Mafiascum.net

Looks fun flavour/mechwise. I'm struggling to understand why you ever go for 1-3 spares. I suppose you may switch into it from a 4 spare plan if the town is suddenly convinced they spared mafia earlier. You never intend to go for it from the start, right?

125 looks amazing and the most fun, but I don't understand the neutral route.
As I understand it currently:

Town's wincon is replaced with this point system, and mafia win by making 4 points impossible to achieve. Day fights and nightkills continue, but town can delay mafia gaining parity by resummoning players from the spare PT. If all 3 of the mafia are a mixture of amalgam/birds, then town autolose. Seems difficult for town to get 4 points unless I'm missing something.

In post 127, Hectic wrote:Looks fun flavour/mechwise. I'm struggling to understand why you ever go for 1-3 spares. I suppose you may switch into it from a 4 spare plan if the town is suddenly convinced they spared mafia earlier. You never intend to go for it from the start, right?

I forgot to write in the standard element of returning spared players from the game, but that was probably assumed.

If I'm counting correctly, bad play on 1 Spare and 3 Fights removes 6 players from the Charaless 11p, putting the game into 5p FiLo. Bad play on 4 fights removes 7 players from the Charaless 11p and immediately grants the mafia parity. So you get to play an additional phase. You've skipped a fight on the neutral route, but when you do your catch-up-fight from the game not being over, it is one informed by the investigations.

The genocide route on the other hand is more powerful if you eliminated one of the goons early on. You get both investigations, not just one.

I would have been perfectly content if the spare route was only useful when town "realizes" they have spared mafia, since Chara flips midgame even when townread in this setup, so it is reasonably likely for town to have epiphanies. That would be function enough. If that was like 10% route usage that'd be good, town has yet to seriously consider genocide in an live run of the setup


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You understand the Menagerie variant exactly right. It's deliberate that the neutral route sucks and that in the worst possible case the neutral route can be impossible to win at all. The idea is for it only to be undertaken if 2-3 points are already confirmed as of the time either stops killing mafia birds or stops sparing town amalgamates (since town amalgamates don't flip, that requires a certain kind of cockiness unless all three amalgamates are spared, which creates an NK WIFOM on the amalgamates.

Since the rand of how many birds and shopkeeps roll scum greatly affects the balance of neutral, you have to assume one of the most anti-scum rands when you balance it, and if that makes the route anti-town it's "okay" because the other two routes are available and don't depend on the rand. It makes the setup philosophically different from the original semiopen in a way (well, like, philosophically different in intent but the revision 1.0 of undertale semi-open is baroken imo and fails to provide genuine route diversity due to it.)

I think I would be ill advised to run menagerie rather than Folly. Folly is at least tied with how long I've thought about a new revision without deciding I hate it and must return to the drawing board posthaste

Ah, I get it now. Yeah, I didn't realise any spared players would return to thread on a neutral route. So, you go for 1 spare/3 fight if you don't get a goon or Chara, and aren't confident about getting one on day 4, so decide to go for a spare instead. The spare route looks the most fun to me still, but the genocide route with the option to transition into neutral on day 4 seems pretty strong with the investigations. I'm assuming you've added the day 5 clause to stop town from triple sparing and then fighting in 7p FiLo after the investigations without any risk. I like it.

For the Menagerie setup, the smalltown roles sound like fun, but neutral as you said is very undesirable. There's less versatility and you kinda lock yourself into a path based on what you do on day 1. If town's misfought thrice in a row, and they're pessimistic about their chances on day 4, then sparing to avoid scum getting parity with the genocide ability is an option I guess.

The day 5 clause is intended to provide some kind of reward to the mafia for getting mafia spared, as in S_S's original design. That does seem like an incidental positive. There would be 2 ICs and returning spared players on day five, so it would be guaranteed that one of the remaining never-spared players is mafia. If the town misses that 50/50, after townreading a mafia enough to spare them, that seems like a fair loss.

I think I'll run Chara's Folly, if I get another favorable review and become no longer living in 1-2 games

If you got no spared players then 2 ppl are investigated but one of them is instantly nighkilled anyway. If you got 1 spared player then he returns as IC and there is no nightkill.

I do currently have a kill in there, a bit of miscounting in my head but not a miscounting that kills the setup, since a 3p eLo with a confirmed town has the same EV as a 4p eLo with a confirmed town, just the strategic benefit of selecting a voice to remove.

So, if I don't change that, currently, if there's 1 maf left the 0 spare gamestate is
IC
Unconfirmed town
Scum

and the 1 spare gamestate is
IC
Previously spared unconfirmed town
2 Unconfirmed town
Scum

There's an entire additional pair of players alive, but it is a town that is 1 exile behind schedule, so that makes sense. It also makes sense that they would be able to perform an exile here and not lose compared to genocide, that's the one they haven't made yet because they are behind on schedule. The next one, that gets them back onto schedule, loses the game like the other route.

That does seem a little bit stronger than genocide, so maybe leaving both IC voices alive in Genocide would be a good idea

I-if Isis won't do it anymore, t-then I wanna try!

Undertale Micro

2 Mafia

7 Town

Each day, there is a vote to spare one player. A player who is spared is moved to the Spared PT and loses access to the game thread (they can't be targeted by the factional nightkill). Town immediately wins if three town players are spared and no mafia is spared, and mafia immediately wins if both mafia are spared.

If, after day 3, exactly one mafia member has been spared, the town votes for one final spare. If the spare is successful (meaning the other mafia member is not spared), the remaining players in the game perish without flipping and the occupants of the Spared PT return to the game thread. Those players vote on one guess of the remaining mafia, and win or lose on its correctness.

