The Castle Doctrine Forums

So what do you guys think about the idea of introducing maps in v6?

I thought about this a lot and in my opinion this change is not in line with the whole game idea (as presented in v5) of breaking into a house, exploring it with your own tools trying to figure out the mechanism/puzzle behind it while risking your life in the process. Possibly repeating the process to put together bits and pieces of the "whole" puzzle (or just enough to reach the vault).

Buying a map takes away the exploration part of the game (since you are solving a map instead of exploring the target's house) and also takes away a lot of the risk involved with it (you risk only once when and only if you decide to execute the attack after you have most likely already solved the map). It also changes the whole game type - from a partial information game to a perfect information game (assuming the maps will show entire houses).

When we talk about game balance we always need to assume that the player is smart and knows the game mechanics. If this becomes a perfect information game it will mean that once a player buys a map he will figure out the way to get to the vault. The only way he can fail is by making an execution mistake. In the current implementation however the attacker needs to gather information about the defense system(s) by himself (no map) and he risks his life for every bit of extra information he wants to gather and usually has to use tools to make (safe) progress. So to get more information about a target house he needs to use tools and spend money to replace them and put himself in danger over and over again until he gathers enough information to make him confident that he can go for the vault. So it's a risk/reward min-maxing problem where he doesn't have perfect information but can get more information if he spends some money and puts himself in different kinds of danger. Not to mention the family mechanics that can help him achieve the goal but introduce another layer of decision making in order to get the most advantage out of it.

I think that the map solution is like introducing "a legal way to cheat" into the game. You can buy a ticket to cheat if you have enough money to afford a map.

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The game designer, Mr. Rohrer, made a few assumptions in the post I quote.

Assumption 1: they will coax the rich people back out into robbing because only rich people will be able to afford maps
Assumption 2: they will set a new goal for poor players to become slightly rich in order to buy maps
Assumption 3: the game will become about designing real puzzles instead of stuff that can be brute-forced

I don't think that maps will force this behavior on their own. There will need to be other changes/fixes made to achieve this (see suggestions below for ideas). I also think that maps are not necessary to promote "real puzzle" design. Actually, I think that maps might limit the amount of creativity that the v5 implementation allows.

Exploring a stranger's house with limited visibility and limited number of tools creates a unique gaming experience, on both the attacker and defender side. The attacker risks his life with every step he makes but can make things safer by being smart and using tools that are available while optimizing costs. He also needs to explore the house to gather information about the defense system in unique, sometimes ingenoius, ways. The defender on the other hand has to design a defense system and add some tricks and traps to it. Then they need to make sure that the logic is hidden, hard to access and, in case it is accessed, hard to figure out. But it doesn't stop there, a good designer will also try to play mind games "in advance" with the potential attacker by incorporating dummy elements, "safe" traps, false signals etc. into their design.

I think that what I describe above is an unique feature of this game. Please don't make those go away or limit them by introducing maps. Maps trivialize most of those and the game becomes about making as complex logic as possible that can't be disabled with the amount of tools available and can only be figured out with a map. This creates an environment where maps bring a lot of advantage to rich players since they can buy many maps and they can also afford to make complex systems while at the same time it doesn't solve the problem of "ultimate defense" systems for all other players. This will make the game even more newbie unfriendly as it is currently.

Introducing maps won't make "ultimate defense" systems obsolete or vulnerable, they will still be "ultimate defense" systems until someone can afford the map. The change only happens when someone can afford the map for a specific system. At that point only that specific system becomes obsolete or vulnerable for the map owner only. So the best defense will still be creating an "ultimate defense" system so that you can protect against all players who can't (or won't) buy a map. And against those who do, you can't really defend anyway, you can only make the logic as complex/weird as possible so that they will spend more time to figure it out. All the mind tricks that you can play with players when they have limited knowledge about your system is gone now because they have full knowledge of your system. Maps won't force players to build "real puzzles". Also anyone can build "real puzzles" in v5 already, there is nothing that prevents that.

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But even if we put aside the "v5 game idea" and if we assume that maps won't display perfect information I still don't think that the maps will address the core issues of v5. I think that the core issues that promote the kind of metagame that we are seeing in v5 are:
1. Impossible to disable/secure an Electric Floor tile while in the unpowered state (with the right pattern it's possible to create impassable regions that no tool can deal with - so in the unpowered state they are overpowered and once the family is dead they simply break the game)
2. Impossible to disable/secure a Wooden Doors tile with a Pit Bull behind it (slightly less overpowered than #1, but once the whole family is dead it can achieve the same result as #1, just in a different way)
3. Hiding the whole logic behind (N+1)*7+1 walls (N = number of family members still alive). Since houses are 32x32 tiles in size it is possible to create (with enough money, ~20k is enough for the whole system) walls thick enough that no matter what direction the attacker takes he cannot breach the wall with the (N+1)*7+1 tools at his disposal.

To address #1 and #2 my suggestion would be to introduce a new tool (or change an existing one) that will be able to deal with these situations.

To address #3 I have 2 ideas:
A) Instead of maps make it so that top/rich houses get a tool penalty over time or in response to the amount of burglary tries/deaths. A tool penalty would mean that attackers attacking one of the rich and still to be bypassed houses would be allowed to bring more tools than just 8. This number would keep increasing over time so that eventually someone will be able to figure out the solution or reach the vault with X tools. The challenge would be to reach the vault with as less tools as possible in order to be able to reach in sooner than others. This would reward skilled and/or daring players who come up with good ideas on how to optimize the amount of tools used.

B) Add 3 or 4 windows to each outer wall of the house (evenly distributed, with only 2 windows on the left wall since the door entrance is already there). When attacking a house the attacker can choose to enter through the door or through one of the windows. Everything else stays the same. The defender still only needs to prove that the house is fair from the door entrance only, and the family still runs for the door entrance as they do now. Some players will probably still go for the codelock protection, hide the vault in the center and surround it with walls but if they want to hide all the logic they will need to hide it inside a smaller space. Also killing any family member would give a lot more advantage in this situation so protecting the family would be more important as well (once there is actually a way to protect them).

As opposed to the map solution the above suggestions don't change the game to a perfect information game and keep the exploration, risks, thrills and mind games of the v5 implementation. They also promote players to rob a house by playing the game "online" instead of solving an "offline" puzzle/map that they bought beforehand.

Personally, I would go for suggestion A first because I see more potential for new features if it actually turns out successful. Imagine having a Hall of Fame with the best robberies of all time. The list would include the attacker's name, the amount stolen, the defender's name and the amount of tools allowed at the time of the robbery (maybe also the amount of failed attempts until then).

Feel free to comment on any of these suggestions. Maybe share you thoughts about the state of the (meta)game in v5?