The Castle Doctrine Forums

steakbbq

Member

Registered: 2013-05-22

Posts: 12

Suggestion for balancing against Bit locks and Magic dances.

Hi all, I started playing yesterday. It seems that the game is suffering from defenses that are nearly impossible to penetrate without brute force. Seeing as death is permanent, brute force really doesn't work and personally I feel is boring.

I have three suggestions on how it could be dealt with.

The first is, make animals way less reliable when it comes to pressing switches. If this means that sometimes they pass over switches without pressing them, or they are only reliable when pressing switches when the player can see them I don't know.

The other Idea I had was to maybe give the player an Item called the brute-forcer. Conceivably you could click it, it would then bring up a little menu and you could set the step patern, 1x2 2x2 2x3 etc and it will sit there and do the pattern really fast for as long as you like.

Third, Nerf the metal floors. Either make it so that they don't kill, but only incapacitate or so that they kill incapacitate and force the robber out of your house.

I feel that all of these solutions help to mitigate the power of guessing-security. I am in no way saying that my ways will work, however maybe we can come up with something better. I really like this game and want to see it actually be fun! As it is right now, the top 20 houses you walk into have a corral of floor grates with dogs on switches out of view, where is the fun in that?

Also make it so houses don't show up on the list if the owner hasn't logged in for x amount of hours, I was thinking 24. There are pages upon pages upon pages of houses I can just walk into and walk through some pre-drilled holes and grab a thousand.

I also like the idea of giving us more exploratory tools in place of maps, maybe basicly maps, but only for different componenets. Wire map, Switch Map, Animal Location Map.

Last edited by steakbbq (2013-05-22 09:54:35)

setz

Member

From: NM

Registered: 2013-04-03

Posts: 121

Website

Re: Suggestion for balancing against Bit locks and Magic dances.

welcome to the castle doc forums! i think that if you search around on the forums a bit you will see that alot of your suggestions have been addressed and discussed. there are alot of fixes and changes coming in the upcoming v.6 of the game. I would definitely search around on the forums because there is ALOT of discussion about Abandoned Houses, Electric Floors, dogs, etc. There is alot of great explanation by users but also from Jason Rohrer the games creator.

colorfusion

Member

Registered: 2013-04-02

Posts: 537

Re: Suggestion for balancing against Bit locks and Magic dances.

I dislike the idea of having things purposefully unreliable. It would make making actual traps really annoying too and how would it work in testing? I'm sure it wouldn't be long before people create luck-based traps, which would kind of defeat the purpose of your suggestion.

"Brute forcer" sounds like a poorly thought out idea IMHO. It woudn't really work on any traps if you have a look at how most work and seems like it just does what the player can do but a bit faster. I haven't actually seen any designs that this could work on, and those that it does would probably be quickly changed. I'd also much rather Jason made a legitimate fix to the problem rather than almost an in-game macro which doesn't really fit the theme 1990s theme at all.

Electric floors can be disabled with a $2 item unless they're cleverly wired. I do think they could be made more expensive, but I dislike the idea of not having some things instantkill; it removes a lot of the risk and rougelikeness from the game.

The removal of wage until the player's logged in idea was recently tested and failed quite badly. There were some rich houses with everything then no-one else was able to get anywhere.

steakbbq

Member

Registered: 2013-05-22

Posts: 12

Re: Suggestion for balancing against Bit locks and Magic dances.

I wasn't removing the wage. Don't show houses that are abandoned. If a user hasn't logged in for a day then remove their house from the list.

Maybe, remove their house from the list if they haven't logged in for a day AND their house has been broken into and lost all the money from the vault.

steakbbq

Member

Registered: 2013-05-22

Posts: 12

Re: Suggestion for balancing against Bit locks and Magic dances.

I was just thinking. The whole Idea of being able to make something 9 deep is wrong. People should be SEVERELY punished for just doing one of something.

Maybe have it so that if you use wire cutters, you can use them again immediately. So if its a bunch of something in a line, one pair of wire cutters will do the trick.