Yes but that’s more a facet of laziness than a desired feature. 13p is easier to balance because the people who balance opens have experience with it.
If you come up with a setup that balances better with a different number than that’s actually desirable.
Generally speaking, you want an odd number of players for the majority of the game if possible and you should avoid setups that are prohibitively large (20+ people would be a nightmare to fill regularly) but non 13p setups (and setups that start at evens if it makes sense to) are actually more desirable than 13p imo because they add options to choose from.
Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2020 2:16 pm
by Jingle
Balance wise, there’s no reason to need to force air to start as town. Otherwise it seems fine. Scum doesn’t have a nk, but they potentially have access to three killing roles. It’s a very skill based setup, but it seems fair. I’d personally leave the neighborhoods open during the day because I don’t see a reason not to but that’s a personal choice thing.
I’m assuming factional pt is a “neighborhood” but you could just leave it as a factional pt and give everyone a randomly assigned neighborhood to cut down on room for misunderstandings, since the factional pt isn’t really a neighborhood.
Darkness will be a struggle to keep people active, I’d bet.
Does air remove the player’s previous neighborhood ala fogport? Doesn’t really change much, but it would make for some interesting analysis.
Worth noting that you have 3kpn, which is high swing. Not sure how much you care about that.
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2020 6:40 am
by DrDolittle
Posted: Mon Mar 09, 2020 6:28 pm
by Jingle
How are list ties resolved?
Could you clarify RC results probability? are they naive T/(T+M) amount of the time and sane the rest of the time? (That's how I parse it, but I think it's ambiguous enough that it should be clarified anyway.) I'm assuming it's not the traditional random cop where it just fails a certain percentage of the time, but sane/insane is probably less breakable than naive/sane.
Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2020 1:57 am
by Kerset
For every correct placement of player aligned with town, the list gets +M points
M points decrease odds to get correct result. It is non intuitive to punish player for correct assignment. Assuming mislynch:
6/(6+2) = 0.75
6/(6+3) = 0.67
The best tactic would be to just take 75% accuracy, which is really decent and check single player with 2 or 3 cops. You got 3 cops with 75% accuracy and 3 cops with 100% accuracy, one cop is being blocked. Two positive results on single person means IC here, two negative are confirmed scum. Even if scum try to give false results, i am pretty sure that this setup is townsided.
Especially that in case of correct lynch
7/(7+1) = 0.875
5/(5+1) = 0.83
its almost whiteflag
I would suggest P = number of players | M = number of mafia * 10
(M-P)/M
-1 P point for correct assignment and +1 P for incorrect and no extra reward for being the best.
I would also prevent players from placing everyone on MAFIA list, so they don't try to play as insane cop
Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2020 7:04 am
by DrDolittle
Oh sorry I wasn't very clear. I meant that Random Cop is literally randomized result in the sense no matter who is checked, the result is town T/(T+M) times, and scum M/(T+M) times. Thus, effectively the result is bogus. I prefer this over the "naive cop"/"paranoid cop" because I want people to internalize they could have bad reads conditional on flips of both alignments.
List ties --- probably just randomize who gets first second and third.
@Kerset see above. I meant for the bad-reads club cops to have no investigative power, while hiding from the players themselves who has the good reads and who has the bad reads.
Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2020 7:06 am
by DrDolittle
PS - the point system has the nice feature that if you place everyone in your list on MAFIA/TOWN/UNKNOWN, you point total is always 0.
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2020 1:10 am
by Jingle
I feel like there might be strategy in massclaiming readlist submissions. If everyone picks a different mafia submission and puts the rest in unknown, then inaccurate flips can be used as pseudo clears.
Saw the mini-theme queue is looking for mods so I put together a quick game based on our current pandemic. I would appreciate any thoughts:
I think it might be skewed against the cult?
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:28 am
by Jingle
Eh. Bp cult leader should be enough. Vig doesn’t really make sense thematically, imo, but it should be balanced enough.
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:35 am
by Karnage
In post 960, Jingle wrote:Eh. Bp cult leader should be enough. Vig doesn’t really make sense thematically, imo, but it should be balanced enough.
the vig is supposed to be a dr that can give a player an experimental treatment at night. it "cures" anti-town and kills town.
Maybe I'll call the vig a "Quack Doctor" or something and the hiders "Patients"
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:59 am
by Karnage
Some modifications, I originally used "hider" when I meant to us "Commuter"
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:21 pm
by popsofctown
The flu is a type of virus, you could improve the flavor there.
Also this game is ten times more fascinating with the same EV balance if the Virus's target becomes the new "Virus" and it's the original one that dies.
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:39 pm
by Karnage
In post 963, popsofctown wrote:The flu is a type of virus, you could improve the flavor there.
Also this game is ten times more fascinating with the same EV balance if the Virus's target becomes the new "Virus" and it's the original one that dies.
Good point about flu/virus
the target surviving and the original dying is absolute genius!
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:43 pm
by popsofctown
That setup looks really favorable to town if you're telling Commuters what kind of Commuter they are. The day one massclaim doesn't degenerate the game to a single point with 5 duplicates of each, but it degenerates it a lot, and people don't usually want to play games that are day1 massclaims.
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:44 pm
by popsofctown
in the context of an open there's not really a downside to making a commuter compulsive and even or odd and refusing to tell the commuter what kind of commuter it is. In a closed "i'm gonna stop commuting so you can check me" is the fanciness but that's not possible here so you're just removing an element people usually don't like that much.
Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:45 pm
by popsofctown
you would get this cute dynamic where the virus might guess a player's evenness or oddness based on where they expected the flu to shoot after a shot fails even though the victim doesn't know their own evenness or oddness
Further adjustments... I'm replacing "the flu" with "sepsis", the infected player inherits the virus role and the original player dies, and patients don't know if they are even/odd commuters. I'm also removing the bulletproof protection from the virus.
I think the original "virus" role will receive an "infected" role PM pregame, they don't become the virus until the end of day 1. the "virus" role PM will be part of the virus PT
In the above setup, what is stopping the town from asking everyone to post BOMB:Player name(bolded) to out the suicide bomber?
Posted: Thu May 07, 2020 9:56 am
by Kerset
If player would ask me in PM to ignore his bolded request before he posted it then i would respect it.
Posted: Thu May 07, 2020 12:32 pm
by Blatant Scum
Mod might require PM for the bomb attack to work.
Posted: Thu May 07, 2020 12:49 pm
by Isis
Looks like the setup has actually been run with this oversight. I think if you ran a slightly flawed setup like this, and one townie figured out that exploit midgame and pressured the suicide mafia about doing it in a time sensitive way, I would pragmatically accept Kerset's approach as a way of handling what has happened.
I think the cleanest answer is to specify in the suicide bomber role PM that only bombings submitted by PM are valid, and to post all role PMs in the OP.
There might be some fancy convoluted redesign you could do that converts the Vanilla townies to Loyal Suicide Bombers and pulls the strategy into some sort of range where it can be useful but isn't gamebreaking, but Kids With Guns isn't interesting enough to me for me to want to figure out how exactly I'd turn those knobs.