The Castle Doctrine Forums

I usually build the starter house in a way where the exit door (vault door) are located at place where I can start building my predesigned house. This way people still see the inviting starter house, but at the end they will find something else and as soon as you have all the remaining place filled with parts of your predesigned house just change the entry to the predesigned one, finish the gaps and you are done. You have house that you wanted. It took a few days to do it, but there it is.

I have never used clocks in any of my houses (when I don't count testing) and still was able to get to top 10 several times. I think clocks are nasty for robbers, but also usually easily discoverable before taking any risk.

Right. That is the problem that needs to be solved and that is why this whole discussion is happening :-)

When I played minecraft I had no idea how people do thousands of things and the game didn't tell me and it still doesn't. In that case the key is community and I think this game has great community. We have nice wiki, castledraft, lots of posts on forums explaining all of the things (and I thank you all for that - it's great). The game is about making traps where you have to think, nobody will tell you all the possible traps that you can make as that would make the game boring.
I think it's just the question what kind of game Castle Doctrine wants to be and what is the target audience for it. You can't make game for everyone (unless you make Angry Birds ).

I think substeps are completely understandable and consistent unless you hit the limit which is high enough to not be hit by accident. Without substeps electronics would be easy to understand, but hard to use for any advanced electronics, or on the other side very easy to use for advanced electronics like clocks. I think one of the entertaining things about this game is finding out more and more stuff that can be done and the more you play the more you learn. Giving everything on a clean plate to the players takes away part of the fun in discovering the game mechanics.

That depends on the way how will he fix it. If the fix would just make wireless transfer impossible/impractical and everything else would work like today then nothing would need to change as the only thing that would be influenced by the fix would be the breaker circuit or circuits that span for more than 32 substeps. We want to get rid of breaker. Circuits that need more than 32 substeps are not usable even today and it was good enough until now.

I think it's mainly usable for saving up some space, but otherwise everything that rotary switch can do can be done with toggle switch and some gates.

Just bumping my own stuff - Isn't this the way to localize the misuse of the breaker? No special detection is required and it will actually solve the problem. Even if there would be some magic to find out localized circuits the ones where there are more than 32 steps would be glitched so the result would be very similar. Using this even connected circuits will work without problems. Can someone see any way to abuse this?

EDIT: It's quite easy code change and I can probably even make a PoC code for this if someone would be interested to test it.

Oh right. Silly me :-) So I guess the only real solution is to have just single step. The electronics will change a lot with this e.g. clocks will be much easier to make. Alternating power will be question of just 1 paradox circuit. No more pulses through electric floors to protect your walls or trigger trap through seemingly unpowered button, etc etc it makes me sad.

EDIT: How about disabling the component that triggered the event where more than 32 substeps are needed? If that would happen at the beginning the house would be refused to be self-tested. If that would happen during robbery, you can cache electronics components that changed state during last turn and as soon as you find out that > 32 substeps are needed just reset those electronic components back to state where they were before and stuck them at that state and do the computations again.
This would stop clocks working after trying to trigger the breaker but there are much easier ways to do that. Maybe you would be able to make unpressable button, but the doors that are supposed to be closed would be closed unless connected to the circuit somehow.

Accidents happen even in real world ;-) I think the chance is really small as nobody has come up with something like this until now. If it happens to anyone by accident - bad luck :-)

I thought about clock that would trigger the breaker after certain time when I read it.

The idea is that the bot will simulate the environment locally and execute only the final solution. That by itself would be great achievement. When we talked about it in other thread  the complexity of all the traps/electronics/animals in house together is really really high. We were talking about brute force solution and even though the problem is certainly solvable, jere was right with his calculations:

That was very basic calculation of number of possible steps that need to be evaluated by bot in house where maximum number of steps from start to vault is 2000. Of course the numbers are not exact :-D, but you get an idea why it is difficult to do it in short time.