[SETUP] Miss List

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[SETUP] Miss List

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Fri Jul 07, 2017 8:04 am

Post by Something_Smart »

Current setup, as of post 16:
Miss List
N Mafia Goons

N + 1 Vanilla Townies


During the day, the mafia choose one townie to add to the "Miss List".

If a mafia member is lynched, the game goes into night. Each town member must choose whether to sacrifice, while the Mafia choose a person to kill in the event nobody sacrifices. If at least one town member sacrifices, one player who sacrificed will die randomly. Otherwise, the Mafia's kill will go through.
Additionally, once during the game, the Mafia may select a player at night to prevent them from sacrificing; if that player attempts to sacrifice, the night will be resolved as though they did not. (Meaning that if they are the only one to sacrifice, the Mafia kill goes through.) If they do not sacrifice that night, the shot is lost.

If a townie is lynched, they flip and are given a (randomized) list of all Mafia members plus the one townie the Mafia chose to add. They then must vengekill one player on that list. This occurs after a thread lock, so the lynched player cannot share the Miss List with the town.

Mafia win if a townie vengekills another townie. Town wins if all Mafia are dead.

Spoiler: Original Setup
Miss List
N Mafia Goons

N + 1 Vanilla Townies


During the day, the mafia choose one townie to add to the "Miss List".

If a mafia member is lynched, they get a vengekill.

If a townie is lynched, they flip and are given a (randomized) list of all Mafia members plus the one townie the Mafia chose to add. They then must vengekill one player on that list.

Mafia win if a townie vengekills another townie. Town wins if all Mafia are dead.


EV calculationInterestingly, the town's EV is equivalent to the SK's EV in this:
1 Serial Killer

2N Vanilla Townies


Which makes the EV's for N = 1, 2, 3, and 4:
NEV
167%
253%
346%
441%

So I think this might be good at 5:4.
Last edited by Something_Smart on Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 8:53 am

Post by callforjudgement »

I like the idea here. It's also obvious that there's no breaking strategy, which is a nice bonus. (Obviously, you have to mention that townies can't publicly communicate post-flip, i.e. the miss list never gets a chance to be seen by the main game thread until the game is over.)

I'm finding it hard to calculate what EV would be wanted, though. Lynching scum during the day is better for town EV-wise, because it guarantees you survive the night. However, it leads to townish players dying. Meanwhile, if you lynch scummy town during the day, you guarantee a second scummy player dies overnight; you'd better just hope it's actual scum. So you get a "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" thing going on with the town; every time they manage to survive a miss list, they get a permanent advantage, but the mere fact that it happened gives them a chance to lose.

One thing that worries me is that scum don't have a huge incentive to not lynch each other early in the game; going for the miss intentionally N1 would be very ballsy (and possibly backfire), whereas just playing the townie and not trying to influence the outcome of the lynch (beyond normal fake-scumhunting) gives them a notable advantage (good townies and bad scum gone if scum gets lynched, or a potential miss with little information if a townie gets lynched). This means that they may well be rather harder to read than they would be in a more normal game.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 9:06 am

Post by Something_Smart »

Yeah the vengekill is the one part of the setup I'm not very happy with. The only other idea I had was to just not have any kill if scum is lynched, so that lynching 2 scum allows 1 mis-venge and thus makes it very hard for scum to win. (Vengekills would still be mandatory even when town is in evens.)
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 9:43 am

Post by callforjudgement »

It almost seems to me like the optimal fix (while staying within the nature of the setup) is "after a correct lynch, town sacrifices a member", but I'm not sure how you'd deal with that logistically. Perhaps any townie can PM the mod volunteering to leave the game, and the mod picks a random volunteer or a random townie if nobody volunteers? Note that in that situation the "optimal EV" that we'd be aiming for would be pretty low (probably in the 30s), implying that the game would have to be larger (probably 6:5)

I can also see this working with no-kill-on-scum-lynch, but have a suspicion that that might be highly townsided in practice regardless of what numbers you pick. With small numbers, town don't have many chances to miss. With large numbers, the odds of two early successful lynches are fairly high, and the odds of missing early are pretty low because it's one townie in a large sea of scum. The game would probably be about scum buddying up to individual townies in the hope they get the miss they need (either by or on a specific player).

