Datisi's Micro Normal Review, October 2020

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Primary: callforjudgement
Secondary: northsidegal

[Datisi]

hi!

1x town lazy tracker
1x town rolestopper
5x vt
vs
1x mafia tracker-finder
1x mafia goon

- daytalk enabled
- confirmed 2v7

my idea was to start from the doc/tracker vs goons setup, which is very townsided from the stats i've seen, and work from there.

i wanted to use the new lazy modifier on the tracker. mafia's tracker-finder is a half-informed / half-rolecop, since i wanted scum to be informed about the tracker, but my last two normals had a mafia informed, so...

rolestopper instead of doc because

i think rolestoppers are neat

so that it rewards good play from whichever side performs it (protecting town from getting checked by the finder vs protecting scum from getting tracked)

i'm assuming this will get called scumsided, in which case i'm open to maybe adding another low-power role into town?

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i won't comment on balance but i will comment to say that i find that setup aesthetically pleasing.

[Datisi]

:D

[Isis]

Am I here as a tertiary reviewer or be-seen-and-not-heard spectator?

[Datisi]

oh yeah, a question i had about night action resolution: if rolestopper is targeting player X, and the tracker-finder is targeting X, and a tracker tracks the tracker-finder, what result does the tracker get, "visited X" or "no visit"? if i recall correctly, the wiki has two different answers to that...

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Am I here as a tertiary reviewer or be-seen-and-not-heard spectator?

You're here so that you know when the setup is done so that you can put it in signups since it's your queue. You're welcome to offer thoughts if you want to.

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Also I believe the canonical answer is no visit to your question.

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But i might be wrong. it's one of those interactions that just sucks.

[Isis]

Does rolestop grant hexproof or indestructible

[Isis]

Also I definitely didn't forget I'm the micro queue listmod hahahah heh heh

[callforjudgement]

oh yeah, a question i had about night action resolution: if rolestopper is targeting player X, and the tracker-finder is targeting X, and a tracker tracks the tracker-finder, what result does the tracker get, "visited X" or "no visit"? if i recall correctly, the wiki has two different answers to that...

I think the situation is that people

want

this situation to be "no visit", but there's no consistent way to do it within the rules. Luckily, there's normally a consistent way to do it in any given setup, and "no visit" is consistent in this one. (For what it's worth, I prefer sidestepping the whole problem by having even roleblocked actions be trackable, but the community has outvoted me on this.)

As for the balance of this setup, the issue is that the town roles hardly do anything; the best use of the Rolestopper for Town is the "Follow the Tracker" interaction, which scum have no way to break up, but even then the Tracker is much weaker than an unmodified Tracker. (It's very unlikely that town will earn a day by stopping two kills, so their only actual Night power is the chance of maybe catching scum performing the kill, which is hard when there are two scum that might be performing it.) So I think that it is indeed scumsided, and it also suffers from the issue that town are rewarded rather than punished if the Tracker claims early.

My main thought for a balance fix here is to make the Tracker (full) Bulletproof, and clue that to the scum somehow (unfortunately, "Bulletproof Tracker"-Finder is probably not Normal, or else I'd be suggesting that). That way, the Lazy Tracker gets more uses of its ability, and makes the setup more townsided because the scum can't just kill them; it also means that town aren't rewarded for letting their power roles be claimed early. Probably we'd have to resort to Informed again. My suggestion:

Town Bulletproof Lazy Tracker
Town Rolestopper
5 VT
Informed Mafia Goon ("There is a Town Bulletproof Lazy Tracker")
Mafia Tracker-Finder ~OR~ Mafia Rolecop

I'm not particularly happy with this, though, and it could probably be tweaked more.

[Datisi]

maybe to go in the opposite direction. make the rolestopper indecisive/roaming to break up follow-the-tracker, and then add more town power elsewhere?

one of my ideas was town neighborizer, since it can confirm itself once one scum is dead (no multitasking), which would offset the lazy tracker losing its track?

also due to certain recent games, i do not want to see any bulletproofs

[Isis]

Town Bulletproof Lazy Tracker
Town Rolestopper
5 VT
N3 Complex Mafia Strongman
Mafia Complex Tracker-Finder

?

Datisi why you gotta pedit me and make my posts irrelevant

[Isis]

You could make the rolestopper loud, but that doesn't fix the no bad deed goes unrewarded issue. I also don't think indecisive really fixes the no bad deed goes unrewarded issue since the scum might not try to kill again after failing the first time, and a full night has a lot of meaning as it is.

[callforjudgement]

Modifiers like Indecisive just don't do much in a Micro; the town can still earn themself an extra Night with the power role alive, and one extra Night is a lot in a Micro (where games are often over after Day 3, and nearly always after Day 4). If you need to break up follow-the-X combos, you need to go with Simple.

Making the setup non-Multitasking is interesting as a way of providing a boost to town. I fear that the balance impact would be very unpredictable, though; it depends on how many of the town players figure out the implications that this has for the scum power roles (in particular, the mere act of making the setup non-Multitasking means that if scum fakeclaim anything other than VT or a very weak power role, town will know that there's too much claimed power in the setup because there couldn't be any powerful hidden scum roles to counteract it).

