Cult Balance Thread

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Cult Balance Thread

Post Post #0 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 5:31 pm

Post by Stabsinthe »

I was thinking of some way to balance cults. Perhaps games with a 'cult' could incorporate a 'conversion resistance' attribute to slow down the cult's acquisition of members?

The Conversion Resistance attribute is an attribute that prevents you from being converted to the cult, as long as your Conversion Resistance is greater than 0.

Each time the Cult Leader try to convert a player, the player's conversion resistance is reduced by 1.

That means if the Cult Leader want to convert, say, a 3 C.Resistance player, he need to try 3 times. However, he could instantly convert a 0 conversion resistance player.
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Post Post #1 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 5:39 pm

Post by Eden »

the problem with cults isn't the rate at which they convert, it's that they convert at all. conversion mechanics make it impossible to commit to your wincon because your wincon changes
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Post Post #2 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 5:50 pm

Post by kunkstar7 »

Ultimately, I don't think there is any way to "balance" a cult that would make cults permissible in a Normal game. The simultaneous strengthening of the Cult and weakening of the oppositional factions makes that untenable. That and what Eden said about the bit about changing win conditions.

Now if you are building a game specifically designed to handle a Cult, this might be one way to handle it, but you're likely going to need to reveal this mechanic to all the players to make it functional. Also, you'd have to consider length of game and action rate. If a cult leader can only recruit once per night and a 3CR player existed in the game, they'd have to waste three nights out of game (which in a mini-theme can average 4-7 days total) just getting one player, let alone enough players to win. This in of itself, if not accounted for, ruins your mechanic.
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Post Post #3 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 6:39 pm

Post by 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.
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Post Post #4 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 6:50 pm

Post by reinoe »

In post 3, Scarab wrote: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.
Couldn't Cult recruitment be balanced by just giving the Cult leader X-shot?
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Post Post #5 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 6:55 pm

Post by Tierce »

In post 4, reinoe wrote:Couldn't Cult--
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nope.
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Post Post #6 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 8:27 pm

Post by Psyche »

what if a cult leader had just a couple of shots and used them all in pregame???

it would equate to a single mafioso being able to choose his buds,
but that sounds kinda interesting, no?
or am i missing something
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Post Post #7 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 8:43 pm

Post by BROseidon »

In post 6, Psyche wrote:what if a cult leader had just a couple of shots and used them all in pregame???

it would equate to a single mafioso being able to choose his buds,
but that sounds kinda interesting, no?
or am i missing something
That would be equivalent to a larger version of Offense/Defense mafia that RedCoyote ran a while back.

You'd have to have him pick before role distribution, probably.
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Post Post #8 (ISO) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 11:58 pm

Post by RichardGHP »

In post 5, Tierce wrote:
In post 4, reinoe wrote:Couldn't Cult--
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nope.
Come on, I refuse to believe that some version of cult isn't balanceable somehow.
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Post Post #9 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 12:32 am

Post by Vi »

In post 0, Stabsinthe wrote:I was thinking of some way to balance cults. Perhaps games with a 'cult' could incorporate a 'conversion resistance' attribute to slow down the cult's acquisition of members?

The Conversion Resistance attribute is an attribute that prevents you from being converted to the cult, as long as your Conversion Resistance is greater than 0.

Each time the Cult Leader try to convert a player, the player's conversion resistance is reduced by 1.

That means if the Cult Leader want to convert, say, a 3 C.Resistance player, he need to try 3 times. However, he could instantly convert a 0 conversion resistance player.
If I told you you were an SK but you could arbitrarily not kill people unless you tried an unknown number of times, how would that go over? (If you made it public knowledge how Cultable someone would be, that would be more interesting and most likely completely defeat the purpose of attempting to balance the mechanic.)

The closest you're going to get is probably something like Mentor + giving players the ability to suicide rather than be recruited.
what if a cult leader had just a couple of shots and used them all in pregame???

it would equate to a single mafioso being able to choose his buds,
but that sounds kinda interesting, no?
or am i missing something
That's not really a Cult per se, and if you're not doing it in a WaCkY game like ehobano
woof
it's wickedly overpowered.

