Power Brokers: Game of Thrones - Game Over

[davesaz]

Not a lot of time to figure out what's going on.

@MOD: that time for end of phase is 7AM in my timezone/ 8AM in yours, and less than 24 hours. A little more time to read up would be helpful.

If anyone has a reason to be voting my slot other than activity it would be good to hear.
I have skimmed the OP and pages since the previous VC while waiting to find out if I got the slot.
Cliff notes on the other two wagons would help too.

Gotta go shopping, be back in an hour or so.

Added 2 hours to countdown -Albert

[davesaz]

Evidently it’s nightless?
Time to sleep. And look at what the next step is after banners called. And review pm for when that action can be taken.

[davesaz]

Once two or more of us have our armies in the capital we can set up new co’s.
It would help me to know what your reads are on all of the nobles.

[davesaz]

Should I go bold and eliminate the need for a replacement?
I wanted opinions on FB for a reason. He seemed overly active compared to a couple town games this year, and I lightly scumread him as a result.
It would be so much easier if there were flips.

[davesaz]

ISO'd BBmolla/gobble, looks like scum.

[davesaz]

FL looked like his scum fake not understanding things as an excuse for doing nothing, but I'm leaning toward it just being burnout.
Pink Ball looks fairly towny to me.

[davesaz]

I haven't played a flipless before, at least not one that I can remember. Whomever is going out of their way to get rid of everyone who can go back and find out what the flips were is scum.

[davesaz]

Arya's posting looks town motivated.
I dread trying to figure out people from 500 post iso. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

[davesaz]

VOTE: gobbledygook

From a numerical perspective only, the smart money is on one mafia in each original group.
Splits of 2/1/0 with the 0 being power brokers group are next most likely. 3/0/0 splits are almost but not quite impossible.
CO's being the 0 group I suppose isn't out of the question.
Setup wise it begs for at least 1 noble, and two if it's not symmetrical.

Town needs large but not hammered wagons. Messing around with small wagons isn't going to cut it. We have to put people on the spot with reads.

[davesaz]

How does kidnap work?

[davesaz]

Once we reach coup the CO abilities come back
Getting flip information now to reveal potential associations is high importance.

[davesaz]

While kidnapped they can't do actions, which means no more flips? It says jailkeep, not just protect.

[davesaz]

It means the same thing it would in any other game. Look at associations.
Otherwise it's just a random killing game and hope we get the scum.

[davesaz]

Nero's point is that there is no value in those single flips when the cost is to lose flip investigation ability after week 4 (which would then mean random killing). We can always check those flips post week 5 when someone who's alive and can stay alive takE them powers

This assumes that we haven't already lost by then. Information earlier is always better than later. The only exception is things like limited shot watcher / tracker which can give more accurate results on a smaller player base. Even n-shot cop results are better earlier rather than later. The proposal is so against the optimum game theory that I'm beginning to question the source.

[davesaz]

Of course there is also the problem that you can yell all you want about what actions we want the COs to take, if they're not here then nothing will happen anyway.

Pedit: Oh, that's not what the OP seemed to imply. In that case we're pretty fucked anyway. If any town offed a CO for lols I'm gonna be upset about it postgame.

[davesaz]

Yeah, to clarify that wasn't a complaint.

[davesaz]

By kidnap you mean "take hostage to a designated castle" right? Trying to match up to OP descriptions without the benefit of having read the whole 110 pages -- which frankly isn't possible. I'm capable of speed reading but forum format doesn't make that straightforward and I wouldn't have the RL time anyway.

[davesaz]

Bam ruleset? What's that?

[davesaz]

You still haven't learned.

[davesaz]

Expected victory (probability)

[davesaz]

Yeah

[davesaz]

Or remove, banish, exile ... choose a term any term.

Remind me who is fire replacement. Please make your slot readable.

[davesaz]

I typically can't read firebringer, and ari hasn't really said much.

I'm reasonably certain that Nero is town. Him constantly mentioning me for elimination despite me being totally myself adds to that feeling.
Auro is not giving me the vibes of pushing correct sounding cases onto town that he did in the recent couple games he was scum. That might mean he's just town. The strategy does have holes that are vaguely troubling so it's not strong town.

This game keeps getting paged out of memory by work and more interesting things, so I can't shoot from the hip like I normally would.

