Early Game Salary Necessary

Spiderman · 2014-01-20 12:37:44

Hello, just bought the game yesterday. Been playing a tremendous amount. I've noticed waves of different play styles I've taken part in and they don't seem to help me in the end:

Make a decent dungeon with all funds:

---stuck waiting for people to enter and die.
---with no wealth, I am a undesirable target

Make no dungeon, spend all on tools, suicidally attack houses until I break through

--- break through a houses' defense.
----------If they have more than 2k, go to top option
----------If not, then I lost money on tools and might as well suicide.

Without salaries, there is a massive hump between living off the entry level 2k
and having a realistic give-and-take personal economy of boosting defenses
and saving up for multi-tool burglary as one normally wants several tools.

Perhaps salaries could cap?

Perhaps the upkeep payment that Mr. Rohrer
dislikes could only begin after reaching a certain tier of wealth?

- therefore the super rich and defended need to maintain their income of
money while new players get a slow gain of funds to fund burglary in addition to home defense.

Last edited by Spiderman (2014-01-20 12:38:51)

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-20 17:35:29

Thanks for sharing your thoughts here!

In the current game climate, the only way to "bootstrap" yourself as a new homeowner is to NOT spend 100% of your money on your house to leave a little bit of money left as bait for others. Of course, you also have to devise some sort of trick in your house that someone will likely fall for.

Note that all that "suicidal robber" activity on your part was giving each of those houses a dose of cash. So, you need to figure out how to attract suicidal robbers to your house.

The problem with salaries is that they encourage players to sit and wait for more money to come in. If you can do that, the best strategy becomes to build a house that LOOKS scary from the outside that no one will bother trying. (For example, a commit gate right by the door with nothing else visible.)

When this is a viable strategy (the "scary turtle" strategy), and the game world is filled with such houses, it becomes uninteresting pretty quickly. The problem there is that the "scariest" looking house might be a single point in the house-design space, so once players find that, they all copy each other. There is no need for innovation in house designs. There's no challenge.

The same is true if I limited salaries to starting players: then there would be a bunch of boring, scary-looking houses at the bottom of the list.

So, now there's a real challenge for starting players, and it's an interesting one: spend LESS than $2k and build a house that somehow tricks someone into getting cocky and dying. People can't just copy each other to pull that off, because the same trick doesn't work for very long...

nathan · 2014-01-20 20:15:24

How I start off is to spend my entire $2k on housing, so my trap is pretty decent, before going out and preying on the people that are either using their other accounts for farming or just designed their houses stupidly and left a bunch of money in their vaults. It's been working well since the new influx of players recently.

arakira · 2014-01-21 04:11:07

I have been playing for some weeks now, and I can say that there is plenty of money to make right away when you start a new life. In my opinion 2000$ is large enough to start with decently. Once you get some experience about how the game and traps work, you can quickly get a feeling whether a house will be easy to rob, there are already many clues just looking around the welcome mat. I can guarantee that most middle-class houses can be robbed with just a few bottles of water, drugged meats or bricks, and good scouting. Every time I start afresh, I can earn about 10k$ in less than 30 minutes just by robbing not so well defended houses (especially with the recent wave of new players).
Don't be afraid to rob and die a lot, you'll get some experience and quickly make progress.
Also, don't forget that there is a lot of psychology in there: you don't need to spend your entire 2000$ if you want to scare away people. My starter house costs less than 500$, and nobody never robbed it! In the meantime, I have cash to invest in tools, and bring in more cash...

jasonrohrer · 2014-01-21 08:35:43

Yes, the "scary turtle" house isn't entirely dead...

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-01-20 12:37:44

Early Game Salary Necessary

#2 2014-01-20 17:35:29

Re: Early Game Salary Necessary

#3 2014-01-20 20:15:24

Re: Early Game Salary Necessary

#4 2014-01-21 04:11:07

Re: Early Game Salary Necessary

#5 2014-01-21 08:35:43

Re: Early Game Salary Necessary

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