Although, again, if you told everyone at the beginning that one person could choose their scumpartners... then you get WIFOM: The Game, in which everyone tries to lynch based on who they think is best at being scum.

...meh, scum will still win.
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Post Post #10 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 10:58 am

Post by mykonian »

There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.

One is the rate of conversion. With each recruitment, town gets one townie less, scum get one more. In effect, that's at least double as effective as a nightkill. Nightkills are huge balancewise already, balancing a game where scum would get two kills is really rough. So that's one thing you are up again. The second is that cult games are boring the moment cult gets critical mass, as town are waiting for the inevitable loss. Giving an escape route a la cult leader makes the game less mafia, gives cult members a reason to get lynched, makes the game trivial. It's a poor solution, but it shows the problem. Cults get too big and don't make for close games (which are fun). I believe you can tackle the cult problem if you limit the rate as well as the maximum size of the cult.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't make it a hidden cult.
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Post Post #11 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 1:36 pm

Post by LlamaFluff »

In post 6, Psyche wrote:what if a cult leader had just a couple of shots and used them all in pregame???
Been done
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Post Post #12 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 1:38 pm

Post by Psyche »

well at least i was right about it being a viable modification
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Post Post #13 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 2:08 pm

Post by Eden »

In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.
It's not "my alignment changes so I won't play to win," it's "my alignment changes so I
can't
play to win if I'm playing optimally." If you start off as town, being the most obviously town player makes you a priority target for conversion, just like it would for a nightkill. It's okay to be a priority target for a nightkill because your alignment doesn't change when you're nightkilled; you've still played to your objectives. When you're converted, everything you've done before has actively worked against your win condition, assuming you are playing to it from the start. And the more you try to play to your initial win condition, the more you've worked against your win condition post-conversion. And of course if you just don't do anything you won't get converted at all.

It encourages that refuge of the inexperienced,
hedging
-- "I'm gonna behave scummy enough to be a viable ML instead of being obvtown so I can live longer!" -- instead of just playing with proper town fundamentals. It teaches placing a premium on survival instead of scumhunting so that you can have a chance to win, which ruins the entire point of the town/mafia dynamic in the first place.
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Post Post #14 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:09 pm

Post by FakeGod »

In post 12, Psyche wrote: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?
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Post Post #15 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:20 pm

Post by Psyche »

i haven't taken any proofbased courses yet :(
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Post Post #16 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:47 pm

Post by FakeGod »

awww what

fine
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Post Post #17 (ISO) » Fri Jun 20, 2014 9:54 pm

Post by Scarab »

In post 14, FakeGod wrote:
In post 12, Psyche wrote: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.
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Post Post #18 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 3:24 am

Post by FakeGod »

Oops, you're right. I fucked up the maths
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Post Post #19 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 6:01 am

Post by Who »

In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.

One is the rate of conversion. With each recruitment, town gets one townie less, scum get one more. In effect, that's at least double as effective as a nightkill. Nightkills are huge balancewise already, balancing a game where scum would get two kills is really rough. So that's one thing you are up again. The second is that cult games are boring the moment cult gets critical mass, as town are waiting for the inevitable loss. Giving an escape route a la cult leader makes the game less mafia, gives cult members a reason to get lynched, makes the game trivial.
That could easily be fixed by making the entire cult lovers with each other. If the town lynches any, they win.
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Post Post #20 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 6:32 am

Post by Eden »

In post 19, Who wrote:
In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.

One is the rate of conversion. With each recruitment, town gets one townie less, scum get one more. In effect, that's at least double as effective as a nightkill. Nightkills are huge balancewise already, balancing a game where scum would get two kills is really rough. So that's one thing you are up again. The second is that cult games are boring the moment cult gets critical mass, as town are waiting for the inevitable loss. Giving an escape route a la cult leader makes the game less mafia, gives cult members a reason to get lynched, makes the game trivial.
That could easily be fixed by making the entire cult lovers with each other. If the town lynches any, they win.
well that's ultra-townsided if i've ever seen it

no matter how poorly town plays at any point prior to LYLO, if they're ~20% better than random lynching at LYLO they win
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Post Post #21 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 6:58 am