There's also the minor potential issue that if two townies end up genuinely hard-tunnelling each other, something which happens way more often than it should, that's likely to lead to an immediate scum win, which rather cuts into all the theory. One of my largest issues with Vote For Town is that the game can be ruined by a single scum failing to play up to the desired standard. This is similar, but with townies.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 9:56 am

Post by Something_Smart »

Although even in a 9-player game, that's 40% of the town screwing up :P My intent was that town should try to vengekill the safest choice rather than the most predictable one, which could be manipulated. If two townies are tunnelling each other Day 1 and one of them is lynched (assuming the other shows up on the list), it's probably smarter to NOT kill the other just because that'd be the most obvious miss.

The volunteering idea is interesting and pretty strong, and it would solve the two townies tunneling issue by allowing them to prove themselves. The only thing I dislike is that it seems a bit arbitrary and awkward (a mechanic added just to balance the game). Perhaps a bodyguard-ish mechanic where the scum get a kill after a scum lynch but any townie can "jump in front of the bullet"? So if nobody volunteers the mafia get to choose the kill, rather than it being random. (Clarification: the mafia's target is not revealed if somebody volunteers, it's just flavor.)
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:05 am

Post by Gamma Emerald »

So town's win chances at 5 Town 4 Mafia is around 40%? Seems a little low.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:47 am

Post by Something_Smart »

EV, not win chances. It assumes random play, but town should perform better than random in a setup like this (or at least I'd think).
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Fri Jul 14, 2017 12:24 pm

Post by callforjudgement »

In post 5, Gamma Emerald wrote:So town's win chances at 5 Town 4 Mafia is around 40%? Seems a little low.
EV is the victory chance if everyone plays completely at random (allowing for optimal/breaking strategies, e.g. you're allowed to assume things like "scum won't nightkill each other" and "townies will claim if it leads to an immediate victory). Or to think about it another way, it's what you end up with if everyone plays to the optimal
strategy
but comes up with entirely random scumlists/townlists, or (for scum) threatlists.

Town somehow manage to consistently do below EV in certain types of setup, which is just embarrassing. However, in setups where scum don't have a full nightkill, town generally do
much
better than EV, and thus in order to get a balanced setup, you need the EV to be somewhere below 50%.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Fri Aug 18, 2017 2:09 am

Post by Something_Smart »

The first run of this setup has ended with a
scum
victory in a close LYLO. The game seemed pretty townsided for most of the game, although that's because scum were lynched the first three Days and scummy townies were able to sacrifice all three nights.

I had a PM conversation with Regfan during the game about a possible breaking strategy, but I'll double-check that he's okay with it before I post it. The strategy involves voting on a single townie to sacrifice overnight, and if they don't die they are confirmed scum.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Aug 18, 2017 2:15 am

Post by Something_Smart »

And Regfan said it was fine, so:
Regfan wrote:What's stopping town from saying X leave the island if you're town, no one else do it and if X doesn't die in the night X becomes confirmed mafia? It does give mafia the potential to shoot anyone if they're mafia but that's a worthwhile trade IMO.
Something_Smart wrote:Nothing, and that's a solid strategy. It basically produces a better result if town's second scumread is town and a worse result if it's scum (compared to letting scummy townies use their own judgement and lynching the scumread D2). I don't think it's breaking however because it depends on town having two correct reads.
Regfan wrote:It provides information in who/why people are voting people to be the person to 'leave the game' as well. It's much better than a "if you're scummy leave" type plan.

It's not "breaking" but it seems massively +EV and I'm a little baffled by the lack of it being brought up thus far. Removing the most widely scum read townie (if town) or confirming that someone is 100% mafia (if mafia) are both pretty solid gains. And the "confirming someone you'd probably lynch anyway is mafia isn't that good" is wrong in that mafia flip that around a lot and scum read players early on endgame relatively often.
Regfan wrote:Alternatively you could have someone that's a null read or a question mark for the entire room be the person to 'leave the game', that way if they're scum you're catching them and lynching them when otherwise you may not. And if they're town they're leaving the game and you can just lynch your scum read knowing they're now an increased chance of being scum.

Almost anything where you have a fairly "locked in" plan going into the night that provides information is better then what they're doing.
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Fri Aug 18, 2017 3:39 am

Post by callforjudgement »

I'm not sure if it's outright breaking, but it does have an effect on the EV (which is more of an effect than I originally realised). I'm too tired to calculate EVs right now, but I'll take a look at it when I'm less tired. Note that despite aiding the EV, it hurts town with scumhunting; if town correctly identify scum and ask them to sacrifice (with no townies sacrificing), scum get a regular nightkill, meaning that they can take out a good scumhunter or townish-looking player.

