v6 released, and Full world reset happened

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-23 15:55:17

UPDATE: v6 has been released, and the reset has happened

Brace yourselves----this is really going to bother a few people.

With the release of v6 very close, and the game changing substantially as a result, I've been trying to decide whether or not a full, everyone-back-to-zero reset is in order.

I've found that pretty much ALL of the houses at the top of the list (first two pages) are unsolvable in their current state (one even exploits a v5 bug in voltage-triggered switches to work), even with a map.

I was excited to try blueprints out on these houses (see if I could solve the 24-bit locks with blueprints). Yes, the blueprints help me figure out the houses, but they also show me that many have one-time-robbable features that have already been tripped. People use the family as bait to get these features tripped before anyone reached the vault. Given that the family was not fundamentally protectable anyway, this use of the family was understandable.

In v6, the family IS protectable, so house design will change around that fact.

And, the idea of starting v6 with the top 20 houses on the list still being unsolvable is really not palatable.

So, the v6 release will include a full, hard reset. Everyone back to zero. All paintings back in the auction house (I think that starting prices will have to be raised though).

Last edited by jasonrohrer (2013-05-24 14:27:45)

steakbbq · 2013-05-23 22:11:44

Can you give an estimate on when the new version will be coming out?

jearr · 2013-05-24 07:53:49

I'm excited to see the update!

My biggest concern about a reset is that it will reduce the total number of houses significantly. Only houses made by currently-active players will exist after v6. This will probably result in 90% fewer houses than there are now (just made up that number). Money is going to be tighter again and new houses are going to experience more robbery attempts. I'm assuming no economy changes in v6.

I'd still love to see npc houses.

DrNoid · 2013-05-24 09:19:29

If the release is announced clearly by email that will probably bring back quite a few people that are currently inactive because the current state of the game is quite broken.

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-24 09:39:14

Very very soon for the v6 release....

Yeah, I'm aware of the house shortage problem. Certainly hoping to bring some players back into the fold.

NPC houses flies fully in the face of what this game is about, at its core.

setz · 2013-05-24 11:23:27

Cant wait to try out v.6! Thanks for all your hard work tweaking this game and communicating with us all. I am excited to see and learn how to play with the new changes and fixes.

colorfusion · 2013-05-24 14:23:39

I think I accidentally just downloaded V6 early.
Downloaded it from the direct link, went on, made a house, played around with new features, then realized that there was only one other house (Jason's?) and no-one had bought any of the paintings from the auction. I checked the website and it still had the red text.

Edit: Just checked website again, it seems properly out now.

Last edited by colorfusion (2013-05-24 14:29:42)

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-24 14:26:17

"accidentally", hmmm....

You mean "accidentally" modified your download URL to v6 instead of v5? And you also tried v7, you sneaky devil you!

Yeah, the files were there, but I hadn't updated the links yet.

It's officially live now!

steakbbq · 2013-05-24 16:35:19

Played v6 a bit, seems like its really hard to keep people from robbing you now. I do like how people only get half of your money if you get the vault. Maybe make it so that you can only rob a house once, or it kind of defeats the purpose of not getting all the money.

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-24 16:45:16

The wife has the other half...

Though I guess it might be more interesting if she KEPT the other half, after you reach the vault.

So, the vault would have $0 in it, but the house would still have money left.

Right now, it decays, because she always has half of the current balance (so if you hit the vault over and over, you can whittle away at the balance).

I've thought about letting each player only rob a given house successfully once...

steakbbq · 2013-05-24 17:08:04

Yea, Idk... Maybe you should take items out of the game.

I heard you say that you want this to be a puzzle game at heart, I feel like now with maps, items are a little too strong.

As long as the owner can beat the map it means its possible, hence no need for items... you just have to puzzle it out.

It makes for very interesting game play when you go to rob someone and you have assets that if you read their blueprint wrong, you lose.

I really do feel like items really marginalize the game-play, especially having to make walls 9 deep and even then people can drill through them up to 16 if they kill the wife.

EDIT: I do like the idea of items, but maybe make them less obtrusive, like the current detector is a good one, also the gun and club, I like the idea of dogs but it seems to me that they just end up making houses broken in the long run.

EDIT2: Yea the more I think about it, the items should be more of a luxury, to prevent dying, by being able to check if a great is on, or if a trap door is powered, or if a wire has power in it, those could all be different items.

Last edited by steakbbq (2013-05-24 17:24:47)

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-24 20:53:45

Well, sometimes you can find the weak spot in a design by applying the right item in exactly the right location. This can be quite a thrill to pull off.

