Obi, the other thing I was thinking about is the fact that the mafia couldn't directly target their kills, which is a huge disadvantage to them, which is another reason I think this game was tilted to the village. Soft networking is a bit lower now than its heyday but it's still a prevalent force and being able to to break up people that normally trust each other or just generally outspoken/analytical people is a really big part of a successful mafia strategy. The mafia were trying from day 3 to take out me and ZH but they just couldn't do it because we weren't in loops even after their busdrivers.
To target their kills, mafia would have had to have some extreme softnetworkers on the team. Like imagine if Langly were mafia, I think it would have been a pretty easy mafia victory. So I guess in that sense the game really was determined by who got what roles. Though I think it would take a lot more work for the mafia to win than for the village because the village just needs to live long enough to trace the voting/focus records and compare that to their soft network info, whereas the mafia needs to kill a pretty specific set of people in order to prevent that from happening.
Was good fun to be back in a phalla. Next time i may even understand whats going on. haha
/lick
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ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
edited November 2013
The mafia not being able to direct their kills was a huge weakness, but one I thought would be offset by the lack of any real village confirmation (seer po required massive coordination to not end up on a dead target) combined with the mafia's ability to mimic every other village special perfectly. The mafia was supposed to have to work to ingrain themselves into the village trust and they had the tools to do it, imo.
Plus I think it would have been contrary to BUSDRIVER PHALLA if the mafia could just bypass or negate the busdrivers.
Don't get me wrong, I love the inability of the mafia to directly target (I tried playing with that in one of my minis by having roles rather than players be targetable). I just think in the balance of things in ended up just being slightly too much for the mafia to overcome when combined with regenerating specials.
Don't get me wrong, I love the inability of the mafia to directly target (I tried playing with that in one of my minis by having roles rather than players be targetable). I just think in the balance of things in ended up just being slightly too much for the mafia to overcome when combined with regenerating specials.
Yeah, we managed to hit some specials and the narration goes "and hey they're back already!"
Also, if we did try to infiltrate the network, 3 heaters and 5 warpers was probably going to raise some eyebrows. Plus, if a green special dies they get a narration-confirmed replacement (at least for the first ones) so suddenly a new person shows up claiming the dead's ability, hey new special! If two people do, hey, new special and mafia
ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
yeah, regenerating specials was probably a bit much in hindsight. I tried to balance that with it going to known specials who thought they were useless to start with so maybe the mafia would know who they are if it went to them. But really all the village got was another guard (which actually saved the mafia more than village) and vig (which was just as untargetable as the mafia's and more kills is better for the mafia, right?)
And without the vig regenerating the game would have gone for like another two days.
What are some ideas to keep the kills level without the specials regening?
Also, if we did try to infiltrate the network, 3 heaters and 5 warpers was probably going to raise some eyebrows. Plus, if a green special dies they get a narration-confirmed replacement (at least for the first ones) so suddenly a new person shows up claiming the dead's ability, hey new special! If two people do, hey, new special and mafia
This is a really good point and wow was that bad for you guys.
Well this game would have been perfect for it - just add a true random hot potato that substitutes for the village vig and follows the same heater rules to replace the vig. There was already a minimum-kill rule in effect
Well this game would have been perfect for it - just add a true random hot potato that substitutes for the village vig and follows the same heater rules to replace the vig. There was already a minimum-kill rule in effect
Yeah, I thought about that but the general aversion to RNG effects in phalla kept me from finalizing it. I think you are right that it could have been fine in this one though.
I dunno about the mafia being unable to target kills.
Really, it was all a matter of trying to pick who the target is going to focus, then linking them to the focus and dropping a potato on their head.
Hence, they really shouldn't have killed off the seer with the hitsquad day 2, as that hitsquad was a huge source of focus information, although Sir Fab's link would've scared them off anyway, and killing off a member with a link would have done the same ... and moving on. I guess the hitsquad was going to die day 2 regardless.
Anyway, otherwise you'd need to try and figure out who everyone suspected and make an educated guess, or even better try to organise hit targets with individual players without alerting the village themselves.