It's possible that this swings the setup sufficiently townsided that even 6:5 is too small as numbers go. It should be balanced at some size, though.
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Sun Aug 20, 2017 4:25 am

Post by callforjudgement »

I started working on the EV for the above breaking strategy, but in the meantime, found a better breaking strategy (which I think outright gives town the win). It works like this: you start off like in Regfan's strategy, each day picking one player to lynch and specifying another player to sacrifice, aiming (with this version of the strategy) specifically for scum in both cases. What differs is that if a player fails to sacrifice, confirming them as scum, you then
don't
lynch them; instead, you keep them around as confirmed scum, and look for their buddies. The reason that this is valuable is that if you ever end up facing a miss list, you can just pick the confirmed scum in order to avoid accidentally losing the game that day.

The way this ends up is town have a "pool" of confirmed scum, initially empty; each day, they pick two players from outside the pool, aiming to pick two scum. If the first choice (the lynch) is correct, they get one day closer to winning without any negative consequences. If the second choice (the sacrifice) is
also
correct (i.e. scum), they get to expand their scum pool by one member. As soon as all the remaining scum are in the scumpool, town wins. Now, whenever a townie is lynched as the first choice, the second choice is irrelevant, and the townie has the choice of either shooting for unconfirmed scum (running the risk of losing the game, but keeping the pool intact; probably the best choice early-game), or shooting a confirmed scum (shrinking the scumpool but guaranteeing survival).

We'd expect town's odds of growing the scumpool to be lower than the odds of shrinking it, which implies that the game is not completely broken. If, however, town's chance of picking two scum is less than the combined chance of the first person being town (i.e. the town are unusually good at scumhunting), the EV actually goes up from day to day rather than down, meaning that there's a level of town competence which means that they have a decent win chance no matter how large the setup is; this isn't a necessarily bad thing but is very unusual as balance properties go.
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Sun Aug 20, 2017 5:28 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

One thing that worries me is that scum don't have a huge incentive to not lynch each other early in the game; going for the miss intentionally N1 would be very ballsy (and possibly backfire), whereas just playing the townie and not trying to influence the outcome of the lynch (beyond normal fake-scumhunting) gives them a notable advantage (good townies and bad scum gone if scum gets lynched, or a potential miss with little information if a townie gets lynched). This means that they may well be rather harder to read than they would be in a more normal game.
An incomplete solution:

During the day, the mafia choose one townie to add to the "Miss List".

If a mafia member is lynched, they get a vengekill.

If a townie is lynched
or vengekilled
, they flip and are given a (randomized) list of all Mafia members plus the one townie the Mafia chose to add. They then must vengekill one player on that list.

Mafia win if a townie vengekills another townie. Town wins if all Mafia are dead.

This makes vengekilling bad townies more tempting for scum, and it makes getting lynched a bigger loss. The problem is that you lose the perpetual n+1 vs. n property, but there may be a way to make that work.
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Sun Aug 20, 2017 5:36 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

An alternative is to allow scum to add two players to the miss list on Day 1, giving scum more reason to push town right away. It's also scum-sided and swingy, so it's perhaps better suited for the 4v3 variant.
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Sun Aug 20, 2017 3:50 pm

Post by Regfan »

In post 11, callforjudgement wrote:I started working on the EV for the above breaking strategy, but in the meantime, found a better breaking strategy (which I think outright gives town the win). It works like this: you start off like in Regfan's strategy, each day picking one player to lynch and specifying another player to sacrifice, aiming (with this version of the strategy) specifically for scum in both cases. What differs is that if a player fails to sacrifice, confirming them as scum, you then don't lynch them; instead, you keep them around as confirmed scum, and look for their buddies. The reason that this is valuable is that if you ever end up facing a miss list, you can just pick the confirmed scum in order to avoid accidentally losing the game that day.
This would make it pretty ridiculously town sided, props for the strategy improvement.
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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:42 am

Post by Something_Smart »

To counter CFJ's strategy, we could give the mafia the option of just sacrificing a member of their choice on a town lynch rather than going through with the miss list. Or we could even allow the mafia to force the lynch of a mafia member.
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Thu Feb 15, 2018 3:30 pm

Post by Something_Smart »

Bump because I'm considering running this again in the near future.

