Balancing games with cult faction....?
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Sunlit Diamond Mafia Scum
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Balancing games with cult faction....?
Hola. *waves*
I've modded simple games before, but I'm on to something more complicated with some friends and I was wondering: in an 18-22 person game, is there any feasible way to have a balanced game if there is a cult involved?
For context, the game I'm building is Doctor Who themed and I want to re-flavor the cultists as cybermen....but not if it's going to ohgodbreakeverything as the wiki page suggests it will.- Lycanfire
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Lycanfire Mafia Scum
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I played on a site that considered cults as normal. They always won except in cases they lost their leader early.
I modded a game with a cult and reviewed other games with them as well. Site meta dictated PRs added purely to eliminate cult. For instance in my game, I gave the SK a two-shot lightning rodifier that had the highest priority in the game. This guaranteed the cult would be revealed, but despite that they managed to endgame the SK.
I co-modded an explicitly bastard game (which would be bastard+ here) where I suggested the cult be a self aligned player (they were an anarchist/musician character) and made their convertees survivors so the 'cult' would not outright win. This was well received... and the cult, for once, did not win.
Merging cult and mafia is another idea, but cults are always swingy.
Basically:
-run a giant game
-force the cult out
-give the town means to contain the cult
-consider alternatives
Cults will never be balanced. All you can hope is to deliver an enjoyable game. For this purpose cults are more trouble than they are worth.- Alisae
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Nero Cain Survivor
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just use a non-recruiting cult. It functions the same as a mafia team but allows you to use cult flavor.Of all tyrannies,a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
edited c.s. lewis quote b/c limit- Randomnamechange
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Randomnamechange Jack of All Trades
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viewtopic.php?f=23&t=70506
this game had a pretty balanced cult. the trick is to gate their ability to recruit in some way.vonflare (21:40)
you suck randomidget- callforjudgement
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The major balance problem with cults is that they recruit faster than you can lynch them. Typically, therefore, the only way to win is to lynch the leader, but that becomes harder as the game goes on because the other cultists clearly won't let you get away with that if they can help it. (Note that lynching acultist, other than the leader, doesn't really help town at all when a standard cult is in use; their only real advantage is from the information they gain from the flip.)
In order to fix this, therefore, you need to slow down the rate at which the cult recruits so that the town can keep pace with the cult. Another bonus is that if you do this, you can sometimes make it so that there isn't a single vulnerable cult leader, thus making things a lot less swingy.
As an idea of the sort of things you should be looking at, here's a suggestion (aimed at 18-22 player games like the one you suggest): make a cult which can't recruit if it recruited a member the previous night, and can't recruit if a cultist died that night or the previous night, but which doesn't have a specific leader (i.e. any member can recruit); and also ensure that the playerlist as a whole knows about the presence of the cult and the rules governing it. Town can thus beat a cult of any size by accurately lynching it once every two nights.
As a side note, games including a cult typically shouldn't have other major anti-town factions (as this causes very large kingmaker problems as each faction needs to choose which opposing faction it wants to work on eliminating first), but if you do include other anti-town players (either factions or self-aligned players like Serial Killers), they should be completely immune to recruitment, otherwise Bad Things tend to happen to your setup's balance.scum· scam · seam · team · term · tern · torn ·town- Mulch
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Gamma Emerald AnySurvivor
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Thank you for the great advice!
I ended up dropping the cult element because I decided that no matter how I implemented it, it would go sideways in a no-fun-for-anyone kind of way, given the meta where it will be hosted. The game I came up with is chaos personified even without it, so...we'll see how it goes... <_<- mhsmith0
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See: LordJVK's game on MUIn post 7, Gamma Emerald wrote:Don't let a groupscum get recruited or things go sooooo badShowhttp://wiki.mafiascum.net/index.php?title=Mhsmith0
Conq: you, sir, are great at being town.
BATMAN: Only jugg was the only one we didn’t scum read at least not me
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Life is simply unfair, don't you think? - mhsmith0
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