[SETUP] No Limits Mafia

[mastina]

Probably scumsided, but as a starting point:

-10:3 town:mafia
-Town has 2 macho doctors; mafia are all goons
-Game features a mechanic where the town can lynch as many times as they want during the day (with no game deadline; they have to vote to end the day)...but the role/alignment of the lynched players will not be revealed until the end of the day.
-Game features a mechanic where the mafia can kill X^X players per night, where X = number of mafia alive. If all mafia survive D1, autowin (as that's 3^3 nightkills); if two mafia survive D1, that's 2^2 = 4 nightkills; if one mafiate survives D1, it's 1 nightkill; if none survive, obviously, town wins.

Game Mechanics, formalized

• This setup contains
  8
  Vanilla Townies
  ,
  2
  Macho

  Doctors
  , and
  3
  Mafia Goons
  .
  
• There is no day deadline. In order to end the day, players must VOTE: End Day. Day is ended when half the living players, rounded down, vote to end the day.
  
• There is no limit to the number of players who may be lynched in a day. However, each lynch requires half the living players, rounded up, in order to obtain.
  
• After each lynch, votes are reset.
  
• The role and alignment of a lynched player will not be revealed until the end of the day.
  
• During the night, the mafia may kill X
  ^X
  players, where X = #mafiates alive. (E.g. 3
  ^3
  = 27 players; 2
  ^2
  = 4 players; 1
  ^1
  = 1 player.)
  
• The mafia will automatically win when they comprise 50% of the living players, or if all three mafia survive D1.

Sample Role PMs

Mafia Goon

Hello and welcome to No Limits Mafia,

Playername

.
You are a

Mafia Goon

.

Your partners,

PlayerX

and

PlayerY

, are also Goons.
You may talk in this private topic at any time.

During the night, your faction may target X

^X

players, where X = #mafiates alive. You will attempt to nightkill all of them.

You win if

the

Mafia

comprise 50% of the living, or when nothing can prevent this.
Please confirm your role via PM.
The game thread can be found here.

Good luck, and have fun!

Town Macho Doctor

Hello and welcome to No Limits Mafia,

Playername

.
You are a

Town

Macho

Doctor

.
During the night, you may target a player. You will attempt to protect that player.

You win when all

Mafia

are eliminated, and at least one member of

the

town

still lives.
Please confirm your role via PM.
The game thread can be found here.

Good luck, and have fun!

Vanilla Townie

Hello and welcome to No Limits Mafia,

Playername

.
You are a

Vanilla Townie

.
You have no powers other than your voice and vote.

You win when all

Mafia

are eliminated, and at least one member of

the

town

still lives.
Please confirm your role via PM.
The game thread can be found here.

Good luck, and have fun!

[Awoo]

That's a lot of mafia kills.
Or you just put your speed shoes on and don't let the game go to night phase and it becomes 10-3 nightless with two named townies. The named townies claim and you never lynch them.

10-3 nightless is ~ 54% EV already, 2 named townies turns the game into nightless white flag, since mafia autolose if there is only one left alive. So the EV for that is > 54%.

If one of the mafia CC's doctor then you just kill all 3 of them since you have no flips, and enter into 8-2 nightless, you get exactly 60% EV.

... though that would be assuming the players are able to co-ordinate anything in time. This might be a game where fast and dirty random lynching is much, MUCH better for town then actually trying to play the game. Reminds me of polygamist, a setup where random lynching is the best strategy for town. People didn't really like that aspect of it iirc.

[mith]

It's way worse than that if scum don't counter. 3:8:2 Nightless with ICs has an EV of 13/15 (~87%). ICs are brutal for Mafia in Nightless. For no reveal, you just have the ICs pick the lynch each time, lynch everyone, and as long as they don't pick the last two or three of the last four as Mafia, town wins.

For the CC case, if it is truly Nightless (rather than the OP setup) then you lynch one at a time until you have lynched the fakes. This means you are either in 2:8 Nightless (60%), 2:8:1 Nightless with IC (EV = 7/9, ~78%), or 2:8:2 Nightless with ICs (EV = 14/15, ~93%) with equal probability, for a total EV of ~84% (113/135).

Two fake claims would be 1/2 1:8 Nightless (7/9), 1/3 1:8:1 Nightless (8/9), and 1/6 1:8:2 Nightless (1), for a total EV of 23/27, ~85%, so 1 fake claim is best.

Basically, don't used named townies in Nightless unless you are very careful about it. (It's interesting though that the EVs are so close for the three Mafia claim strategies. 117/135, 113/135, 115/135)

[mith]

For the actual setup with 1 fake claim, it goes to 2:8 after lynches and then 2:4 after kills, EV of 33%. (No fakes has the same problem as Nightless; two fakes is obviously not better than 1, since you're lynching all the claims either way.)

I suspect town's actual best strategy is just to ignore the setup entirely and lynch people until they either lose or get down to two+ town players and win. EV would be the same as 3:10 Nightless, EV = 7/13 (~54%, as Awoo says). Going to night is strictly bad for town, and you can't flush out the fake claims without doing so.