That said, I know I for one was in the habit of focusing rather unrelated targets, these being either mafia who I was going to try and vote out the next day, or just plain villagers of no suspicion especially when you've actively annoyed the mafia/hitsquad (Sorry Sepah). Being predictable was too dangerous as it allows that link mentioned above to be set up, but it also leads to grudge loops. It's always very easy for villagers to start suspecting villagers who suspect them. So if you run with your suspicions with your focus all the time, then you wind up in a focus loop and die.
I don't know, but if I had a vig potato I would have nailed Greenbarons on day 6 I think. Two days earlier anyway. But it was a bit easier to guess the mafia's focus due to their likelihood of targeting claimed village specials.
Also, if we did try to infiltrate the network, 3 heaters and 5 warpers was probably going to raise some eyebrows. Plus, if a green special dies they get a narration-confirmed replacement (at least for the first ones) so suddenly a new person shows up claiming the dead's ability, hey new special! If two people do, hey, new special and mafia
This is a really good point and wow was that bad for you guys.
Even better, if two showed up and they followed kill-both-and-let-the-narration-sort-it-out... they'd probably still get the special back anyway!
I dunno about the mafia being unable to target kills.
Really, it was all a matter of trying to pick who the target is going to focus, then linking them to the focus and dropping a potato on their head.
Hence, they really shouldn't have killed off the seer with the hitsquad day 2, as that hitsquad was a huge source of focus information, although Sir Fab's link would've scared them off anyway, and killing off a member with a link would have done the same ... and moving on. I guess the hitsquad was going to die day 2 regardless.
Anyway, otherwise you'd need to try and figure out who everyone suspected and make an educated guess, or even better try to organise hit targets with individual players without alerting the village themselves.
That said, I know I for one was in the habit of focusing rather unrelated targets, these being either mafia who I was going to try and vote out the next day, or just plain villagers of no suspicion especially when you've actively annoyed the mafia/hitsquad (Sorry Sepah). Being predictable was too dangerous as it allows that link mentioned above to be set up, but it also leads to grudge loops. It's always very easy for villagers to start suspecting villagers who suspect them. So if you run with your suspicions with your focus all the time, then you wind up in a focus loop and die.
I don't know, but if I had a vig potato I would have nailed Greenbarons on day 6 I think. Two days earlier anyway. But it was a bit easier to guess the mafia's focus due to their likelihood of targeting claimed village specials.
There was some targetability yes, but the easiest way was to start on our intended target, then hope to get back there either via focus or busdriver. With all focus targets public, it becomes really suspicious to constantly toss stuff at the most confirmed villagers, so we had to rely on busdrivers and hope we could guess someone downstream. So, semi-targettable. Then the village bus drivers just messed everything up
What are some ideas to keep the kills level without the specials regening?
Off the top of my head, in a game as crazy as this one you might have been able to get away with the vigs being randomly assigned every day without respect to alignment. In general that makes for really poor balancing but since no one can really target anyway, and it was all about creating loops, etc, it could have worked here.
I've always had problems keeping minis short, but the best thing is to have as much environmental (vs. player-based) as possible (thus the mantra of never giving the mafia a vig, just give them an extra kill). What exactly "environmental" means is going to change from game to game. In larger games things tend to even out so it's not as big a deal but having too many player-based kills in a mini will create huge tails in the game length distribution.
One way to lower swinginess it is even/odd abilities, but that has a similar confirmation problem as regen if it's balanced. I've strongly considered running games where villagers all had odd-day abilities and tell the mafia this (along with the ability to simulate even-day abilities), but in the end I usually decide that breaking the meta for its own sake is not actually helpful in the long run, since people will just revert back to old behaviors.
What are some ideas to keep the kills level without the specials regening?
Off the top of my head, in a game as crazy as this one you might have been able to get away with the vigs being randomly assigned every day without respect to alignment. In general that makes for really poor balancing but since no one can really target anyway, and it was all about creating loops, etc, it could have worked here.
