More thoughts on too-hard houses

sergio · 2013-04-19 11:21:36

One idea would be that objects can receive electricity, but not conduct electricity. This would make it a bit trickier, but not impossible.

bgorven · 2013-04-20 07:07:43

jasonrohrer wrote:

Regarding players starting with $0 or borrowed money.... big question: where would money come from in the game?

A different question that could be asked is: where should money be going to? I suppose the answer is mostly personal opinion, but to me it seems clear: the rich should get ever richer, and the poor should be stuck a desperate race to try and get ahead and get a good security setup before they end up losing everything, again. So I'd suggest a scheme where income is based on leaderboard rank. As a side effect, this would a) balance the impulse to spend all your cash on fortifications (or paintings, since they don't add to your score) when doing so will decrease your rank and therefore earning potential, and b) reduce the amount of money to be had from abandoned houses.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Imagine a world-wide restart, where every player starts $2000 in debt and needs to pay it back.

At the moment, it seems that a fair share of the money in top players' stashes comes from the starting $2000 of other players, either in the form of guns & blow torches or from open homes, and I feel like that's not quite right - imo most of that $2000 should be going towards building your first house, so I thought that there could be some way to enforce that, and there's something about the concept of a homeowner turning to a life of crime that made me jump to the conclusion that he would be in debt.

Another thing I wanted to mention is: if the starting funds are supposed to be a source of liquidity, remember that any other change that will affect the spawn rate will also affect the amount of money coming into the world.

Matrix · 2013-04-20 09:10:18

Or, once maps get introduced, make a change so that the initial $2000 money can't be used to buy tools. After the first successful house test reset any unspent money to something like $100-200. That amount can then be spent to buy tools.

Maybe change the income to only deposit into the vault when the player actually logs into the game, so that abandoned houses don't auto generate money anymore.
With that change in place the "money while offline" rate could be increased to compensate and still keep a good rate of money coming into the game.

All these together should prevent $2000 house farming and abandoned (no risk) house farming, while still keeping a set rate of money coming into the game from active players through log-ins. The rate could always be tweaked server-side based on the amount of active players.

Last edited by Matrix (2013-04-20 09:26:43)

CastlePi · 2013-04-22 23:05:59

I think combination looks are ok. What I would like to see is a way to disable e-floors when they are powered off. We could use the wire cutter for this.
Also I am thinking about a mobile battery or wires to take a long. This way you don't have to solve the combination you can just power up what ever is blocking you.

DrNoid · 2013-04-23 01:15:27

I'm not too sure about adding something to disable non-powered e-floors. It will just result in 9-deep floors instead of 1-deep ones and once maps are implemented you can see their workings any way so there's no need to disable 'em any more...

segarch · 2013-04-23 05:52:17

jasonrohrer wrote:

Maybe a choice between two packs... one with 32 slots for scouting, but you can't carry a loot sack to take anything (reaching the vault gives you nothing, you can't even open it), and another pack with 8 slots plus a loot sack.

I really like what this is getting at. What I think we've all noticed in this game, is that there are two modes you eventually have to play as, but currently the game treats it as one.

There's "A have a house I worked on hard and I'm scared to lose" mode.

and there's "I'm out for blood and revenge and I'm going to break into this other house if its the last thing I do" mode.

Figuring out how to do justice to both modes will be the challenge in my mind.

A note on being able to see the whole map: I feel like this will spoil the game. I mean I haven't played it this way, so I don't know, but I feel like a lot of the fun is figuring things out, not just how they work, but inferring things about what you CAN'T SEE.

If you can see the whole map and it's still hard, to me that just means people of have obfuscated what the real map is. Like when people do cryptic stuff to javascript code to make it unreadable by humans, but it does the same thing. If everyone can see the whole map, we'll be trying to over-complicate everything we do to make it as obscure as possible. Not sure that's going to be that fun!

However, I do think the game needs more tools that allow us to infer things from what we can't see. Tools that are like the voltage sensor (but more useful). Like a tool that allows you to "hear" through walls (like safecrackers use), so you can determine, that 20 squares away, something just stepped on a switch. An obscured "wire view" which maybe allows you to see some flow through the house, or maybe indicates when a large electrical change has occurred. Maybe a little camera snake, that can burrow through walls and allow you to see what's going on, without going there? Or a device that allows you to splice wires together (say, to avoid a pressure switch) and then manually toggle them on and off. Brute forcing a combination lock just became easier. (OOoh OOh! and if you want to go off and a completely nonsensical direction, how bout letting us download and share bruteforcing software into the program which can crack the code for us. Okay forget that.)

Also, maybe instead of making a pack of 32, these tools are simply reusable.

bey bey · 2013-04-23 10:06:32

I think a big part of the problem is the amount of starting cash. With 2000 one can either try and build a "playable" labyrinth with wooden walls that can be cut through with cheap tools, or one can build a magic dance defence. This just leads to people building essentially unplayable houses from the start. It takes at least 10000 to build a house that's both playable (as in walk around, solve things) and reasonably robbery-proof.

Hunter X · 2013-04-26 06:09:15

I believe the centre of the whole problem is that as long as a player's house being robbed is tied to the progression of the game for that player (in that they will lose some or all of their hard-earned cash) there will always be a very heavy incentive for players to construct hard or impossible houses rather than ones that are fun to play. Changing the mechanics to negate the current impossible houses may well help things in the short-term, but ultimately players will simply find another way to build an impossible house and the whole cycle will start again. For the issue of impossible houses to be solved in the long-term, the incentive needs to be on creating houses that are fun for robbers rather than creating houses that have a 100% chance of protecting your game progress. Once that happens things would likely start branching out, with players building houses that are different, new and more exciting than existing houses in order to gain the favour of players rather than everybody re-using the same techniques which have been proven to provide as much difficulty and un-crackability as possible.

