Open 521: Jungle Republic (Alright. We'll call it a draw)

[Leafsnail]

In LyLo town isn't required to lynch. However not lynching reduces its chance of winning to 0% whereas a lynch increases it to 33%.

Well that's assuming the mafia can kill. If the mafia can't kill, as in Jungle Republic, not lynching will lead to a draw. Would it be acceptable to let town force a draw then, due to their unfavorable chance of winning if they lynch?

The 66% chance of losing by killing is worse than the 0% chance of losing by taking the draw. It's a perfectly reasonable alternative.

...

In any event, a draw is better than a loss, so don't all three factions have an incentive to go for the draw when none of them have a strong chance at winning?

[/quote]
That works if you're playing to not lose. But you're meant to play to

win

, and having gamestates that stagnate to a draw complicates this dramatically.

In addition, the mafia actually had a pretty strong chance of winning from their position (above 50% if the werewolves killed, barely below 50% if the town lynched).

And with the 1:2:2 setup, it isn't called because the moment town dies, werewolves lose. It's a tricky gamestate, and I'm actually rather pleased at the amount of dynamic interactions this setup brings. I mean, claiming scum is actually a reasonable strategic option here. It's so interesting.

But town can't win in that situation (barring a quadruple modkill), so it's basically just "a guy who can't win gets to decide which other faction wins". That doesn't really make for an interesting end to the game, and I think that's the reason why the town-wolf-mafia endgame is called in favour of the mafia.

I agree that Jungle Republic is a really interesting setup, but I feel that some of the endgames lead to anti-climactic draws, rather than interesting lylo situations where two factions are forced to work together to try and take down the other.

[Lord Mhork]

I dunno. I most definitely am not nearly informed enough to be touting any opinions more than my basic gut feelings. However there's always MD for a much better discussion on draws and the like.

I do agree though that the mafia had a great chance at winning, but that was only if they could have convinced town to go along with a plan without outing themselves. Otherwise it would have been a loss. I think mafia had the trickiest position here.

And yeah. Kingmaker things happen. It's one of those facts of mafia that you just kinda gotta go with. It's especially a big multiball thing. The same sort of thing happens when one scum team decides to fuck over the other instead on hitting town targets that might objectively have been better.

[LlamaFluff]

over it