I've always had problems keeping minis short, but the best thing is to have as much environmental (vs. player-based) as possible (thus the mantra of never giving the mafia a vig, just give them an extra kill). What exactly "environmental" means is going to change from game to game. In larger games things tend to even out so it's not as big a deal but having too many player-based kills in a mini will create huge tails in the game length distribution.
One way to lower swinginess it is even/odd abilities, but that has a similar confirmation problem as regen if it's balanced. I've strongly considered running games where villagers all had odd-day abilities and tell the mafia this (along with the ability to simulate even-day abilities), but in the end I usually decide that breaking the meta for its own sake is not actually helpful in the long run, since people will just revert back to old behaviors.
I think you hit it with the odd-even day abilities idea. I always forget that way of assigning specials and in hindsight its usually better than what I end up doing for levelling out the deaths.
Though the mafia could be "cheating" by peeling at the target list. That could work, maybe
hm, interesting idea
Are you saying the target list from the previous day or the current day?
Current. They'd get no say in target selection, but then that's a trade off for no village vig and all random targets. They could still try to coordinate though in a more limited fashion
If you can't ever see the target list as mafia you have no idea if doing something is bad or good
Also, if we did try to infiltrate the network, 3 heaters and 5 warpers was probably going to raise some eyebrows. Plus, if a green special dies they get a narration-confirmed replacement (at least for the first ones) so suddenly a new person shows up claiming the dead's ability, hey new special! If two people do, hey, new special and mafia
This is a really good point and wow was that bad for you guys.
Even better, if two showed up and they followed kill-both-and-let-the-narration-sort-it-out... they'd probably still get the special back anyway!
I dunno about the mafia being unable to target kills.
Really, it was all a matter of trying to pick who the target is going to focus, then linking them to the focus and dropping a potato on their head.
Hence, they really shouldn't have killed off the seer with the hitsquad day 2, as that hitsquad was a huge source of focus information, although Sir Fab's link would've scared them off anyway, and killing off a member with a link would have done the same ... and moving on. I guess the hitsquad was going to die day 2 regardless.
Anyway, otherwise you'd need to try and figure out who everyone suspected and make an educated guess, or even better try to organise hit targets with individual players without alerting the village themselves.
That said, I know I for one was in the habit of focusing rather unrelated targets, these being either mafia who I was going to try and vote out the next day, or just plain villagers of no suspicion especially when you've actively annoyed the mafia/hitsquad (Sorry Sepah). Being predictable was too dangerous as it allows that link mentioned above to be set up, but it also leads to grudge loops. It's always very easy for villagers to start suspecting villagers who suspect them. So if you run with your suspicions with your focus all the time, then you wind up in a focus loop and die.
I don't know, but if I had a vig potato I would have nailed Greenbarons on day 6 I think. Two days earlier anyway. But it was a bit easier to guess the mafia's focus due to their likelihood of targeting claimed village specials.
There was some targetability yes, but the easiest way was to start on our intended target, then hope to get back there either via focus or busdriver. With all focus targets public, it becomes really suspicious to constantly toss stuff at the most confirmed villagers, so we had to rely on busdrivers and hope we could guess someone downstream. So, semi-targettable. Then the village bus drivers just messed everything up
Tbh, I think you had less issues with village busdrivers and more issues with people not throwing potatoes.
Even with village busdrivers in play, the person you target with your potato is always going to be the highest in that potato's chain, so in the absence of any other busdrivers, you just have to figure out which people are going to form a loop. So looking at people that hate each other etc. The loop isn't going to guarantee that the target is upstream of the loop, but it's going to be the likely endpoint in a random graph.
Then the only affect that village busdrivers can have is to run the potato past the same person in the loop more than once. The loop is going to be small, so a random targeting is unlikely. Preferentially, the busdriver is going to land on the most dodgy person on the loop, so you could try for the person that that person is likely to focus. But overall, if you guess the loop correctly then the person you link is likely to be hit on loop entry anyway.
Other from loop interactions, village busdrivers can only change the potato's path between tracks to the loop (does nothing), jump between two downstream players (shortens the track to the loop) or jump the potato back upstream of the starting position (funnels the potato down into the loop through the mafia busdriver). All of these don't really affect your potato.