Reading through all the breaking strategies, I feel like scum are going to need something extra to counter them. What I'm currently considering is giving scum the ability to prevent a townie from sacrificing once during the game. This would resolve just as if the townie had not sacrificed; if they were the only one, the scum kill goes through.

This does not negate the strategies, but it causes significantly more uncertainty. If town chooses one member to sacrifice and they do not die, the town learns nothing about them (and the scum get a free kill). If town chooses TWO members to sacrifice, and neither dies, then it confirms that one of them is scum (and if they both are town then one will die for sure)... but scum can also allow one of them to die when the other is scum, introducing WIFOM and mostly preventing town from building up a scumpool the way CFJ said.

Thoughts?
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Post Post #17 (ISO) » Mon Feb 19, 2018 9:22 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

I still think the original setup with this addition works:

3 Mafia Goons
4 Vanilla Townies

On Day 1, the mafia choose two townies to add to the "Miss List". On later Days, the mafia choose only one townie.


If a mafia member is lynched, they get a vengekill.

If a townie is lynched, they flip and are given a (randomized) list of all Mafia members plus the one or townies the Mafia chose to add that Day. They then must vengekill one player on that list.

Mafia win if a townie vengekills another townie. Town wins if all Mafia are dead.


Pushing a D1 lynch on a townie gives scum a 40% chance of winning, hardly a long shot. Increasing the difficulty of the first vengekill also makes the what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger effect less troubling -- the vengekilling townie earns it for the rest of his team. (Vengekills in 3v2 and below are quite difficult already.)

And the EV = 3/7 * EV3v2 + 4/7 * .6 * EV3v2 = 41%.
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Post Post #18 (ISO) » Wed Feb 21, 2018 4:03 pm

Post by Something_Smart »

I don't really want to fix the balance by just making it more likely for the game to end on D1 though... I don't think that would make it a more enjoyable setup, as it changes pretty much nothing assuming the game lasts past D1. (Not to mention that the D1 miss list would be everybody except for one person, so if there's one universal townread then it gives next to no information.)
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Post Post #19 (ISO) » Thu Feb 22, 2018 12:10 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

In post 18, Something_Smart wrote:I don't think that would make it a more enjoyable setup, as it changes pretty much nothing assuming the game lasts past D1.
Your other points are fair, but this doesn't seem true to me. See:
In post 1, callforjudgement wrote:One thing that worries me is that scum don't have a huge incentive to not lynch each other early in the game; going for the miss intentionally N1 would be very ballsy (and possibly backfire), whereas just playing the townie and not trying to influence the outcome of the lynch (beyond normal fake-scumhunting) gives them a notable advantage (good townies and bad scum gone if scum gets lynched, or a potential miss with little information if a townie gets lynched).
Since scum now have a large incentive to push a D1 town lynch, there will be strong associative tells from the get-go. There may be better ways to establish this.
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Post Post #20 (ISO) » Thu Feb 22, 2018 12:18 am

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

For example, deny town their last vengekill if a townie is lynched on Day 1:

3 Mafia Goons
4 Townies

During the day, the mafia choose one townie to add to the "Miss List".

If a mafia member is lynched, they get a vengekill.

If a townie is lynched, they flip and are given a (randomized) list of all Mafia members plus the one townie the Mafia chose to add. They then must vengekill one player on that list.

Mafia win if a townie vengekills another townie,
or if a townie is lynched on both Day 1 and Day 3
. Town wins if all Mafia are dead.
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Post Post #21 (ISO) » Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:39 am

Post by Something_Smart »

That feels really kludgy... like I'd prefer to not mess with the core concept of the game as much as I can.

Also, after what cfj said I don't think we should be giving scum motivation to get lynched (in that, it seems like scum very much have motivation to get lynched D2).
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Post Post #22 (ISO) » Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:29 pm

Post by Bicephalous Bob »

If town gets lynched on d2, there's a 33% chance of town-on-town violence. I think cfj was talking about early days in larger games, where the odds are neglectable.
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Post Post #23 (ISO) » Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:43 am

Post by Mathdino »

Itching to run an experimental mini open.

Do you guys think this would even function as 7:6?
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