Maybe 8 items is too much, though. Pretty ridiculous to make everything 9 thick to thwart it. Still, if it was 2 items, everyone would make stuff 2 thick.

And it seems that $2000 is not enough to make a hard-enough house in the beginning.

The idea with items is that everyone is vulnerable, and security is something of an illusion.

It's clear that pickings are pretty darn slim on the current server, and no one can get a leg up.

We went from houses being way over-powered to robbers being way over-powered.

I've upped the starting house budget to $6000 for now... so, everyone go ahead and kill yourselves to get that money!

steakbbq · 2013-05-24 22:16:57

Ha, Yea I agree, the power switched to the robber quite a bit. I would like to see items maxing out at maybe 4, Not only would this help give a bit power back to the homeowner but It would open a lot more "Puzzle" elements I think.

I really love this game, and I want to see it be all it can be. It has a huge amount of potential, you are doing a great job.

Last edited by steakbbq (2013-05-24 22:57:15)

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-24 23:48:21

Well, with my $6000, I made a pretty tricky puzzle, with about $1300 left over. Yeah, part of it is 9-deep, but only part of it.

I'm not sure that 9-deep vs 5-deep (for 4 backpack slots) changes things very much. You'll always have to design your puzzle around what the robbers might be coming in with.

More starting money really only helps the homeowners, though, because filling up 8 slots with tools is cheap compared to building a hard house. (The upper limit on the cost of a house is $180K, where the upper limit on the cost of a full backpack is $3760).

So, maybe money is a good tool to balance this aspect of the game. Maybe $6000 is too high.... we'll see!

steakbbq · 2013-05-25 10:13:05

Yea, 9 deep but you got to remember that if you kill the wife the changes are permanent, you can get 8 saws a gun, walk in kill the wife, drill 8 walls, leave come back repeat and you just drilled 16.

Last edited by steakbbq (2013-05-25 10:13:26)

colorfusion · 2013-05-25 11:03:30

steakbbq wrote:

Yea, 9 deep but you got to remember that if you kill the wife the changes are permanent, you can get 8 saws a gun, walk in kill the wife, drill 8 walls, leave come back repeat and you just drilled 16.

The wife and children are protectable now, so on a well set up house you should only be able to drill 8.
Also there are traps that can't be gotten through; a door and bulldog can function as an unbreakable wall and some wiring can make electric grids that act as instantkill walls.

Edit: Didn't know doors can be broken with crowbars now.

Last edited by colorfusion (2013-05-26 02:13:35)

steakbbq · 2013-05-25 13:58:30

Interesting how exactly do you protect the wife and children? I did notice that you cant block them still.

Matrix · 2013-05-25 13:58:42

steakbbq wrote:

Interesting how exactly do you protect the wife and children? I did notice that you cant block them still.

You can't block them with walls and traps but you can "block" them with pitbulls, chihuahuas and cats.

So you know a corridor maze with animals in the corridor, maybe with powered doors at the side that open and close to affect the amount of animals that have access to the said corridor etc. There are many possibilities.

And since in v6 the family won't actually move until the robber gets close to them, you might not even need "corridors" to protect them.

Last edited by Matrix (2013-05-25 14:03:26)

Matrix · 2013-05-25 14:04:30

Well... the amount of power that the robber has is determined by your house design. Yes, every house design can be solved, but that doesn't mean that all players will be able to solve it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can make your house in such a way, so that it can only be robbed once between your login/rob sessions (I am not sure if the timeout exploit is fixed already but let's assume no exploiting). You can also make house designs where tools are useless (it's a bit hard to do this with the whole family alive, but once gone it's quite easy to pull off).

Sooner or later people will realize that there are some ways to make houses mechanically too annoying to rob for most other players out there to even bother trying. Let alone figuring it out and pulling it off.

So I guess given some time you will see more and more houses pop up with this type of defense in place. Of course those players who will figure them out will probably just make similar designs if they prove effective. The hard part is coming up with this kind of design, building it ingame and not dying during the confirmation run.

dalleck · 2013-05-25 19:28:24

colorfusion wrote:

... a door and bulldog can function as an unbreakable wall

Actually Jason didn't make this clear, but if you read the release notes:

--Crowbar now can open a wooden door without stepping through it.

jasonrohrer · 2013-05-27 10:01:47

steakbbq wrote:

Yea, 9 deep but you got to remember that if you kill the wife the changes are permanent, you can get 8 saws a gun, walk in kill the wife, drill 8 walls, leave come back repeat and you just drilled 16.