In the case of multiple busdrivers, you can get unlucky and have two busdrivers overlap and cause the potato to track past the same players twice, but that's not something the villagers really control either, and you're more likely to avoid interactions at all at decent player pool sizes.
Though the mafia could be "cheating" by peeling at the target list. That could work, maybe
hm, interesting idea
Are you saying the target list from the previous day or the current day?
Current. They'd get no say in target selection, but then that's a trade off for no village vig and all random targets. They could still try to coordinate though in a more limited fashion
If you can't ever see the target list as mafia you have no idea if doing something is bad or good
Current would be a pain to keep updated I would think. Unless you're using something like that Digital Devil interface.
What I'd sort of like to have seen would be this phalla but where the mafia are all nodes to begin with.
Still have them cheat and pass powers and whatnot, but have it so that as they kill the village specials, they make it more likely to get more control over the game.
I don't know if that would have been too overpowered for the mafia, but just having the mafia go from networking and limited power but with random potatoes flying everywhere killing specials anyway, to mafia with the specials preventing themselves from dying and adding to the village's grief, it just seems like it would've been a better game for the mafia day 4. As it was, I thought we got off easy for wasting that TRV vote and being hopeless at finding mafia until halfway through the game.
Sorry. I would have seriously considered working with you, except that I thought Greenbarons revealing himself to be "the last mafia" when narrations don't tell us we've killed all the mafia meant he was providing cover for someone else.
Sorry. I would have seriously considered working with you, except that I thought Greenbarons revealing himself to be "the last mafia" when narrations don't tell us we've killed all the mafia meant he was providing cover for someone else.
MrT and Sir Fab were freaking out about that too.
I think everyone was.
I wasn't. The kime vote would've looked far different with 4 mafia to 5 villagers.
Last minute swings ahoy.
I was more concerned about whether Phyphor was the last mafia or not.
Megafrost had just given me nothing to work with in the thread, or at least I didn't see anything particularly villagish or mafiaish.
Though the mafia could be "cheating" by peeling at the target list. That could work, maybe
hm, interesting idea
Are you saying the target list from the previous day or the current day?
Current. They'd get no say in target selection, but then that's a trade off for no village vig and all random targets. They could still try to coordinate though in a more limited fashion
If you can't ever see the target list as mafia you have no idea if doing something is bad or good
Current would be a pain to keep updated I would think. Unless you're using something like that Digital Devil interface.
What I'd sort of like to have seen would be this phalla but where the mafia are all nodes to begin with.
Still have them cheat and pass powers and whatnot, but have it so that as they kill the village specials, they make it more likely to get more control over the game.
I don't know if that would have been too overpowered for the mafia, but just having the mafia go from networking and limited power but with random potatoes flying everywhere killing specials anyway, to mafia with the specials preventing themselves from dying and adding to the village's grief, it just seems like it would've been a better game for the mafia day 4. As it was, I thought we got off easy for wasting that TRV vote and being hopeless at finding mafia until halfway through the game.
Oh, I was talking about all-rng kills, not village focuses or anything
And that would result in a severely underpowered or at least unpredictably powered mafia. How would we even get a special killed except through sheer luck?
Nobodys going to let a node in the network because a dud potato is a great mafia cover power and even if provable, its at best a neutral power
Well the mafia would start with some power, but not as much as they had at the start this game.
So a hot potato or two and possibly that tracker power (which didn't look all that helpful).
And then the aim for the mafia would be to use their group knowledge and potato spawns early game to keep themselves alive til midgame hits and they start getting powers added to their arsenal.
But yeah, probably too unpredictable.
I was convinced I was totally marked to kill that day, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and hoped that someone would take me up on my offer to walk them into the final three. I did have a lot of fun panicking everyone about whether I was the last mafia or not.
Well I was convinced that you should die, but I don't know if that carried across.
You may have been able to convince the village that Megafrost was the traitor, but it'd be a stretch.
