The Castle Doctrine Forums

I did! That's why I originally put [BUG?] into the subject. Maybe it is really broken and when someone steals money from vault and then another one comes and dies for $100 bounty the money are split again. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to me. It was literally like this: I woke up and saw that someone broke into my vault, I closed the game without changing anything on house or even passing the self test that is needed after your vault was emptied. I came to work and looked at tapes and I saw 1 guy die for $100 bounty and another guy steal another $2000 from vault (wife is still alive and he didn't even see the wife).

Oh. I've always thought that you can use wife as secondary vault, but this way .. it's strange as when the first one brute forces all traps all the others have clear way (that's what happened) to come and take half of what otherwise untouched wife is supposed to have, because robbers took everything from the vault.

Good to know that. I will take it into consideration in my next house design. Thanks!

EDIT: If anybody would be concerned I fixed the wiki article to reflect current state http://thecastledoctrine.gamepedia.com/ … se_Robbing

Looks like you are right. I was just used to have lots of curious scouts in my starter houses so it was suspicious to have almost no visits. Everything is back to normal, I think it was because of weekend

I have to agree. This was just an example of very brute force solution (like guessing a password by trying all combinations), simulation can be improved so you don't need to calculate everything from beginning and just take a state from the previous move, when you do move and nothing in the house changes (you see whole house) there is no reason to try to go back and forth so you can drastically reduce number of possible steps, also when dog moves, but doesn't press any button or move to the path where it cannot get back you don't need to go back and forth (left,right,left,right), etc. It can also find out dead ends that don't change any electronics state and don't lead to the vault and exclude them from the map. You can even teach the AI to track the wires of button it is going to step onto, calculate the state of electronics to find out which buttons need to be pressed in what order and then just solve the maze problem of getting to those buttons in that order, etc. By "teaching" the AI some of the things that are obvious to human you can get to numbers that are more realistic.

As I said it was just a theory and I completely agree with what you said - it is not viable to implement such brute forcing AI as I described I just wanted to quickly describe that AI does not need to understand electronics, because it just sees <=4 possible moves at each square.

I was just thinking about making a bot that would solve the houses and believe me - it's doable. The houses are not so big for it to be too much of a computational problem and bot could see your whole house so it's basically just maze solving with more variables than just walls (think of it as a chess with mazes :-) ). It's certainly not an easy task, but it took me just few hours to figure out an algorithm that would be able to solve any house (given the bot sees whole map, which is the case now).
Unfortunately I don't have time to do something like that. But I'm currently thinking about more complicated problem - bot that can build houses :-)

I find it very funny, but I guess they just spent their $2000 and couldn't rob your house so their life has no meaning :-)

I noticed the same thing and I think know why it is - because they are now by default at their house values when looking up targets so they don't scroll up too much to get to the top. As opposed to the state before where they just pushed page down a few times and ended up robbing houses ~15000 - 20000.

EDIT: If you have high value house take care of it as making money in high value houses is going to be difficult. The game has changed a lot for those that were making money by having well protected high value house. And it was just simple UI change :-) I think the only profitable way of gaining money with high value house is to spend the money on tools and rob another high value house ;-)

I just wanted to write the same thing. This is much worse than listing through 4 pages of high tier houses. I have 12$ and I needed to list through at least 10 pages (probably more) in order to get to $1000 houses. I think there should be lower limit of what houses to display at start.

EDIT: Just wanted to add simple quick fix that I used even before:
Just type some character to filter - I usually enter 3 random characters and click filter. You will find it much easier to find higher value houses.

Hello Arakira. Thanks for that link. That's what I thought - it is practically impossible to build house that cannot be brute forced without even seeing it by rich robber that takes lots of tools, if he knows what he is doing (he probably wouldn't be rich by jumping to regular pits )

I understand both sides - the ones that are mainly building houses are pissed about brute forcing and the ones that are robbing them are pissed about the traps that are virtually impossible to solve without seeing behind walls.

Unfortunately that leads to the state where robbers are just trying to get enough money to brute force house and house builders trying to build houses that are impossible to solve without knowing internals of the house. However it's hard to say whether it can be any better as house builders will always try to build impossible to solve houses and robbers will always try to circumvent traps without spending days figuring it out. So maybe this is how it is supposed to be

Another solution to this that I was thinking of is to have some kind of rewards for building entertaining house so house builders would try to build houses that would get them some 'impressions' from robbers or something like that. Maybe the 'impressions' could be permanent = some kind of stat/attribute of the account (not the game character) so people would try to get impressions and not be so sad after being robbed (therefore not trying to build impossible houses with lots of combination locks that are not fun to solve).

Hi jere, thanks for your reply.

I understand that brute forcing is part of the game as are the combination locks. Both of which are quite questionable from the gameplay point of view IMHO. But on the other side you are right that it makes the game more fun when the people on the top places are changing. But I think the time will come when there will be someone with loads of time like Mr Price that will destroy everyone being even remotely close to having enough money to brute force his house.

I have to say that the only thing that saved me from Roger was combination lock which is impossible to make more than 1 guess which I'm planning to remove soon as I don't like the idea of it being basically unsolvable, but it helped me to survive some brute forcing attempts. Nobody from hundreds of people that died in my house solved even 1 of my traps yet, even Roger that broke into all the electronics from the first 2 traps was not able to solve (AFAIK) them second time he came in, which is kind of sad as I can see most of the people just brute force not even trying to solve the problems (which is why my house was so successful from the beginning as when you did wrong move all traps in the house were turned on with no way to disable them again).

EDIT: just after I wrote this there was one man that went through my traps like a boss without tools I'm really sorry 'Dennis' (if you're reading this) for the combo lock And thanks for finding hole in my design

I already built 6 button combo lock where each button has 4 states which I think gives 4096 combinations and is really hard to guess when you don't know there are counters behind the buttons and as much fun as it was to design it there is no fun in solving it so I just threw it away.
I know there is no way to remove the combination locks from the game as simple crossing where you can choose path to go is basically one bit combination lock and when you stack multiple crossings you have multiple bit combination lock so theoretically combination lock is just series of traps put into small area making one large trap that is really hard to guess. Anyway it helped me survive, but I don't like it. Maybe I will not remove the lock, but instead show people the right combination (using lights or so) if they successfully solve my traps.

One way I was thinking about solving brute forcing problems was to force robber to have 9-10 different tools in order to brute force the house (as he can have only 8), but I didn't find a way to do so yet. The wired wooden walls are always the weak point as there is nothing else with similar function (blocking view and conducting electricity).

It was easy to lure people into my house and kill them from the start, but now I'm facing problem where I need to scare them to go away and leave me my money That's also why I changed my very inviting house to be much more scary from the beginning. Funny thing is that now ~10% of the kills are just people that come and jump to the regular pit after 2 moves