Actually, each child killed adds another 8 to that! So, you can actually saw through 32 walls, assuming that you can reach the family.

If you can't reach the family, but you can figure out the vault, then every time you reach the vault, the house state is saved, so if you can reach it over and over, you can "saw through" an unbounded number of walls to eventually reach the family (for revenge, spite, etc.)

A well-designed house will probably have a well-protected family and be one-time vault-reachable, though, thwarting both techniques. I'm a bit concerned that the family is TOO easy to protect now (it's possible to make them invulnerable). Though this is much better than having them be impossible to protect (everyone in v5 just put them by the front door to get rid of them early---now everyone is protecting them).

In v6, you want to protect them (even cynically, just to save half your money). So optimal play is to build a one-time robbable house where the family is protected. Then you get robbed once, but still have half your money to rebuild.

The testing so far as made me realize this: I've now got to really focus on designing a game that is good/interesting even if everyone is playing optimally. In v5, 50+ players had combo locks and no families (optimal), and that wasn't good/interesting. Imagine if everyone in the game has a one-time robbable house and a protected family. That could be interesting forever, I think, even if nobody ever "loses everything" to a robber (people will still lose everything periodically due to their own folly).

zed · 2013-05-27 11:14:42

Yep, the design is seeming quite solid now. Note however that making a house truly one-time robbable is harder than it looks - a determined thief can use 8 tools in their first run to soften up the house for subsequent runs, so you need to make sure that in the post-robbery state, family and vault are protected against 16 tools (and moreover that clever use of tools on the first run won't make the "post-robbery state" rather different from that you'd intended).

bey bey · 2013-05-29 08:42:33

v6 looks very nice - thanks for all the work put in Mr Rohrer!!

Family seems to be protectable via a simple setup like this, up against the upper wall in a corner, p being pitbulls 8 and the funnelish part being 8 deep:

* f *
* * f *
* * f *
* pppppppp *
************

writing this, I realise that the lower right corner is the weakness, it would have to be 8x8 filled with 9 pitbulls. But again, an acceptably cheap way to fully protect the family, especially if one side of the setup is already taken care of by other stuff.

Sadly, right now, there is a big cashflow problem in the game - only four houses carry more than petty cash and all appear to be broken. And even 6000 is too little cash to do anything other than frying floor mysteries. I'd love to do houses one can actually work around in but the ingame cash doesn't allow for that atm.

zed · 2013-05-29 09:26:27

At least one of the top houses, namely mine, is not broken - it's just hard.

(assuming it hasn't been broken into in the last few hours.)

It's the one with a vertical column of electric floors stretching north a bit in from the entrance, and trapdoors just in front of the entrance.

Hint for anyone who wants to try to solve it - try to understand what the electronics in the south is doing. This may involve some experimentation (or sourcediving) to figure out the details of how electricity works in this game. As a simple exercise, determine and understand the behaviour of this setup:
+-$
|+s
|+V++
+--v+I

$: power
s: switch
+,|,-: wiring
V: voltage inverted switch
v: voltage triggered switch
I: indicator floor

Last edited by zed (2013-05-29 10:57:11)

bey bey · 2013-05-29 10:11:55

Fair enough, the chihuahua stir-fry looked like a give-away but point taken.

That setup seems a bit redundant to me the way it's designed since it's always on (if that was the point then fair enough). If one removes the last wires in the second line, it becomes a quirkily inverted switch setup that takes a minute to grasp.

Was that the point?

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2013-05-23 15:55:17

v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#2 2013-05-23 22:11:44

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#3 2013-05-24 07:53:49

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#4 2013-05-24 09:19:29

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#5 2013-05-24 09:39:14

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#6 2013-05-24 11:23:27

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#7 2013-05-24 14:23:39

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#8 2013-05-24 14:26:17

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#9 2013-05-24 16:35:19

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#10 2013-05-24 16:45:16

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#11 2013-05-24 17:08:04

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#12 2013-05-24 20:53:45

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#13 2013-05-24 22:16:57

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#14 2013-05-24 23:48:21

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#15 2013-05-25 10:13:05

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#16 2013-05-25 11:03:30

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#17 2013-05-25 13:58:30

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#18 2013-05-25 13:58:42

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#19 2013-05-25 14:04:30

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#20 2013-05-25 19:28:24

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#21 2013-05-27 10:01:47

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#22 2013-05-27 11:14:42

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#23 2013-05-29 08:42:33

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#24 2013-05-29 09:26:27

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

#25 2013-05-29 10:11:55

Re: v6 released, and Full world reset happened

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