ZH was trusted by Bedlam and MrT and Sir Fab trusted each other, so you'd have to have convinced one or the other group.
Obi, when you did the RNG for the discrider/marikir, did you consider marikir as having 2 loops, so the odds would be 2/3 vs 1/2?
Yeah, I did.
The more interesting question is, did you, on the second pass for a lot of those potatoes, do another RNG to determine whether the potatoes would go through the second warp back to Marikir?
Cause I'm a bit amazed only two stuck to him under those conditions.
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Yeah it was a player based restriction.
It was per person, so as long as we kept rotating who threw the potatoes we could target the same person more than once.
Probably not for you guys.
But seriously.
To target their kills, mafia would have had to have some extreme softnetworkers on the team. Like imagine if Langly were mafia, I think it would have been a pretty easy mafia victory. So I guess in that sense the game really was determined by who got what roles. Though I think it would take a lot more work for the mafia to win than for the village because the village just needs to live long enough to trace the voting/focus records and compare that to their soft network info, whereas the mafia needs to kill a pretty specific set of people in order to prevent that from happening.
/lick
Plus I think it would have been contrary to BUSDRIVER PHALLA if the mafia could just bypass or negate the busdrivers.
I'm just trying to give you all the feedback I can because I know you'll use it and make some super awesome games.
Yeah, we managed to hit some specials and the narration goes "and hey they're back already!"
And without the vig regenerating the game would have gone for like another two days.
What are some ideas to keep the kills level without the specials regening?
This is a really good point and wow was that bad for you guys.
Yeah, I thought about that but the general aversion to RNG effects in phalla kept me from finalizing it. I think you are right that it could have been fine in this one though.
Really, it was all a matter of trying to pick who the target is going to focus, then linking them to the focus and dropping a potato on their head.
Hence, they really shouldn't have killed off the seer with the hitsquad day 2, as that hitsquad was a huge source of focus information, although Sir Fab's link would've scared them off anyway, and killing off a member with a link would have done the same ... and moving on. I guess the hitsquad was going to die day 2 regardless.
Anyway, otherwise you'd need to try and figure out who everyone suspected and make an educated guess, or even better try to organise hit targets with individual players without alerting the village themselves.
That said, I know I for one was in the habit of focusing rather unrelated targets, these being either mafia who I was going to try and vote out the next day, or just plain villagers of no suspicion especially when you've actively annoyed the mafia/hitsquad (Sorry Sepah). Being predictable was too dangerous as it allows that link mentioned above to be set up, but it also leads to grudge loops. It's always very easy for villagers to start suspecting villagers who suspect them. So if you run with your suspicions with your focus all the time, then you wind up in a focus loop and die.
I don't know, but if I had a vig potato I would have nailed Greenbarons on day 6 I think. Two days earlier anyway. But it was a bit easier to guess the mafia's focus due to their likelihood of targeting claimed village specials.
Even better, if two showed up and they followed kill-both-and-let-the-narration-sort-it-out... they'd probably still get the special back anyway!
Still, thanks for running
There was some targetability yes, but the easiest way was to start on our intended target, then hope to get back there either via focus or busdriver. With all focus targets public, it becomes really suspicious to constantly toss stuff at the most confirmed villagers, so we had to rely on busdrivers and hope we could guess someone downstream. So, semi-targettable. Then the village bus drivers just messed everything up
Off the top of my head, in a game as crazy as this one you might have been able to get away with the vigs being randomly assigned every day without respect to alignment. In general that makes for really poor balancing but since no one can really target anyway, and it was all about creating loops, etc, it could have worked here.
I've always had problems keeping minis short, but the best thing is to have as much environmental (vs. player-based) as possible (thus the mantra of never giving the mafia a vig, just give them an extra kill). What exactly "environmental" means is going to change from game to game. In larger games things tend to even out so it's not as big a deal but having too many player-based kills in a mini will create huge tails in the game length distribution.
One way to lower swinginess it is even/odd abilities, but that has a similar confirmation problem as regen if it's balanced. I've strongly considered running games where villagers all had odd-day abilities and tell the mafia this (along with the ability to simulate even-day abilities), but in the end I usually decide that breaking the meta for its own sake is not actually helpful in the long run, since people will just revert back to old behaviors.