Such a change would obviously require rather significant mechanic changes, but otherwise I suspect there will ultimately always be players who will try and succeed to create impossible houses regardless of the limitations placed upon them (that, or the game is changed to the point where every house is either incredibly simple and easy to beat or robbers are given the ability to identify the exact solution of a house in every situation).

realitysconcierge · 2013-05-06 20:38:20

I think segarch's idea of having more exploratory tools is the way to go. I think maps don't really go along with the game, but tools that allow you to see say, all of one type of block- that would be pretty cool. That along with making electric tiles bypassable, that would be great.

jearr · 2013-05-07 07:33:32

If maps are introduced for all houses, my current house design (which so far has been pretty effective at killing people and preventing robbery) will be nearly-instantly defeatable. It does not rely on a complex series of interconnected switches or anything that takes time to figure out.

A big part of house design is that you know the robber cannot see it, and so misdirection and decoys are effective. If you can see behind the curtain, all you have to do is identify where the vault is, and then it is a very simple matter to solve how to get there. Maps will reduce the kinds of viable map designs while making it even harder for new players to compete.. unless maps are only available for the most valuable houses.

I hate that people can see maps in the current version, and think overall it hurts the game. Maps remove one of the biggest psychological elements of robbery which is that you don't know what's around the corner. What's the point of fog-of-war if you can see everything in advance?

Reduce the "follow" distance of dogs to 7 or less. This ensures that the logic behind a magic dance is accessible to a tool user.

I like this.

realitysconcierge · 2013-05-07 13:31:38

Tool Idea!
Remote control mouse/roach. These can go through walls, but have a limited field of view. Mice would have a larger field of view than roaches, but would be more expensive, or wouldn't be able to go through as many things, or wouldn't have as long of a control range. When inside walls I think their view range would need to be one. Once used they would be controlled like the regular player character.

What do y'all think?

Matrix · 2013-05-07 14:29:05

jearr wrote:

Reduce the "follow" distance of dogs to 7 or less. This ensures that the logic behind a magic dance is accessible to a tool user.
I like this.

7 or less won't solve the issue. It would have to be 6 (or even 5) or less. But that limits animals too much, imo. And with maps you don't actually need that restriction.

jearr · 2013-05-07 19:00:16

Reduce the "follow" distance of dogs to 7 or less. This ensures that the logic behind a magic dance is accessible to a tool user.

7 or less won't solve the issue. It would have to be 6 (or even 5) or less. But that limits animals too much, imo. And with maps you don't actually need that restriction.

I'd love if the game supported the choosing of different rule sets for such things, altho that's a different discussion.

Being able to see the entire map before scouting or robbing will severely weaken magic dances and imo, all other tactics.

Blip · 2013-05-07 19:34:53

segarch wrote:

If you can see the whole map and it's still hard, to me that just means people of have obfuscated what the real map is. Like when people do cryptic stuff to javascript code to make it unreadable by humans, but it does the same thing. If everyone can see the whole map, we'll be trying to over-complicate everything we do to make it as obscure as possible. Not sure that's going to be that fun!
However, I do think the game needs more tools that allow us to infer things from what we can't see. Tools that are like the voltage sensor (but more useful). Like a tool that allows you to "hear" through walls (like safecrackers use), so you can determine, that 20 squares away, something just stepped on a switch. An obscured "wire view" which maybe allows you to see some flow through the house, or maybe indicates when a large electrical change has occurred. Maybe a little camera snake, that can burrow through walls and allow you to see what's going on, without going there? Or a device that allows you to splice wires together (say, to avoid a pressure switch) and then manually toggle them on and off. Brute forcing a combination lock just became easier. (OOoh OOh! and if you want to go off and a completely nonsensical direction, how bout letting us download and share bruteforcing software into the program which can crack the code for us. Okay forget that.)
Also, maybe instead of making a pack of 32, these tools are simply reusable.

I completely agree that people will try to obfuscate houses, but that won't really help them much. It still has to make sense to the viewer, despite a lot of excess components. Obfuscated code, on the other hand, is completely changed in look. Making a house overcomplicated would be like adding a lot of useless lines of code, not obfuscating it.

I really like the idea for more tools, especially the wire view. I feel that a wire or electronic view would fix magic dance houses while leaving many other designs possible. And the "splice wires" idea is ingenious; manually toggling power to wires or conductive walls would be very useful. I think a battery would also help; electric floor-based magic dances could be toggled on and then beaten with water. I also think that the sticky pressure pad should by un-stickable with a crowbar, to help fix the "locked in by 9 doors" strategy.

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#26 2013-04-19 11:21:36

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#27 2013-04-20 07:07:43

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#28 2013-04-20 09:10:18

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#29 2013-04-22 23:05:59

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#30 2013-04-23 01:15:27

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#31 2013-04-23 05:52:17

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#32 2013-04-23 10:06:32

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#33 2013-04-26 06:09:15

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#34 2013-05-06 20:38:20

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#35 2013-05-07 07:33:32

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#36 2013-05-07 13:31:38

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#37 2013-05-07 14:29:05

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#38 2013-05-07 19:00:16

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

#39 2013-05-07 19:34:53

Re: More thoughts on too-hard houses

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