[SETUP] Situation Room

[northsidegal]

From the November-December Challenge

Situation Room

5 Vengeful Mafia

12 Vanilla Townies

• Begins Nightless.
  
• When a player is eliminated, the entirety of their wagon is added to a new neighborhood. This neighborhood will remain open until the end of the following day.
  
• After 5 eliminations, the game thread is locked. All players not already in any neighborhoods are added to one.
  
• From there, each neighborhood is opened again and gains a kill, decided by majority vote within the neighborhood.
  
• The game continues with kills decided within the neighborhoods (sequentially, from the earliest neighborhood to the latest) until one faction has achieved victory.

EV for Vengeful Mafia 5:12 is 38.44%, which I think that this should resemble pretty closely. It probably makes sense to transition to blitz-esque deadlines once the neighborhood kills start happening.

I'm making this thread because I think this might be the next large theme I run, and to maybe get some feedback before doing that.

[northsidegal]

Is there cross neighborhood communication other than people being in multiple hoods?

only via the scum PT

[northsidegal]

and yeah, that's a definite consideration on the wagon composition thing

i don't think it affects the EV all that much, although i do think that in terms of in-game strategy it opens up a lot of gameplay space there, e.g. scum coordinating to try to control a majority of a hood or a majority of most hoods, them still having to act like town even if they control a majority of a hood because the townies left in there could be in another hood, so on and so on

[northsidegal]

i trust that both the scumteam themselves as well as players who care more about having fun than playing completely mechanically optimally will be enough to ensure that any sort of super low neighborhood size strategy like that would fail. also, i wouldn't count "no eliminate" as a valid vote, so that'd require nobody at all to vote, which again i trust wouldn't happen.

i'm interested to hear why you think it's scumsided – i could've made it 4:13 which has a vengeful EV of almost exactly 50%, but i expect vengescum to play more like nightless than it does like mountainous, so i tend towards a lower calculated EV.

[northsidegal]

Normally I'd agree with you, but I think the endgame parity is a strong scumsiding factor.

Basically, if Neighborhood 1 is 3 scum and 4 town to begin with and Neighborhood 2 is 4 scum and 4 town and neighborhood 3 is 2 scum and 4 town, Scum can manipulate Neighborhood 1 into killing someone who is town in Neighborhoods 2 and three. Scum now have the majority in Neighborhood 2, and can kill someone who is town in Neighborhoods 1 and 3. Scum now have three sequential kills and can mitigate overlap into other hoods to be able to work to parity faster.

I'm not 100% sure there isn't an opposite balancing mechanic (neighborhoods becoming conftown via the game not ending) but it seems more likely for the scum one to matter, particularly with the incentive town has to distrust any townies who are in multiple hoods. It definitely seems like the kind of setup where limming a scum early could easily snowball into an inevitable town win, but the odds of 5 living scum on D6 aren't unreasonable (13%) and both 4 and 5 large scumteams seem virtually unbeatable in endgame. This is even without considering the venge aspect of the scumteams.

meh, i think my opinion on this is basically "if they can swing it, good for them, they deserve it". i think that this setup is unusually

skewed

in scum's favor, at least compared to normal nightless or vengescum games (where skew is defined as the tendency for one faction to be able to make massive gains if they play well or get lucky). if scum can manage to get it, they can not only dominate day play but end up controlling the nightkills that the town should otherwise be able to control, so good play is rewarded a lot more than in a typical game. apart from that, if it's relatively scumsided then i'm fine with that – i think that the site meta is currently such most people have a weaker scumgame than towngame, and in the past i've been fine with running setups way more scumsided than this which have ended up fairly close.

i just get the feeling like making it 4 v 13 runs too much of a risk of rolling a weak scumteam that just gets rolled over and then the game doesn't really get to run to its full potential.

[northsidegal]

sure, great to see you again!

[northsidegal]

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