Thirteen Cops

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Thirteen Cops

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:37 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

10 Townies / Honest Cops
3 Mafia / Dirty Cops

Cops are of varying sanity

Sane cops - all results are correct
Insane cops - all results are reversed
Naive cops - all results are innocent/town/etc
Paranoid cops - all results are guilty/mafia/scum/wolf/etc
Random cops - all results are random

4 random cops
2 sane cops
2 insane cops
2 naive cops
2 paranoid cops
1 additional cop, randed among the five roles

Scum are assigned 1 random cop, 1 sane or insane cop, 1 naive or paranoid cop, town gets the remainder. No player is told the type of cop they are (and flips do not show the flavor either), just that they are a cop, and must determine their cop flavor through investigations and lynches.

Lynches and night kills are mandatory; no lynching in particular gives town too much of a mechanical edge potentially.
You also can't check yourself, and you can't check anyone who's already died (someone who dies the same night as your check, though, is still fine).
Last edited by mhsmith0 on Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Tue Mar 20, 2018 8:11 am

Post by mith »

Way too much randomness to get anything meaningful, I suspect. There's a very fine between completely solved and too random in all-Cop games.

To justify this type of setup, I think you would need to prove both that there is no breaking strategy which guarantees EV>1/2, and that there is enough information to be meaningful at endgame.
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:19 am

Post by mhsmith0 »

FWIW I'd just played something similar to this on a different site (9/3, mandated lynch and kill, and town got 2 of every signle type, and then dropped one at random).

The key points to it IMO:

1) It's quite swingy. Scum have a lot of potential paths to a sweep, but every scum lynch increases the number of town's investigations and the claims that scum MUST commit to... and then create more chances for mechanics to narrow down the POE. If there's ever just one wolf left, there's very reasonable odds town has a mechanical lock win. Even before then, you can start to narrow down possible scum teams based on who's claiming what; if scum are spreading out their fake claims, well, you aren't going to have a three wolf team where all three wolves are claiming double town checks, for instance.

2) There's enormous noise in the mechanics, and town needs to have a controlled plan to maximize the amount of useful information and minimze the amount of BS. The generic strategy would be to mass target one player N1, then mass target a different player N2. Go 0/4 in targeting wolves with the first two lynches and investigations? You're probably going to lose. Lynch a wolf and mass check a wolf? You're probably going to win. Something in between? Well, that's where it gets more interesting...

3) Scum probably need to figure out their own mechanical strategy early on, which likely includes faking a guilty on someone and winning the head to head in LYLO. How easy or hard that is... well, that's for players to determine :)
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:23 am

Post by Mulch »

/pre in
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Sat Mar 24, 2018 3:29 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

What would you say to giving all cops a n0 result on a town or scum slot?
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Sat Mar 24, 2018 3:41 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

It's been run in a somewhat modified way giving n0 checks but where the setup was 9/3 (i.e. one fewer mislynch to give). At 10/3, getting that extra mislynch is relatively valuable, and then it's really a matter of sifting through the mass of noisy results and trying to get at nuggets of useful information.

I'm not 100% certain, but I THINK that if you go 10/3 where everyone gets a n0 check (and let's say everyone gets randed targets too), the mass of information becomes too much for the scum team to have a real shot of overcoming after any kind of early game scum lynch (partially because now every cop gets an extra free check, and partially because now there aren't ANY town cops who die without getting off a peek). Like, in particular I'd say that if town lynches scum day 1 in a game where everyone gets an n0 check, it becomes semi-realistic that town can come up with an outright breaking plan (or something very very close).

It's the sort of tweak I might think about if results become overly wolfsided, but I'd be pretty nervous about giving town THAT much power on the first pass of the setup.
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Thu Apr 05, 2018 1:08 pm

Post by TesXX »

I like the idea of the sane, insane, guilty and naive cops
But not the random ones
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Thu Apr 05, 2018 1:33 pm

Post by mhsmith0 »

Without random cops, investigations become way too strong (in particular, a false result on "x is same alignment as y" then becomes an outright scum claim, which means that scum's claiming options become DRASTICALLY reduced). the only other way to balance it would be to give scum godfather/roleblocker/etc type abilities, which I think would make the game actively less fun, as well as go away from the point of the setup, which is to juggle a large pile of mechanically suggestive but not rock solid data in lieu of the more traditional type setups where town power is focused on a couple of key roles that town needs to protect and scum needs to find and kill (there's SOME of that here, but it's not like you rand cop and are like "ok I need to live a long time" and/or scum can be like "ok this guy is giving off major PR tells and it's just day 1" or the like).
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Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
Quick: There is little to no chance this slot is Power-Wolfing.
SR: I want to give him a day
Life is simply unfair, don't you think?
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:31 am

Post by mith »

I remembered another old game today; wasn't an all-Cop game. For the game in question, every player had 4 attributes (one of which was their role, the others were physical traits; there were 3 or 4 options for each). The Detectives in the game could investigate a body each night (there was a NPC N0 death, scum had to pick a killer), and would get one piece of information about the killer. Scum Detectives (I was the only one in this particular game) could plant evidence on a body instead, since they knew whodunit. It was an interesting way to introduce probabilistic evidence.

In a 3:10 with 4 traits and a N0, you'd be looking at 6 possible results for the real cops (4 real plus 2 planted by the non-killing scum), plus fake results from all scum. So not much to go on day 1. The other advantage to this type of setup as far as controlling information is that scum control who goes out each night, and could either send the same killer repeatedly until lynch (minimizing exposure for the others), or you could mix it up to confuse the results more. Might still be solvable somehow, of course. Probably more interesting in a larger setup with more scum, to mitigate the effect of the day 1 lynch determining the result.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Apr 06, 2018 2:06 pm

Post by BBmolla »

In post 8, mith wrote:I remembered another old game today; wasn't an all-Cop game. For the game in question, every player had 4 attributes (one of which was their role, the others were physical traits; there were 3 or 4 options for each). The Detectives in the game could investigate a body each night (there was a NPC N0 death, scum had to pick a killer), and would get one piece of information about the killer. Scum Detectives (I was the only one in this particular game) could plant evidence on a body instead, since they knew whodunit. It was an interesting way to introduce probabilistic evidence.
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