Question about Balance

[Gamma Emerald]

Is the same-day-win method used for balancing here often, or is win rate the primary factor?

[Something_Smart]

What do you mean by same-day-win method?

[Gamma Emerald]

Balancing by ensuring Mafia and town can acheive perfect wins on the same day

[Alchemist21]

I don't think anyone really balances it so that Mafia and Town could get a perfect win in the same amount of time. It usually takes Mafia a little longer to achieve a perfect win than it would Town.

In a 13-player game with 3 scum, a perfect Town would win on Day 3, and a perfect Mafia would win on Day 4. (assuming 1 death per Day and 1 death per Night).

[Gamma Emerald]

Thing is, with Same day win, power roles are used to balance from the start, as scum has a more likely win in mountainous same day win scenarios. I saw this on a modding tips topic on another site.

[Something_Smart]

I agree with Alchemist. Balance isn't really about how long the game should take; it's about the chances each side has to win. In fact, I doubt there are very many setups that are even balanced by that principle; if the town and scum could get a perfect win on the same day, it means that town needs to lynch X scum without lynching X town (whatever number you use for X), which is really hard without PR's, so the PR's will have a huge effect on balance, even if they don't affect the number of days to a win. (For instance, 2 goons versus 5 townies is super scumsided, even though it is balanced by the same-day-win principle. However, 2 goons versus a 1 doctor, 1 cop and 3 townies is very townsided, despite also meeting the same-day-win principle.)

I say win chances because win

rate

is impossible to calculate for closed setups (and even for open setups, you want to be sure that it's reasonably balanced

before

you run it). So the things I'd focus on in determining if a setup is balanced are:

• How many townies can be confirmed (either by cops or neapolitans, or because their role is provable like Mason, Vigilante or Innocent Child)
  
• How likely guilty results are (and this varies depending on what investigative roles you use; Cops and Watchers get more guilties than Trackers, and Roleblockers can get suspicious results but not definite guilties)
  
• Whether town even has enough power- there's no easy rule of thumb for calculating how much power is enough, but you just have to keep in mind that win rates for mountainous games are disastrously low for town.

Did that answer your question?

[mykonian]

Don't forget the phase the moon is in.

[Antihero]

Balancing by ensuring Mafia and town can acheive perfect wins on the same day

that's not really an indicator of balance

that's more an indicator of what people call "swing"

[Firebringer]

Honestly all setups need to give town more chances to fuck up and still win so I don't think same day win actually is balanced.

[Gamma Emerald]

Balancing by ensuring Mafia and town can acheive perfect wins on the same day

that's not really an indicator of balance

that's more an indicator of what people call "swing"

This is the best answer yet.

[callforjudgement]

However, 2 goons versus a 1 doctor, 1 cop and 3 townies is very townsided, despite also meeting the same-day-win principle.)

I might need to call this one out. The setup in question is broken, but it's approximately win-rate balanced if both sides play to optimal strategy. (Note that this can require spontaneous fakeclaiming from the scum on occasion, something that they're unlikely to think of unless they're very familiar with the setup, given how strongly a spontaneous fakeclaim is against site meta.)

[callforjudgement]

Oh, and here's an obvious example of why same-day-win doesn't work:

Imagine a setup with 2 Mafia Goons, 11 Vanilla Townies.

Town can win this on D2, if they're sufficiently good at lynching.
Scum's earliest win is on D5, after five mislynches and four nightkills bring the setup down to 2:2.
Same-day-win would assess the setup as highly townsided. However, mathematically speaking town's winrate is predicted as somewhat less than 50:50, and when the setup's been run in practice on this site, town has

never

won it.
The main reason here is that with so many more townies than scum, the scum are very hard to find early because they're in such a large lynchpool; and by the later days, when scum are easier to find, all the competent townies will have been nightkilled.

[Something_Smart]

However, 2 goons versus a 1 doctor, 1 cop and 3 townies is very townsided, despite also meeting the same-day-win principle.)

I might need to call this one out. The setup in question is broken, but it's approximately win-rate balanced if both sides play to optimal strategy. (Note that this can require spontaneous fakeclaiming from the scum on occasion, something that they're unlikely to think of unless they're very familiar with the setup, given how strongly a spontaneous fakeclaim is against site meta.)

Touché.

