Question about Balance

[callforjudgement]

However, 2 goons versus a 1 doctor, 1 cop and 3 townies is very townsided, despite also meeting the same-day-win principle.)

I might need to call this one out. The setup in question is broken, but it's approximately win-rate balanced if both sides play to optimal strategy. (Note that this can require spontaneous fakeclaiming from the scum on occasion, something that they're unlikely to think of unless they're very familiar with the setup, given how strongly a spontaneous fakeclaim is against site meta.)

[callforjudgement]

Oh, and here's an obvious example of why same-day-win doesn't work:

Imagine a setup with 2 Mafia Goons, 11 Vanilla Townies.

Town can win this on D2, if they're sufficiently good at lynching.
Scum's earliest win is on D5, after five mislynches and four nightkills bring the setup down to 2:2.
Same-day-win would assess the setup as highly townsided. However, mathematically speaking town's winrate is predicted as somewhat less than 50:50, and when the setup's been run in practice on this site, town has

never

won it.
The main reason here is that with so many more townies than scum, the scum are very hard to find early because they're in such a large lynchpool; and by the later days, when scum are easier to find, all the competent townies will have been nightkilled.

[callforjudgement]

Right. Giving counters to power roles is much more important in a Nightless, where scum can't counter with the kill.

In a game with a normal phase sequence (say Day Start), the scum nightkill has two main uses: killing power roles, and killing strong/accurate town players. There's tension here which means that the scum can't always do what they want with it.
If you give power roles a counter, then the scum can use the counter on the power roles, saving the nightkill for killing players who are doing well in the dayplay. As a result, town end up having to solve the setup mostly through nightplay (as all their best dayplayers are being killed), but the counters simultaneously mean that their nightplay isn't very good.

[callforjudgement]

Huh, that's actually a really good explanation of where the 10:3 balance standard comes from. I personally consider the point of balance to be approximately "enough nightplay information to confirm three players, plus a small amount of help from setup speculation". Your standard of "one mislynch, plus one scum found" is three confirmations exactly (a mislynch is worth two, finding a scum is worth one), but they're confirmations which are above-averagely useful (explaining why you didn't need to give town that small extra boost). So our balance rules are very similar. (Mine's a bit more flexible; it has to be due to NRG work, meaning that I need to assess the balance of setups which might not have been designed in a way that I'm used to.)