The Castle Doctrine Forums

I think I pretty much know how it would go...

Yeah...

Man, this has been SUCH a hard game to balance!

Well, I was thinking it wouldn't affect the price of buying, just that you'd be billed extra for having too many of one thing in your backpack. So, it wouldn't affect resale value.

But yeah... I'm still on the fence about this, because this will make breaking the top houses even harder.

I mean, if I REALLY wanted to drive people crazy with paranoia, I could make it so that damage accumulates, even for failed robberies.  So, they'd collectively chip away at every house over time, like termites.  You'd have to watch your house day and night to keep it patched up....

Anyway, if it worked like that, then carrying multiple tools could become expensive (or even impossible---back to 8 slots).   But, I don't want to do THAT to people....

In the client, the quantity in a slot is a signed 32-bit number, meaning that the maximum quantity you can carry of any one item is 2,147,483,647. 

I'm pretty sure that will be enough for the foreseeable future!

This is interesting!

So... what about a rich player who gathers free tools from robbers dying in the house?

The point is... it seems like the surcharge needs to be placed on how much you CARRY, not on how much you BUY.  Like... a transportation cost, really.

Essentially, it seems like this could be a flat rate for each "extra" item you carry in each of your eight slots.  So, you could carry 1 saw for free, but as the slot gets more full, the transport cost could rise.  That could be on whatever formula... probably something that grows non-linearly.

Also, I'm trying to figure out where to plug this into the game.  It seems like... hmm...  that it really needs to be on the Load Backpack screen, where you shuffle stuff around and see the transport cost factored in to what you're doing, and then hit DONE to be charged that cost.  It still seems like it would be confusing.... like, you'd have enough money to buy a saw, but you wouldn't be able to buy it, because you're already carrying 10 saws, and the transport cost of putting one more in your pack would be too much.

SO... maybe transport cost needs to be billed separately on that screen, and let it exceed what you actually have to spend (with a number that is green and turns red when it goes over).  And if the current transport cost is more than you have, the DONE button is blocked on the Load screen.  And then... if you come back to that screen and move stuff OUT of your backpack (before heading out to rob), you could get that transport cost BACK.

I do wonder, though... this makes the rich even more invulnerable!  Both to each other, and to lower players.

I mean, for a certain house design, brute forcing is the ONLY option---for houses that would take an exponential number of guesses to pass without tools.

Hmmm.... it's a good problem to have, though, I think.

I'll know by the end of the day how the removal of easy $2000 houses changes "how much money is stolen" and all that.  I can break it down per player, per robbery, etc.

Yeah, I already got rid of the $2000 empty houses by adding a 5 minute delay before a respawn house can ever show up on the list (whether it is built-out or not, but building usually takes more than 5 minutes, so then the house is listed instantly).  That 5 minute value can be tweaked in the settings as-needed, but it seems to be a good value.

As for the other stuff... let's see how the no-farming thing pans out.

ALSO, Josh.... I'm sorry, but you just have gotten too good at the game.  By the way... why didn't you win the contest?  :-)

There is a potential chill ONLY in the next life (or subsequent lives after that).

The chill is triggered by one of three things in your past life:

1.  You died in that house.

2.  You carried tools into that house.

3.  You reached the vault in that house.

We have the most people EVER playing the game right now (417 active players this very moment, and 3800 over the past 24 hours).

Thus, it's okay for the chill to be high right now, because it won't lock anyone out of the game unfairly.  There are 726 houses to choose from!  You'd spend all day paging through them all (I really need to add a "skip 10" arrow to that list now... yikes).

So, the chill is 24 hours.

BUT... to prevent certain camping exploits (like dying to drop a bounty in a house, and then camping in that house with a second account until the chill wears off), the chill only "ticks" when the house is live on the list.  It doesn't tick while it's being robbed or edited.

THUS, in practice, the chill will last more than 24 hours.  It will be in effect for 24 visible hours.

There was this thread with some tips:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/forums/vie … php?id=523

However, it's not exactly a guide.  Probably a video would be the best way to do this, but I don't have time to make one right now.  Maybe next week?

Yeah... "vulnerability" is the main aesthetic goal of this game.

Everyone should be vulnerable, and the richer you are, the worse it should actually become.  Yes, you have more to spend on security, but more people coming at you, and robbers are motivated to spend more trying to get what you've got.

I don't ever want you to "feel safe" in this game.

In fact, "vacation" should be the most vulnerable time!

Yes, a pay-per-life server, where you get to steal real money 24-7 and cash out, is something I've thought about.

HOWEVER, you're right about the cheating incentive being huge at that point.  People could make a living by playing the game... and as soon as that's possible, well... everything would need to happen server-side.

I am super interested in that kind of game dynamic.  However, I don't think I'd do that with this game.  I'd build a game from the ground up around that concept, and do everything on the server.  Obviously, it would have to be turn-based on a longer time scale to make it work.

The problem with this game is that, during a robbery, you want to MOVE quickly and fluidly.  You don't want to wait 10 or 5 or even 1 second to make a move.  During peak server load times, the delays can be about like that!

Of course, it has something to do with the server architecture (where every client "move" is an HTTP request that makes a MySQL query and so on).  In a slower turn-based game, that would be fine, though!

(For this game, you'd really need to keep a socket open to each client to make robbery moves as fast as possible, which is fragile and bug-prone, etc...  but on a slower turn-based game, like Clairvoyance, you could stick with the robust HTTP/MySQL server.)