[REVIEW] Open Setup Reviews

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Both previous True Love games allowed lovers to talk.

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Vi is obviously confusing True Love with Lovers Mafia.

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Um, no?

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I guess we could all agree on this definition of "balance" : A game is considered balanced when there is no breaking strategies from the start, a reasonable town win probability calculated with basic routine (no more than 60% no less than 40% without 3rd party - no more than 55% with 3rd party) and an interesting mechanic that makes people want to play it (because it's pointless to discuss balance on a game nobody wants to play - like mountainous *cough*)

Firstly, I will gladly play Mountainous. Secondly, ev calculations assume random lynches - town should be able to do better. For a mini-sized game or smaller I would personally think an ev of 40% is right around what you want.

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50%

is

town-favoured. Not significantly in such in a short game, mind you, but town-favoured.

Both 2:3:2 and 3:7:3 seem fine to me.

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Any set-up wherein scum have a greater inherent advantage would have random lynching as a breaking strategy and are thus problematic (that may be a valid knock against Mountainous, now that I think about it).

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Hence the parenthetical statement.

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I have a Gurgi EC8 game going into signups now. Before it fills, I have the weighting at 33/33/33 for the possibility of 1, 2 or 3 Weak Cops. Would it make more sense to weight it 25/50/25, so it's truer to the original?

Yarr.

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2:11 is unbalanced. Scum has too much control over the game using their nightkill.

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Well it's certainly balanced (EV of 47.8%), the only question is whether random lynching is a breaking strategy. I'd like to believe that the town's ability to find connections among the three scum is significant enough to at least balance the nightkill. Hopefully, once one scum goes down, the real pairing will become more obvious as the Days go on

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2:7 with a cop isn't balanced?

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Re: Mayo Clinic: I still think adding a docblocker works fine to counteract mass claim strategies and doesn't change the set-up noticeably.

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That's the set-up I had in mind, yes.

My only concern with changing one role is that it fixes the breaking strategy unless they get lynched/killed d1.

While true in general, I do think it's sufficient here. The breaking strategy just isn't that robust and this way the mafia really do have two outs - the Mafia Doctor and the Docblocker.

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Jailkeeper is probably better off protecting in that set-up, yeah, at least at first.

town's typical strategy (hunting the SK first)

That's not town's typical strategy.

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Hidden SKs aren't sufficiently anti-town that one would change their scumhunting strategy - the correct strategy is simply to look for scum. And most SKs will just claim Townie and try to get away with it - claiming SK means you have a negligible chance of winning and that's really only if you've picked bulletproof. The SK would also never fully align with the town - he needs one scum to remain alive right up until the end.

P-edit: no, the town wins and the SK loses.

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1) A vt claim does occasionally work (as does refusing to claim). That's just how it is.
2) 1:1:1 is probably not a draw with non-bulletproof SK, scum can still win by having the SK shoot wrong.
3) If I were town in 1:1:1 with bulletproof SK who claimed early, agreements be damned, I'd give the win to the Mafia.
4) The type of SK that picks bulletproof tends to be the type that's competent enough to be able avoid being forced into helping the town.

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2) No, no, there's no agreement. There's just a no-lynch and the SK doesn't know who the final scum is.
3) Because the SK doesn't deserve to win if he got caught early.

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Let mafia win those endgames, yes.

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There's on average 1 doc protect each Night, so it really shouldn't be that hard to get a kill through on either a cop or an innocent result. If you've got the doctors protecting a pool of 3 or bigger, odds are that they won't manage 2 successful protect (i.e. an extra lynch). As for the set-up information, unless claims end up 5-8 (chance of 1 in 6), town needs to lynch 2 scum in the same pool to get any information out of it; I don't think that's meaningful enough to justify telling the scum who the cops are.

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No.

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Alright. Say we go ahead and run this, are we allowing double ups on roles? Can there be three N1 Docs for example?

Yes. (The set-up doesn't actually make sense if you didn't allow it.)

I still get the feeling that town will spend their time on D1 trying to break the game instead of playing mafia, regardless of whether they find a beneficial claiming strategy.

Hmm. Let me think about it. Isn't that a problem a lot of Open set-ups are going to face regardless?

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You know I know all that stuff, right? The "problem" I mean is that it's going to be a distracting topic of discussion early on.

I do not believe there's sufficient networking possible to overcome the inherent downsides of mass claims. Seems to me like the main thing mass claim will accomplish (excepting a 5-8 spread of claims) is telling the scum who to shoot. There's too many players to protect and too little protective power for that not to be case, as I see it.

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Okay. I've come up with a unintrusive if inelegant change to Diffusion of Power that should remove mass claim's most meaningful benefit - tell the scum how many Cops and Docs there are. That way the 5-8 split should always be avoided; the town can gain no information from timing of claims (e.g. if a claim makes for a 7-5 split, that claim would look townie otherwise); scum can even all claim the same role if there are only 4 of those which means the only way for anyone to be cleared by set-up logic is if the town lynches 2 scum from a group of 6.

Just flipping Doc/Cop instead of Nx Doc/Nx Cop prevents hypocopping by the bye.

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I think 11:2 with a JK is reasonably balanced

(It's not.)

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That's on the pro-town side of acceptable, I think. Probably works quite well for the intended purpose (given the set-up'll foster paranoia towards good scum players and will mean that sucky scum teams won't play the 2-scum variant).

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Probably balanced with the right number but it'll only be more demoralizing than regular mountainous, e.g. with 5 mislynch win condition LyLo could come come to finding one scum among 6.

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The roleblocker plays a key role, it allows mafia to rolecop a PR and negate their effects with a sneaky NK. Especially if they are unable to force a mislynch on the player.

eg. Night 3 - rolecop finds cop
Night 4 - roleblocker blocks cop, goon kills cop, once kill resolves the cops investigation will fail

It's an unusual scenario as it requires mafia to be aware of the role they are killing, but that's the point in this game. Their NK's aren't solely about getting rid of the strongest townie.

I think you're making the classic mistake of giving the scum a counter to everything the town has here. And the best thing about the set-up is definitely that scum have more difficult decisions to make with their nightkills, so why detract from that by letting the scum ignore it once?

On top of that, town doesn't really have that much power as is? ~2.5 public investigations? I'd drop the 1-shot roleblocker and the investigation-immune goon, go down to 13p and make the rolecop a day action.