enough to solve that problem by simply removing the house from that player's list (fully consistent from that player's point of view---"the house is gone because I already robbed it once").