The Castle Doctrine Forums

Good one ukuko!

And if Mr. Black is reading this, I would love to see your full house and hear how to properly get to its vault.

Yeah, whenever I die and have to restart, the first thing I do is go scout around other houses. I never bother bringing any tools with me for these preliminary scouting trips because I don't know what sort of tools I'll need (and I'd lose them anyhow when I ditch my backpack after scouting around). Once I find a promising house I just commit suicide at home and bring the kind of tools my preliminary scouting suggested I may need in the next run. Even this trip is just scouting too though. If I can get to the vault on this trip, I'll again leave without robbing them, commit suicide at home again, and restart once more for the "real" robbery. This time, since I know exactly what I face, I can bring exactly what I need and nothing more. I try to hit them up quickly so that I can get home before anyone else robs my remaining cash since my house is defenseless at this point.

This practice often generates a lot of "free money" houses for others to grab at as an unintentional side effect. However, I see this as a positive. I don't see how extra injections into the economy could be a bad thing, even if my "opponents" are getting the money. The worst thing for the game, in my opinion, is when you have almost no houses, and almost all of them are dirt poor and uninteresting. In that case it seems like more money is what all the players need to start building more interesting things.

Edit/Update:

I just noticed this morning that 1) Mr. Black is still not on the list, and 2) his paintings are back up for auction. Sadly, I think he must have died. I guess we'll never get the chance to rob him now.

I hear you, I can't tell you how many times I've died and lost great houses due to a careless keystroke error on my part.

I think this statement is dead on. I don't think a time delay would really save me from myself. I'd still manage to screw up. I am only speaking for myself though, it may be different for others.

Wow... 60 crowbars ... not enough? He must have dogs wrapped all around his entire house?

Mitchell W. Black's house is pretty interesting. I've been trying to break it off and on over the course of the day. After the the money generating antics of this morning, I gave Mr. Black's house one last old fashioned attempt from my meager $2000 starting funds as well as a few hundred I grabbed from some previously solved house. I spent it almost entirely on a few ladders to chase down the cat that's present when you first walk in... To my astonishment, I actually had enough tools to see what I needed to get past his first trap doors, which I did on a subsequent visit (start fresh with $2000 in new tools).

So I then ended up exploring the inside of his house for a really long time. I *really* wanted to break it and get my paintings/money back, but had almost no tools. I wanted to be absolutely sure I got everything out of my break-in that I could, so I painstakingly recreated his house on a piece of paper and then copied it over to Castle Fortify. Because of this, I was probably in his house for an hour or so. (If Mr. Black is out there reading this, I do apologize for keeping you out of your house so long! I genuinely felt bad about that, but I didn't want to miss anything.)

In the end, I accidentally stepped on a sleeping pit bull (as usual)... While I was locked out, Mr. Black went in and modified his house. I died trying to get in with the old version of his magic dance. However, after waiting through my second lock-out I figured out the change he made and got back in. This time I simply failed to figure out what I needed to do and locked myself in while trying. I have a pretty decent map based on my most recent visit. He may have changed some stuff since then, but it's probably a pretty decent approximation to what his house is currently like. Here's the Castle Fortify link:

http://castlefortify.com/c/e325db3

Empty spaces mean I couldn't see what was there. I've got most of his house, but am missing the far right side (and a little blob inside walls near the front door). I am assuming you used up all your crowbars fighting dogs that lined the perimeter of his house dalleck?

I can't seem to figure out how to open the trap doors that wrap around the top part...

All the money was coming from me. I most definitely do not have multiple accounts and wasn't doing anything fancy and/or nefarious like using a script to repeatedly prop up houses. It was just good old fashioned manual grinding. I think it made for some interesting shenanigans. Anyway, I think a bit of background explanation is in order...

At some point late last night Mitchell William Black arrived at my house with over 30K in tools and proceeded to tunnel through to my vault. This was a little bit weird because he spent all that money, but I only had $5,000 so he ended up losing 26K or so. I also had assumed that if he had wanted to rob someone, he would have robbed Norbert Brewington, who was, at the time, the only other person who had enough money to be a potential threat. After getting to my vault, Mr. Black carefully went back through to thoroughly tear down every bit of my house he could access, laying down ladders over every trap door, tossing bricks through every window, pouring water over all the power supplies... you know, the standard treatment. Ah well, I had just finished the last touches to my house that evening too!

Anyway, I was actually rather amused at it all. Afterwards, I tried to do some repairs, but I had $0 and couldn't afford tools needed to rob even $40 houses. To make things worse, every time I logged off and then came back, I found that some random person had come by and snagged the $70 I earned. This struck me as admittedly, a pretty hilarious situation - I had been torn down to such a degree it was comical.

