Mini Normal 2143 (Game over)

[northsidegal]

How is a 3 town neighbor, tracker, neighbor neopolitan and backup neopolitan not overly townsided.

Especially when scum only has 2 goons and a vanilla cop that can’t fake claim because the town neopolitan is a fucking neighbor.

Neighbors aren't really considered true power roles and so don't really factor in to setup balance except insofar as they interact with other roles (e.g. false positives for Traffic Analyst, Neapolitan). In this setup specifically they obvious play at least some role, but I wouldn't say that they're any super significant amount of power in town's favor. So is Neapolitan + Backup + Tracker an excessive amount of town power? I would argue that it isn't, especially versus a scum Vanilla Cop.

Interestingly, this setup is one that's unusually skewed less in town's favor for a Normal game – and here I use "skew" not as a synonym for balance, but as its own property, defined as the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky. Theoretically, if scum made perfect Night actions this game they could achieve a near-complete shutout on TPRs, allowing only 1 neapolitan shot or 2 tracker shots off depending on whether they kill the neapolitans or the tracker first. That isn't typical for Normal games.

Tracker is a pretty high-skew role though, and it looks like a lucky tracker shot is exactly what happened this game. I think it would be results-oriented to take that happening and extrapolate it to the setup's overall balance.

I can say a bit more later, if you're still interested.

[northsidegal]

Neighbors aren't really considered true power roles and so don't really factor in to setup balance

They do when there are 3 town that can strategize and mafia would have no clue what they are doing. Sure they would theoretically be suspicious of a mafia in the group, but when there isn't. AND one of the neighbors has a power role. It opens the possibility for the "Farkran claims investigative PR, if he don't die then all of the neighbors are likely hard confirmed town" strategy.

This is a pretty high-risk strategy. I think that most people probably expect at least one scum in neighborhoods (especially ones of more than two people), and I might expect the Neapolitan to be more suspicious of neighbors given that they're sort of Neapolitan-millers. In any case, this is still a gambit with its roots in dayplay to me seems sort of similar to everyone in a neighborhood townreading each other and deciding to claim that they're masons instead. In any case, I still don't believe that the setup is anything above 50% in town's favor, if even that.

I can say a bit more later, if you're still interested.

I still want to know why doctor was weaker then backup.

I wanted this setup over the one with the 2-shot doctor not primarily because it's stronger (although I do think that and it is

a

factor), but really because I think it creates better gameplay. Investigatives plus a doctor are really unfun for scum to play against without any sort of counter, and I expect that it's not all that interesting for town either. I also think that Doctor is a fairly high-skew role (i.e. you can get radically different results based on how effectively the Doc uses its shots), and that the setup benefitted from having a more consistent role where basically no matter how the backup neap uses shots, there will be some info for town.

any game where a three player town neighborhood trusts each other is dangerous to a scum team.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with this. I don't consider it really much different than any three-person townblock in a game, although the addition of a PR to the neighborhood is stronger than in isolation, given the potential for claim swap gambits and stuff like that. Stuff like this doesn't happen very frequently and so I don't really consider it much when thinking about balance, but in the future I'll at least keep an eye out for potential neighborhood gambits.

[northsidegal]

Neighbors aren't really considered true power roles and so don't really factor in to setup balance

They do when there are 3 town that can strategize and mafia would have no clue what they are doing. Sure they would theoretically be suspicious of a mafia in the group, but when there isn't. AND one of the neighbors has a power role. It opens the possibility for the "Farkran claims investigative PR, if he don't die then all of the neighbors are likely hard confirmed town" strategy.

I agree with this, but i'd also like to say that it's part of this game's balance. Town power actually wasn't that high. Just imagine if the tracker didn't hit the killer: how different was the game going to be? What would i have done with my nonVT check on popopo if i didn't know how many PRs town had?

We only had 2 soft investigatives, no protectives, no autoconftown roles such as masons or ICs. I made a choice to trust my hood, and the tracker hit the spot, that's what led town to victory. If we repeat this setup a million times, i think the outcomes will be balanced, probably slightly more scumsided than the average normal game (which is usually townsided to begin with)

This is a pretty good analysis.

[northsidegal]

Setup review threads tend to be released in batches far after the game is over. Kind of annoying, yeah.