But of course the point still stands; I could design a 7p setup that is townsided, yet still allows the scum to win in a minimum of 2 days. (For instance, if I made the cop an IC cop and the doctor 1-shot bulletproof. That should be sufficiently townsided- in fact I think town always wins with optimal play.)

[BrainpanSonata]

Usually if a team gets a win with no casualties, something about the setup is seriously broken.

[Zachrulez]

Actually using the outcome of a game to judge balance is a pretty terrible way to judge balance.

[Untrod Tripod]

preventing snowballing is an often-underlooked side of balance

additionally, something that I usually do in my games is making sure that both town and scum have hard counters to each other's abilities.

[mykonian]

oh for gods sake please don't say that

[Untrod Tripod]

why?

[mykonian]

because you get setups like

mafia 1 shot strongman
mafia ninja
mafia RB

vs

Doc
Tracker
neapolitan
7vt's.

Which is a mile away from a balanced state. It's really common newbie mod error to give scum too much power to "keep it fair", by giving them options to deal with everything the town have. At some point in your setup you have to deal with the fact that scum have a large head start, and giving powers to either side at the same rate isn't going to do that for you, and in a mini you'll run out of design space to make up for it really quickly.

[Untrod Tripod]

ehhhhhhhhhhhh okay it's not a catch-all rule, but in large games it can help to expose design flaws and breaking points that allow one team to win via night actions

plus it's not like a 1:1 thing

[hitogoroshi]

I like to thinking of the counterability as sort of a points system. This isn't an exact framework but something like:

Does this unambigiously catch scum when you "succeed", or just help inform the picture?
What's the minimum value of the role, ie the value you get aiming it incorrectly?
Will it always catch all scum, or is it situational (e.g tracker doesn't catch passive scum)
Is the ability always on/can be used each night, or is it limited?

A role that's strong in all 4 needs a counter, and a role strong in 3 probably needs at least a soft counter. For roles only strong in 1 or 2, I don't worry so much about countering.

For example, I had a role in Abarat 2 mafia who would target players, and if he targeted one specific member of the scumteam, that member would be killed. It had no counters and in fact I explicitly informed the role his kill couldn't be blocked, doc'd, etc - because it only works on that one specific character, and you don't gain any info on a miss except "if they're scum, they're not that scum".

[Untrod Tripod]

^ this is a much smarter way of saying what I was thinking

[Antihero]

It's really common newbie mod error to give scum too much power to "keep it fair", by giving them options to deal with everything the town have.

game designers forget that the factional kill itself IS a counter

and newbies aren't the only ones who do that beeteedubs

[callforjudgement]

Right. Giving counters to power roles is much more important in a Nightless, where scum can't counter with the kill.

In a game with a normal phase sequence (say Day Start), the scum nightkill has two main uses: killing power roles, and killing strong/accurate town players. There's tension here which means that the scum can't always do what they want with it.
If you give power roles a counter, then the scum can use the counter on the power roles, saving the nightkill for killing players who are doing well in the dayplay. As a result, town end up having to solve the setup mostly through nightplay (as all their best dayplayers are being killed), but the counters simultaneously mean that their nightplay isn't very good.

[GreyICE]

Balance is more an idea of everyone having their fair shot. And yeah, the mafia kill is a STRONG counter to any town role. So is dayplay. A cop is a super strong role, but it can always be used really poorly. I like to think my last normal was balanced (at least it got past all three reviewers with nary a peep) and the scum had a hard counter to only one town role, and it was a painful one to use (I gave them an enabler, and they had to bus him to turn off the town role.).

How I like to think of it is this. An 11:2 is mathematically fairly balanced (yes, the town has lost a lot, but first those were mostly 10:2s, which have a horrid town win rate (worse than 9:2s believe it or not) and second experienced players avoid those sorts of games like the scourge, so you get to see what happens when new players get demoralized in a game where most everyone is town) so to get to 11:2 from 10:3 your setup needs to get at least one scum lynched and give the town at least one additional lynch, through either information or two successful uses of a protective/killing role. So one scum flat dying to "PR BS" is perfectly acceptable, so is scum failing to kill two nights. And you have to consider what your roles will actually do, not what they could do. A doctor could save every night kill, but realistically will probably save at most one.

I always angle for that "one extra lynch plus enough information to nail 1 scum" dynamic in my balance for 10:3 setups. At least assuming reasonably competent use of roles.