[SETUP] Decisions By Election

[northsidegal]

It seems like, if I'm understanding the setup correctly, it's almost always the correct choice to

Divulgence

a player. If you scumread a player, you of course want to either Departure them or Divulgence them. Between the two options, I think that Divulgence is almost always superior, for the same reasons that a Public Cop is so powerful – you're in some sense forcing the mafia NK. If the person that you Divulgence is indeed scum then it's true that you have to sort of waste another day phase actually eliminating that player, but if the person you choose is town then you eventually either force the mafia to NK that person, or allow that person to live to LyLo, where an IC changes the EV for town pretty significantly.

If you townread a player, it might seem like choosing Erudition or Supplement is a good idea, but it seems like whoever you give the power to just immediately gets killed by the Mafia. So you've wasted a day phase where you could otherwise be eliminating someone / revealing someone's alignment and instead allowed the most townread person to die – in essence, it seems identical to voting "no elim".

I would imagine that the fact that it's always optimal to divulgence until you hit scum (at which you depart them) probably runs contrary to your vision of how this setup should play out. So maybe it would be interesting if you could choose any number of the options in a single day, from one to all four. Of course, doing all four might make it too townsided, so perhaps the more options that you choose in a day, the more powers that scum get to counterbalance it. Might be an interesting direction to go in.

[northsidegal]

Sure, but the thing with scum nightkilling a divulged townie is that it's a good thing for town. In fact, it's a great thing for town, because it

essentially

reduces the game to Vengeful mafia. If the mafia is spending nights nightkilling townies that were suspected enough to be pseudo-elimmed, they're not spending their nights killing the towniest townies or the ones with the best solves. It's only days where the Divulge lands on scum that they get a chance to kill someone they want to kill, which makes it sort of like Vengeful (although still worse for town because they then have to spend another day actually elimming that scum and then scum gets another free nightkill).

The mafia getting the option to give themselves roles or modifiers is interesting, but is probably never the right choice. The mafia nightkill is

really

powerful, and it's not worth it to skip a night for almost any power role, especially none of the ones you've got on the distribution table though.

Despite what I said before about Divulgence being better for town than just regular elims (which is still true), I still think this setup is probably scumsided. Best case scenario for town of Divulgence-ing someone every night reduces the game to Vengeful Mafia but with an extra day to actually elim scum after divulging them, which I

think

is still slightly scumsided? It's not so scumsided as to be in the realm of unplayable, but also there's still the fact that the optimal way to play the setup is still probably not in the direction you want the setup to go in.