Cult Balance Thread

[Scarab]

Cults can be balanced without resorting to crazy things like 3-shot recruit resistance (3-shot resistance is functionally equivalent to "unrecruitable" anyway....there's no reason to waste 4 nights recruiting one player). You just need the right numbers and roles, like with any other mechanic. The more important things to worry about are what Eden touched on (How do you not make it feel bad for players to play to their win conditions?) and town motivation/interest later in the game when the culting mechanic has potentially made all of their early reads worthless.

[Scarab]

well at least i was right about it being a viable modification

Hey, Psyche. Here's a fun question.

Can you prove that given that all players are faithfully playing to their current win con and that all lynches/recruits are random, a basic cult game, which is defined as day-start game with N players (1 Cult Leader, N-1 VTs, N is a positive integer greater than 2), will never have higher than 33.33% for the expected win rate for town?

I'm not Psyche, BUT

Spoiler: Answer

That's not true!

Let n=3k, for some positive integer k. Since all lynches are assumed random, there's a 1/3 chance the cult recruiter will be among the first k players lynched. Prior to this lynch, there will have been at least 2k+1 players alive and at most k cultists (including the cult recruiter), giving the town the win. If it's possible for town to win while not lynching the cult recruiter in the first k days, town will win more than 1/3 of the time. This requires 2 cult out of 2k players to not be a cult win (i.e. town lynches cult recruit every day but day 1), which first occurs for k=3. Therefore, town wins more than 1/3 of the time for any number of players that is a multiple of 3 and at least 9. I don't know if town wins more than 1/3 for any other number of players (and I didn't brute-force check any to try to find out), but it definitely works for those.