I think you hit it with the odd-even day abilities idea. I always forget that way of assigning specials and in hindsight its usually better than what I end up doing for levelling out the deaths.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
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Can't believe how bad my busdrivers were. So bad, they match up to mafia busdrivers.
hm, interesting idea
Are you saying the target list from the previous day or the current day?
Current. They'd get no say in target selection, but then that's a trade off for no village vig and all random targets. They could still try to coordinate though in a more limited fashion
If you can't ever see the target list as mafia you have no idea if doing something is bad or good
Tbh, I think you had less issues with village busdrivers and more issues with people not throwing potatoes.
Even with village busdrivers in play, the person you target with your potato is always going to be the highest in that potato's chain, so in the absence of any other busdrivers, you just have to figure out which people are going to form a loop. So looking at people that hate each other etc. The loop isn't going to guarantee that the target is upstream of the loop, but it's going to be the likely endpoint in a random graph.
Then the only affect that village busdrivers can have is to run the potato past the same person in the loop more than once. The loop is going to be small, so a random targeting is unlikely. Preferentially, the busdriver is going to land on the most dodgy person on the loop, so you could try for the person that that person is likely to focus. But overall, if you guess the loop correctly then the person you link is likely to be hit on loop entry anyway.
Other from loop interactions, village busdrivers can only change the potato's path between tracks to the loop (does nothing), jump between two downstream players (shortens the track to the loop) or jump the potato back upstream of the starting position (funnels the potato down into the loop through the mafia busdriver). All of these don't really affect your potato.
In the case of multiple busdrivers, you can get unlucky and have two busdrivers overlap and cause the potato to track past the same players twice, but that's not something the villagers really control either, and you're more likely to avoid interactions at all at decent player pool sizes.
Current would be a pain to keep updated I would think. Unless you're using something like that Digital Devil interface.
What I'd sort of like to have seen would be this phalla but where the mafia are all nodes to begin with.
Still have them cheat and pass powers and whatnot, but have it so that as they kill the village specials, they make it more likely to get more control over the game.
I don't know if that would have been too overpowered for the mafia, but just having the mafia go from networking and limited power but with random potatoes flying everywhere killing specials anyway, to mafia with the specials preventing themselves from dying and adding to the village's grief, it just seems like it would've been a better game for the mafia day 4. As it was, I thought we got off easy for wasting that TRV vote and being hopeless at finding mafia until halfway through the game.
Sorry. I would have seriously considered working with you, except that I thought Greenbarons revealing himself to be "the last mafia" when narrations don't tell us we've killed all the mafia meant he was providing cover for someone else.
That would have been a really good idea!
I think everyone was.
I wasn't. The kime vote would've looked far different with 4 mafia to 5 villagers.
Last minute swings ahoy.
I was more concerned about whether Phyphor was the last mafia or not.
Megafrost had just given me nothing to work with in the thread, or at least I didn't see anything particularly villagish or mafiaish.
Oh, I was talking about all-rng kills, not village focuses or anything
And that would result in a severely underpowered or at least unpredictably powered mafia. How would we even get a special killed except through sheer luck?
Nobodys going to let a node in the network because a dud potato is a great mafia cover power and even if provable, its at best a neutral power
So a hot potato or two and possibly that tracker power (which didn't look all that helpful).
And then the aim for the mafia would be to use their group knowledge and potato spawns early game to keep themselves alive til midgame hits and they start getting powers added to their arsenal.
But yeah, probably too unpredictable.
You may have been able to convince the village that Megafrost was the traitor, but it'd be a stretch.
ZH was trusted by Bedlam and MrT and Sir Fab trusted each other, so you'd have to have convinced one or the other group.
Yeah, I did.
The more interesting question is, did you, on the second pass for a lot of those potatoes, do another RNG to determine whether the potatoes would go through the second warp back to Marikir?
Cause I'm a bit amazed only two stuck to him under those conditions.