The Castle Doctrine Forums

jere

Member

Registered: 2013-05-31

Posts: 540

Couple small issues with the squatter update

First off, the new updates are great! I've really had a blast over the past week after honestly thinking I had exhausted my time with the game a while back.

The main issue I'm seeing is that the surprise tool is visibly shown in squatter house value, not only after the first death, but after the first viewing. I agree that after the first death it's acceptable because the house has proven itself and the value has changed. But as it currently stands, the behavior can be easily exploited by visiting all the sub $200 houses until you find one that pops back up to about ~$1k and ignoring those that don't.

It's possible to find a $50 house, step on the doormat, and have the visible price jump 25x. One side effect is that it's zero risk to bypass the cheap houses. It's not at all worth robbing a house that you know will only get you $100 when it's practically suicide to scout without at least one $200 dog meat. If the value remained hidden, you'd have to stick your neck out hoping for a reward... maybe taking more risks than necessary.

Also some houses are so badly "broken" with dogs right in the entrance that tools are an absolute requirement and the listed price isn't higher than the tool cost. That should be fixed for free along with the first issue.

Neither of these are deal breakers. The game is still a lot of fun, but the value thing is cheesy.

One other issue (if you even think it's one) is we're starting to see some repeats of squatter houses and some of them are pretty braindead. I personally think that's OK, but the stray pitbull idea might be brought in to ramp up the difficulty on these. In fact, it might be worth occasionally pulling from the larger 4000 list (with 0 deaths). Some of these might be kind of interesting with a few random pitbulls thrown in and we'd see a little more variety.

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Golden Krone Hotel - a vampire roguelike

ukuko

Member

Registered: 2013-04-06

Posts: 334

Re: Couple small issues with the squatter update

Yeah the fact that you can see how much a house is worth after a visit means the house list is now mostly < $200 houses that have a hazard near the doorway that costs more than the house is worth to bypass. Maybe if a squatter house has gone X visits without a robbery or a death drop another tool in there. Otherwise they're just filling up the house list.

Actually kinda like the braindead houses. It's like salary, but with at least a little bit of risk involved.

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2013-04-01

Posts: 1,235

Re: Couple small issues with the squatter update

Okay, thanks folks!

Both issues have been fixed now.

First, the value of the tool is no longer a surprise at first (it was a weak surprise anyway, because the value estimate was recomputed after the first visit).  I don't want to muck with the code that checks houses back in, so instead I'm just getting rid of the surprise.  The value estimate is correctly computed for abandoned houses from the very beginning now.

Second, for every 24 hours that an abandoned house lives on the list, extra seed money is added.  So, they will eventually become "worth it."

Maybe 24 hours is too slow, but in the first batch update, 33 abandoned houses got extra money.

I don't want it to climb too fast, because I want players to be conducting a careful value calculus.

So, see how it feels now.

monkey

Member

Registered: 2014-02-12

Posts: 50

Re: Couple small issues with the squatter update

After playing a while post update, I've noticed a knock on effect. It is now easier to get ahead as a robber, but that makes it far more difficult to get started as a builder.

Since you have all these houses available, many are broken or otherwise quite easy. By the time someone hits my house they have built up a bounty. In the old days, I could make a house for $1500, leave it overnight, collect maybe $300 or $500 in bounties and build from there. But now, the first guys to die in my house will regularly drop 5k or 20k in bounties they've most likely accrued from robbing abandoned houses. This is quickly followed by someone with more spent on tools than the house cost to build.

It is simply not possible to defend a 5k or 20k vault from multiple players each with $2k+ worth of tools when you have a <2k budget.

Given the fact that the players who rob me are always gone by the time I log in and the bounty money is steadily building in the house at the top of the leaderboard, it appears that TCD has now devolved to a state where you *have to* use multiple accounts to play.

I'd like to propose either a soft fix of significantly lowering the bounty accrued when robbing abandoned houses, or a hard fix to prevent a house that works well immediately becoming low hanging fruit the first few hours it is unattended. A delay between killing a robber and collecting the bounty of 24 hrs or until the first login, whichever comes first would do it.

Last edited by monkey (2017-12-07 23:54:34)