I had considered running this as a pared-down version of the setup during the marathon weekend, but there was never a good time for it. Thoughts? It looks balanced-ish, EV-wise (~47% town win), although I worry the "perfect town victory" may be a little too easily achievable in this version. (7/9*5/7*3/5=1/3 chance of all 3 spares being town if decided randomly).

I didn't think up non-pacifist routes because people seemed to like the idea of sparing and I wanted to strip it down to be as simple as possible, and focus on getting one route right before attempting to workshop in any alternate one.

The lack of genocide route makes it seem more like a The Coalition variant than a variant of S_S's setup, but Undertale is good flavor for townhunting setups and those numbers might be good.

I do plan to revisit this but want a few months to refresh my approach.

Fair enough! This was mainly a "does this route look decent" type of post. I mayy be able to workshop a genocide route, although with a simplified setup it probably ends up looking like something not very original like desperation day. the challenge is in getting multiple routes that are relatively evenly balanced, and then making a potential neutral path where town might actually have a decent reason to switch depending on game circumstances.

Some kind of design where "it becomes good to switch routes when certain slots are towny/scummy" is the most promising which was some of the idea of the Menagerie idea. There is maybe something simpler I could come up with at some point.

It's really hard. If you make a design where a triggering circumstance makes it trivially correct to switch to neutral route, you maybe haven't done that much better.

A far saner version of menagerie. Maybe not really an undertale though:

someone review this please

In post 139, Isis wrote:

Toriel's Patience

3 Mafia
11 Town
Nights 1-3 are skipped.
One player is randomly, publicly Toriel at game start. Toriel has two votes day one, a single vote day two, and no votes thereafter. Toriel can't be voted before day 3 and is the only player who can be voted on day 3.
Between day two and day three, players choose Mercy or Fight. If Mercy is chosen, for there rest of the game eliminations are flavored as sparings and town wins if town spares four townies and loses if it spares two mafia.
If Fight is chosen, those effects are simply not applied.

This seems unfun for the Toriel player.

To know you can’t really vote anyone and then know you have to be elimmed D3 kinda feels bad?

On top of that you can’t really vote for Mercy or Fight without losing your limited votes?

Plus if they are scum since Toriel is the only elim possible D3 and there’s no punishment you always elim Toriel every time here.

I would actually dress up a super old setup I played on before MS.

Lemme see if I can find it.

https://forum.throneoflies.com/t/purgat ... -win/72233

This was during a hiatus from MS not before hand. My bad

The biggest flaw was that you could elim a scum for control so you just always elim scum the scummiest players first then control in the main game is with town. So scum was penalized for completing their wincon.

I would change this to where you have Heaven and Hell player stumps. Nightkills do not happen then you just have spare or hurt instead of Heaven/hell

Then build Undertale flavor around it.

If you want NKs to happen you’d have to increase the number of town dramatically here.

This idea could use some smithing as it’s 1 am but I think it’s along the lines of what you’re looking for

In post 140, Isis wrote:someone review this please

I don’t think you ever don’t eliminate toriel D3. Assuming the first two days are normal elims, not spares regardless of choice (my understanding correct me if wrong) then going into the rest of the game you have a mountainous game, potentially an unwinnable one for either faction in mercy route. Not liming toriel takes the game to evens with no way of returning. Probably runnable, but the game should just be called if it starts with two scum lims.

If the spares/elims decision is retroactive, it’s townsided. You just get rid of the two hardest to read players, decide post flip based on whether they were town or scum. If it’s 1-1, you base the decision on whether Toriel is towny or scummy.

I would have D3 be a vote for whether heal or hurt and then it always gets applied to toriel thing, btw. Gets rid of the unnecessary decision of do we vote toriel.

Also don’t think toriel is an unfun role. “You only have to care about the game for three phases” is pretty freeing tbh.

In post 144, Jingle wrote:

In post 140, Isis wrote:someone review this please

I don’t think you ever don’t eliminate toriel D3. Assuming the first two days are normal elims, not spares regardless of choice (my understanding correct me if wrong) then going into the rest of the game you have a mountainous game, potentially an unwinnable one for either faction in mercy route. Not liming toriel takes the game to evens with no way of returning. Probably runnable, but the game should just be called if it starts with two scum lims.

If the spares/elims decision is retroactive, it’s townsided. You just get rid of the two hardest to read players, decide post flip based on whether they were town or scum. If it’s 1-1, you base the decision on whether Toriel is towny or scummy.

In post 145, Jingle wrote:I would have D3 be a vote for whether heal or hurt and then it always gets applied to toriel thing, btw. Gets rid of the unnecessary decision of do we vote toriel.

Also don’t think toriel is an unfun role. “You only have to care about the game for three phases” is pretty freeing tbh.

I am not a fan.

I don’t see how you don’t just elim Toriel anyway.

They are the only slot ever voted.

They can’t vote so they can’t do anything.

If Toriel was a treestump of known alignment it makes sense

But in this game Toriel is a treestump with limited votes and no additional powers and forced to elim itself d3 is just blah.

I know you said you don’t elim Toriel here but a free elim on the only person votable ans no consequences for a failed miselim I elim the slot every time.

I phrased that poorly with a double negative, but the meaning is that you always eliminate toriel. The other option of course being no elimination D3 which leads to evens, also known as a bad idea.

Toriel still has to convince town to spare them D3 (mercy route), unless the game is already autowin for town or sparing them would make it autowin for scum, in which case you might as well skip D3.

Also, as I understand it Toriel is a D1 doublevoter d2 regular voter, so I’m not getting where your complaint of limited voting comes from.

Toriel has two votes day one, a single vote day two, and no votes thereafter.

I read this as two votes the entire phase of D1 and one vote during all of D2 and no votes at any other point.

A double voter is different than having two votes.

I think it may be the literal part of my brain biting me in the butt.