Post by Prof Fridays »

I remember being apart of a mafia game with a cult in it. It happened to be a Pirates of the Caribbean mafia, and I was Davy Jones, the Cult Recruiter. It was a massive game. The mafia consisted of the East India Trading Company (the British), and if I tried to recruit them at all, I died (seeing as they had my heart!). My win con was to recruit Jack Sparrow (I can't remember if having a cult majority ended in a win for me or not), who was a Self-Bus Driver (so, not easy). It was a *really* fun game, and probably one of my best as a player - I ended up claiming Davy Jones, Cult Recruiter, and convinced the town that they could just win with me, and I'd recruit them all and lynch off the British, but by that time Jack Sparrow had revealed himself, and we were able to get him to not use his self-bus drive, so I recruited him for the win, endgamed my whole faction and town got plowed by the mafia. Haha.

Anywho, while we did win as cult, it seems to me it wasn't an easy game by any means. I wonder if something like the Davy-Jack mechanic could work, in that you need to recruit a particular role name (not username). Perhaps that role could have a redirecting mechanic as a method of protection from the Recruiter, like Jack did.
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Post Post #22 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 8:00 am

Post by Who »

In post 20, Eden wrote:
In post 19, Who wrote:
In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.

One is the rate of conversion. With each recruitment, town gets one townie less, scum get one more. In effect, that's at least double as effective as a nightkill. Nightkills are huge balancewise already, balancing a game where scum would get two kills is really rough. So that's one thing you are up again. The second is that cult games are boring the moment cult gets critical mass, as town are waiting for the inevitable loss. Giving an escape route a la cult leader makes the game less mafia, gives cult members a reason to get lynched, makes the game trivial.
That could easily be fixed by making the entire cult lovers with each other. If the town lynches any, they win.
well that's ultra-townsided if i've ever seen it

no matter how poorly town plays at any point prior to LYLO, if they're ~20% better than random lynching at LYLO they win
How so?

Chances of winning at LYLO are 1/4, 2/6, or 3/8 depending on how large the game is and how the cult plays. Furthermore, the town don't know when it's LYLO, since the cult might not recruit every night.
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Post Post #23 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 10:02 am

Post by mykonian »

In post 19, Who wrote:
In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.

One is the rate of conversion. With each recruitment, town gets one townie less, scum get one more. In effect, that's at least double as effective as a nightkill. Nightkills are huge balancewise already, balancing a game where scum would get two kills is really rough. So that's one thing you are up again. The second is that cult games are boring the moment cult gets critical mass, as town are waiting for the inevitable loss. Giving an escape route a la cult leader makes the game less mafia, gives cult members a reason to get lynched, makes the game trivial.
That could easily be fixed by making the entire cult lovers with each other. If the town lynches any, they win.
Still a massive anticlimax.
In post 13, Eden wrote:
In post 10, mykonian wrote:There's a couple of issues beyond "my allignment changes I won't play to win because of that" which might depend on your players discipline. I don't think that's the worst.
It's not "my alignment changes so I won't play to win," it's "my alignment changes so I
can't
play to win if I'm playing optimally." If you start off as town, being the most obviously town player makes you a priority target for conversion, just like it would for a nightkill. It's okay to be a priority target for a nightkill because your alignment doesn't change when you're nightkilled; you've still played to your objectives. When you're converted, everything you've done before has actively worked against your win condition, assuming you are playing to it from the start. And the more you try to play to your initial win condition, the more you've worked against your win condition post-conversion. And of course if you just don't do anything you won't get converted at all.

It encourages that refuge of the inexperienced,
hedging
-- "I'm gonna behave scummy enough to be a viable ML instead of being obvtown so I can live longer!" -- instead of just playing with proper town fundamentals. It teaches placing a premium on survival instead of scumhunting so that you can have a chance to win, which ruins the entire point of the town/mafia dynamic in the first place.
Bingo, that's about discipline.
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Post Post #24 (ISO) » Sat Jun 21, 2014 12:03 pm

Post by reinoe »

What does everyone else think of the X-SHOT idea for cults? Is it really as bad as Tierce made it out to be?
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