At this point I killed myself in someone's house and figured I'd start fresh. I don't know if anyone else was playing at this time, but for a while I just couldn't get anywhere. There were a few piddly $40 - $100 houses and then a couple impossible $40,000 houses (Mr. Black and Mr. Brewington). So there was nothing to do. I really wanted to get into Mr. Black's house so I could avenge myself and also get my prized paintings back (as a side note, I'm sure Mr. Black didn't rob me for the paintings because I bought them cheap at auction after a great deal of time during which he never bought them).

So it was around this time that I noticed David Ernest Stanfield and Rudolph Daniel Navarrete were online. I can't remember who was first, but one of them stole $2000 from me while I was scouting a house. I'm all for injecting money into the game's economy, so it occurred to me that if there wasn't any way for me to build up at the moment, then why not pour piles of cash onto these two folks and watch and see what they do. Whatever happens, I figured it'd sure beat sitting around with a few dirt poor, thoroughly pillaged houses, and a couple impossible ones. So I started re-starting, leaving all my money out, and waiting for them to take it.

This turned out to be great fun for some reason. Some sort of vicarious excitement I guess. I then started to get interested in the possibility of trying to communicate with the other two players. There is obviously no built-in means for players to communicate, so wouldn't it be cool if we could figure out a means to do so through the normal mechanics of the game? To some extent, we already were communicating. I was fairly certain they knew I was intentionally letting them "steal" from me over and over. I then decided to see if I could spell out a message.  It would be great if one of them could take down Mr. Black... so I spelled "Rob Black" with lights. Fortunately both players entered that house and saw the message.

This continued for some time. I moved the vault and wife closer to the door so there would be no doubt that I was working with them to pump up their savings. To my minor disappointment, it did not appear that either player had attempted to rob Mr. Black (correct me if this is wrong). So I spelled out the message again.

Ironically, it sounds like they were actually going after you, herb! I should note that the goal was never to generate money for vandalism though (not that I think vandalism is necessarily a bad thing; it's part of the game right?). I mostly wanted to mix things up, and was also interested in the prospect of working out some sort of player to player cooperation. That part really intrigued me, because if players developed means of subtly communicating (and team up to take down super-houses), it could entirely change the dynamics of the game. I'm not talking about communication that takes place outside of the game, that's not interesting at all. But for cooperation to emerge naturally within the game itself, that seems more interesting.

One last thing I wanted to point out here is that if there were a really large volume of players online, then there would constantly be "freebie" houses from all the new players and people who recently died. I think the fact that such easy targets are scarce now is really just an artifact of the smallish population.

Haha, I love the presentation!

I think that was me.

I guess that makes you Brewington. I see that you placed a new dog next to the cat just now.

EDIT: I actually left your house by accident too. I had wanted to try some other things, but carelessly hit the left key by mistake when I was in the entrance.

Hi Warl0ck, welcome to the forum. I must admit that I'm quite confused by your post though. As far as I can tell, the new update only strengthens the very aspects you seem to desire. I'm also not sure what you mean when you say that the new rules make elaborate traps unusable. I don't see how traps (certainly elaborate ones) that were possible in v11 will not be possible in v12. You just need to be a bit more careful in designing them, and they may be a bit more vulnerable to robbers, which is completely fair in my view.

Also, if you don't want someone to get through a window using only a $2 brick but you need an animal to be visible, just place a pit or something in front. Doesn't that solve it?

Good one zed!

Well placed "dog released behind you" traps are great. A bit ironic that the guy with the uber-expensive, highfalutin house gets taken down by the oldest trick in the book. I've fallen for that trick many times; I assume we all have at one point or other.

I think my favorite trap I've seen was one where I ended up sealed in between a couple power doors without a crowbar. I forget how I managed to walk into that one...

Ahh... the "oh no" moment... I've had quite a few of those...

I just logged in and noticed that I had a balance of $0 even though it told me I had earned $X while away working (don't remember exactly what X was, I think it may have been around 1000). Normally this just means somebody has robbed you, but I checked my tapes and there are no successful robberies listed. My wife is dead and gone. Could this be related to the new changes?

By the way, I think these changes make sense. I used to just rob houses that I had figured out over and over to drain away the wife's money. I thought it was sort of silly that half of the wife's money would suddenly appear back in the vault each time.

Well done! I was wondering who it was.

Somebody came in a while back when I was building an earlier version of the maze and similarly got through. I wonder if that was you as well?

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'll stick with this sort of thing mainly because it is so dangerous to test.