[SETUP] The One Day Scum Hunt

[mith]

I like the idea, but needing such a high ratio of town votes for a hammer may make things impractical. Wouldn't the idea work with 8 to lynch and each player having two totally distinct votes (a "Lynch A" and "Lynch B")? Players could still double up, but if there is a clear leader they could then choose to all move their Lynch B votes to someone else. (Add the condition that a hammer consists of A and B reaching 8 votes simultaneously on two different players, to prevent scum from pushing a B lynch on the same town player once A hit 8.) This would also fix the potential issue of *three* players hitting 5.5 at the same time (A is on 5.5, B and C are on 5, someone switches from D/E to B/C).

(And FWIW, it's more similar to The Bus Stop 2 - town wins if one of the first two lynches is scum - than Red Flag. )

[mith]

I tried to make a Doublevoter version work (i.e. equivalent to Doublet Voters but with the numbers doubled and without the ability to contribute twice to the lynch of the same player) but it'd require 11 to lynch to prevent a hammer contradiction. I guess you could just reduce the lynch threshold while not worrying about the "three wagons can viably hit 8 at the same time" problem. It's possible in your version of the setup to have four players lynching player X with vote A and player Y with vote B, four players lynching player Y with vote A and player Z with vote B, and four players lynching player Z with vote A and player X with vote B, meaning that three players are in a hammered state simultaneously. That's normally undesirable, although you can make it work.

I think you're misunderstanding my proposal. When I say A and B lynches, these are totally distinct. You don't add the votes on A with the votes on B to reach 8. At most one player can hit 8 votes on A, and one player on B, and as soon as there are two different players hammered simultaneously they are both lynched and the game ends.

The idea is that a coalition of 8 townies can force a lynch, and both lynches can be truly controlled by the town, rather than either needing all 11 townies voting together or else relying on the first target's vote to help lynch the second target (which is fine if you are lynching scum, but not so fine if you are lynching town - might as well make it a normal lynch plus a vengekill if it hits town).

Three 5½-votes at the same time are impossible; there are 15 players so if 11 votes are tied up on two of the players, a third player can have at most 4.

Some days I can math, some days I can't.

[mith]

(In case you missed it, Red Flag just had a test run, with fairly mixed reactions to the setup. My reaction was that Day 1 was a lot of fun but the rest of the game wasn't really, so I tried to preserve the feeling of that part of the setup.)

I was aware it was being run, but not that it was finished. I'll have to flip through it at some point.

At some point I'd like to run some actual numbers for the "should scum kill their own" question. I mentioned it as a possibility about a week after suggesting the setup (and even suggested that maybe the wincon should just be 2 Mafia dead rather than 2 Mafia lynched), but never really explored the ramifications of leaving it as is. In the actual game, not killing Mafia N1 was clearly a mistake; in fact, with a 4:9 setup I would hazard a guess that scum should *always* kill two members, regardless of how the lynches go. Town does still get a benefit over a comparable Vanilla setup though, in the form of higher odds on the first couple days. In 4:7, things are probably different if the first lynch is town (since town is immediately in a double lylo if scum kill town).

It's an interesting problem though, and worth exploring to see how that strategy affects the EV - the EVs I gave originally were assuming they would kill town.

[mith]

So, if my numbers are correct, after a day 1 scum lynch in the 4:9 setup, town EV is ~72% if scum kill town N1 and ~67% if scum kill scum. Not as big of a difference as I was expecting, but still a clear blunder in that game. After a town lynch, scum should kill town (~35% vs ~38%). Overall I get a 44.5% EV for 4:9. (It also has a pleasing feature that after day 1, EV is close to 1/3 if town was lynched and close to 2/3 if scum was lynched.)

At 4:7, scum should kill town either way - there should always be some point where you're close enough to Lylo to just go for that. Curious where the boundaries are for other counts - there is one boundary to cross where scum should kill scum after a scum lynch, and another where scum should kill scum after a town lynch. For 4 Mafia, you have:

4:5 - kill town either way
4:7 - kill town either way
4:9 - kill town after town lynch, scum after scum lynch
4:11 - kill scum either way

In that sense, 4:9 may be the most interesting count.

At some point I'll set up my script to handle this and start a new thread. It's a pretty interesting setup theoretically, even if it doesn't play that well.

[edit]Just saw that you came up with something different in the post-game. I did find one error in my spreadsheet, but not something that affected 4:9. Still checking.[/edit]