As a result, we may be looking at something along these lines:

Town Lazy Tracker
Town Simple Rolestopper
Town Neighbouriser
4 VT
Mafia Tracker-Finder
Mafia Goon

I have a feeling that this is townsided even with Multitasking, though. Town's roles still don't do much, but town are likely to figure out that at least 2 out of 3 of their power roles are town by setup speculation (especially if the Tracker-Finder flips, all but confirming that a Tracker claim is town); also, players have an unfortunate tendency to assume that Neighbourisers are town even though it isn't an alignment-locked role. So this setup has the problem you see in Opens sometimes, where the mere fact of having a vaguely confirmable role has a lot of balance impact in its own right, even though the role itself isn't all that powerful. (It doesn't take all that much town power to balance a 7:2.)

Now I'm wondering whether Lazy Tracker + Neighbouriser + 5 vs. 2 (i.e. without the Rolestopper) is balanced with Multitasking turned off. I think it's probably scumsided, but it rather depends on how good the scum are at fakeclaiming (I think it's balanced if scum fakeclaim VT, and may be townsided if scum screw up their claim, so they'll need to claim quite well to take advantage of the scumsidedness).

[Datisi]

if towns are likely to assume a neighborizer is town, i think i wanna axe it then...

spitballing here:

town lazy tracker
town simple loyal rolestopper
town checker
4 vt
mafia complex tracker-finder
mafia goon

i dislike townsided setups and wouldn't mind hosting something that leans scumsided. though i don't know how to solve the issue of "town lazy tracker + rolestopper aren't enough for town, but adding a 3rd town power role swings it back to town too much due to nature of there being too many PR claims"...

[callforjudgement]

Loyal Rolestopper + Checker is interesting as combos go. Was that intentional? One issue is that it can produce a false inno on the Tracker-Finder (this is very unlikely to happen), but town are at least aware that it's a possibility.

I have no idea what the meta for Checker is yet. It's weak enough that it can't be setup-speculated to belong to either side (which is probably important here), and it's probably more useful to scum than town in most setups, so the existence of three roles here is less likely to break the game for town.

The "Complex" on the Tracker-Finder is actually quite helpful for scum; it somewhat increases the chance that they will kill a town power role N2 (making it easier for them to survive a 3:2 ending).

I think the setup as you've listed might well be balanced, actually (although it's somewhat "out there", so harder to predict what will happen). If it's unbalanced, it's probably going to end up scumsided (especially if the scum are good at claiming). So that sounds about where you want the setup. The town power is of a nature where it could be useful in theory, but any individual piece of probably won't be that useful in practice.

Giving scum global Multitasking will have something of a balance impact here; without it, they can't fakeclaim any noticeable amount of town power and are pretty much locked into VT, with it they have more scope to be tricky (bluffing the existence of a powerful scum role). That said, VT is a pretty decent fakeclaim in this setup anyway, so the balance impact won't be all that large.

[Datisi]

Loyal Rolestopper + Checker is interesting as combos go. Was that intentional? One issue is that it can produce a false inno on the Tracker-Finder (this is very unlikely to happen), but town are at least aware that it's a possibility.

it wasn't intentional, no... i'm thinking whether it's a problem, but i think it's unlikely it ends up clearing a vt. though i'm not sure i see how that combo produces a false inno on the tracker-finder? the rolestopper is both simple and loyal, it won't work on the mafia tracker-finder, and the checker that checks him will see a passed check, correct?

Giving scum global Multitasking will have something of a balance impact here; without it, they can't fakeclaim any noticeable amount of town power and are pretty much locked into VT, with it they have more scope to be tricky (bluffing the existence of a powerful scum role). That said, VT is a pretty decent fakeclaim in this setup anyway, so the balance impact won't be all that large.

i think i'd want to give scum multitasking, actually. i'd like for scum to have room for smart fakeclaims, and i want to give scum a fighting chance if the goon flips day one.

[callforjudgement]

Ah right, I got the false positives / negatives backwards. The combination works like Neapolitan, not Goon Cop, so there are no really problematic false negatives to worry about.

[Datisi]

though i worry if that neapolitan-combo becomes unavoidable if all three power roles survive to day two and massclaim - the rolestopper and the checker targeting the same person, the tracker tracking the rolestopper. i don't want the setup to be "you failed to kill a PR on night one, you shall lose now". is that a likely scenario?

[callforjudgement]

In that case, scum just kills the Checker. The only protective is Simple, so scum can break up claimed role combinations with their regular nightkill.

[Datisi]

actually, that leads me to another question. if the simple loyal rolestopper targets the checker/scum, and the tracker tracks the rolestopper, does the tracker get "did not visit anyone"?

if the answer's yes, that's why i'm thinking of the neapolitan-combo as being unavoidable, as the tracker can also check whether the rolestopper's action succeeded or not. granted, it's not *conclusive*, since the rolestopper themselves might've gotten blocked, but... i wanna avoid as many "bastard" scenarios as possible.

[callforjudgement]

I typically expect actions that fail due to Loyal and the like to be trackable (just like actions that fail due to Ascetic are trackable). I'm not 100% sure that that's the correct Normal ruling, though.

[Datisi]

"It causes the role to behave as though it were roleblocked unless the target has the same alignment as the user."
"It causes the role to behave as though it were roleblocked when targeting a player who is not vanilla."

if roleblocked actions aren't trackable, then these shouldn't be either