[Awoo]

what do you mean by that mith? You don't need to go to night if there are counterclaims, you can just kill them all!

3:10 with 2 IC's is better then 2:8 nightless which is in turn better then 3:10 nightless (~87% > 60% > ~54%), so get your doctors to claim which brings town winrate up from ~54% to ~84%, but mafia can bring it back down to 60% by putting in a CC and then going to 2-8 nightless.

[mith]

What I'm saying is that if it is truly Nightless (Mafia get no kills), then there is no punishment for town stopping their lynch fest and taking them one at a time. That way, you may hit the fake claim D1 without taking out the two real docs.

But I now understand you're saying that the OP setup is still in play, you're just ignoring it by lynching all the claims (if there are fakes), making it Nightless with no flips. So yes, 60%, and ignore my comment about 33% above.

[mith]

Incidentally, if it's 5:8:2 instead of 3:8:2, and there is one fake claim, it is better to pick one of the claims and assume it's an IC. There is a 2/3 chance of being right, making the game 4:8:1 (5/9) for a 10/27 chance overall, vs. 1/3 for 4:8 Nightless.

(It may be slightly better still to pick one of the non-claims to be assumed IC - if you are able to lynch the other 11 without losing, you're down to 1:2:1 (2/3) for a 4/9 overall. But it's possible that the odds of losing before you get to that point are enough the other way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if either way results in the same 10/27.)

At this point we're basically talking about a Nightless Neighborhood setup (with two neighborhoods of [M-1]:[T-2] and 1:2).

[Korina]

See, my question on this is what's stopping town (or mafia) from saying "Let's lynch everyone who we feel is scummy till we get to 4 people, end the day and hope that we killed all the mafia or if not, we have at least one mafia left so we can go into a 3p lylo"?

[Korina]

And also, something I was thinking of was:
What's preventing a circular reasoning lynch where everyone posts reads, the player with the weakest reads gets hung, then everyone theorizes what they were, and reformulate reads, and keep going until 4 players are left?

For example:
Everyone posts reads, and mith has the weakest reads compared to everyone else, and is most likely to be scum.
We hang him.
We all theorize what mith could've been, and formulate reads based on what we think he was, (scum), and then whoever has the weakest reads next, (lets say myself), gets hung.
So we hang me.
And this keeps repeating until 4 players are left?

[mith]

See, my question on this is what's stopping town (or mafia) from saying "Let's lynch everyone who we feel is scummy till we get to 4 people, end the day and hope that we killed all the mafia or if not, we have at least one mafia left so we can go into a 3p lylo"?

Let's say you aim to go down to 4 players and stop. There are three possibilities:

a. You've lynched all the Mafia - yay, you win
b. You've lynched all but one of the Mafia
c. There are still two or three Mafia - boo, you lose

Now let's say you actually made it to 4 players and haven't won or lost yet (so you know you're in case b.). If you now stop and let the Mafia kill, you have 3p lylo as you said, EV is 1/3. However, if you just keep going, you get two chances to lynch the remaining scum, EV is 1/2.

So it's better to just keep lynching and never let this game go to night, as Awoo suggested (overall EV is 60%).

[Korina]

Part of my problem with that is that, it’s not really fun.
All it’ll boil down to is random/semi-random lynching at the end of the day, which, that’s not really fun.

It’s like rolling dice over and over; sure you’ll eventually get lucky and get something good, but its not really fun.

[Korina]

My major problem with this is that there will be a point where lynching will just devolve into random lynching, and that’s not very fun.

Eventually scum will start acting really townie or all scum will be hung and the hanging will keep going on, based on the assumption there’s at least one scum still alive.

[Korina]

I’m also assuming that hanging would continue since town has no way of knowing how many scum are left until day ends.
Which means that if the strategy is to go down to 2 people, the game will always have some random lynching point.

[mith]

That is kinda the point: If the best strategy for town is to ignore most of the mechanics and treat the game like non-flip nightless, it's not a good setup.

[Korina]

Yea, if there was a way to prevent this sorta "we just hang everyone" idea, it may have been an actually cool idea.

My only problem is that the "let's just cirlcle-hang" strategy

is

the best idea.
If that wasn't a problem, I'd actually be willing to run / play it.

[mastina]

Throwing out an idea to limit that strategy: what if the town was only allowed a maximum of [number of scum alive] * 2 lynches per day? (This number could be tweaked, e.g. number of scum alive x1.5, rounded either up or down--whichever fits the setup better--to be 4/5 with three scum, 3 with two scum, and 1/2 with one scum, but I'm throwing out *2 as a starting point.)

So with three scum alive, six lynches; two scum alive, four lynches; one scum alive, two lynches?

[Irrelephant11]

well you'd have to change the name

[mith]

Yeah, it'd just be a different type of game. With 3:10, 6 lynches gets you down to 3:4 (scum win after NK), 2:5, 1:6 (1:5 after NK), or 0:7 (town win); if you keep the NK mechanic from OP, 2:5 is also an immediate scum win. There may be some cases here where it's better for town to not use the maximum available lynches, but otherwise it's just a somewhere-between-Vanilla-and-Nightless setup.