[davesaz]

I agree with Auro on Gobble and will offer two additional data points.
In both the SIR game and the cult game, Gobble was actively engaged as town and there was a stark disconnect when he got culted.
Granting the counter argument that cult style games are inherently bizarre to begin with, I do think there is a vast difference when he's scum.

I also think that he was scum with one of my teammates during team mafia this year (in the white flag perhaps?) and I was inwardly groaning at how bad his engagement is when scum.

Yes people can have down periods where they don't have time or motivation for mafia. Any activity / motivation tell is subject to false hits because of that. But I think it's a strong enough trend that we can't ignore it.

[davesaz]

And as often happens I hit submit and immediately had another thought.
This is one of the areas I trust my scumreads much more than townreads. I'll get a tone/motivation/activity read wrong on town much more often than scum reads.

[davesaz]

That’s easy to say when you usually scumread almost everyone.

[davesaz]

Ari (Firebringer) must have been killed by a power broker action, given the noble action is public and burst.
Assassinate is a slow action and would have needed to be initiated two phases ago, and needs to specify at time it is sent where the target will be when it hits, right?

[davesaz]

Do I read this right, that a power broker whose second is in the dungeon doesn't have access to the spy network actions?

Pedit: is the mafia action completely separate or is it part of the listed mechanics at top of thread? I haven't been able to figure that out.

[davesaz]

Coup can't happen until tomorrow when my army arrives, so I'd really like to see some investigation results.

[davesaz]

I'd say the best interpretation is probably "parity at the end of a phase" which aligns pretty well with regular usage.
Parity as the result of a messed up burst action is a little less certain, though town mis-day-vigging at lylo would be the closest equivalent and is a case where the fittest don't survive.

[davesaz]

I flubbed the last 3 words of that. Least fit don't survive. lol

[davesaz]

It has come to my attention that the mafia wincon is not clearly stated anywhere.

I'm going to rule that the mafia win when they control 50% of living players. If anyone can find an ABR quote indicating anything different, please let me know.

Why not just ask the scum team what their wincon is?

What will be funny here is if the scum team are who asked.
We can't/shouldn't act based on that.

[davesaz]

Being in castles only affects the noble ability.
The vig like ability depends on knowing where the target is, or more importantly where the target will be when the action lands. People in town are targetable.
You're overlooking another aspect of being in town vs. the vig ability and I'm going to refrain from discussing it.
CO's can't travel in either case.

[davesaz]

Should I go bold and eliminate the need for a replacement?
I wanted opinions on FB for a reason. He seemed overly active compared to a couple town games this year, and I lightly scumread him as a result.
It would be so much easier if there were flips.

Yo.

[davesaz]

I was open about thinking FB was scum.
To be clear, I did not kill FB.

[davesaz]

Dave, if you were scum, can you detail what your mechanically optimum NK would be (regardless of dayplay)?

Mechanically for me specifically? Or for someone in a particular role? It's kinda hard to detail in either case with mechanics this complicated. I think it could be helpful to think this through from a more general point of view but here's a quick take.

I'll summarize the relevant mechanics, since this was a mechanics based question.
Nobles can kill in their own castle and can be killed if their second is jailed or if they are in someone else's castle. (or by scum)
PB's can kill anyone by correctly guessing where they will be when the action resolves. They can be killed if in a noble's castle, if their location can be guessed, or by scum.
I don't know if scum have to know someone's location
CO's can't travel so their location is always known. They represent a risk to scum both by investigation and by enabling vigs by jailing seconds.

It should be fairly obvious that killing Fire/Ari last "night" would be a bad move for scum!me because I could have scumkilled someone else and then noble killed Fire/Ari if he didn't move. Surface level a PB makes the most sense to kill because the assassination vig is a serious threat to scum. A CO kill paradoxically reduces scum's future access (via coup) to CO actions that are beneficial to scum.

[davesaz]

Can the scum kill be avoided? Don't know if anyone has taken the type of action that enables the evasion action for example.

[davesaz]

Yes he was, afaik.

[davesaz]

Assassination attempts hit seconds if they are not jailed (and thus with their first), if I understand things right.
Because of that, I tend toward excess jailing instead of investigation as scummy. And arguing that jailing seconds is "protection" is scummy too, it has the opposite effect of protection.

[davesaz]

Do I have to send any other action to make the coup happen?

A 2nd army has to arrive in the capital first.
Any armies that have been raised but not sent to capital should be.

[davesaz]

Gotta be honest here, I haven't a clue what to do without flips. If I had been here from the start I would have been fighting against everything and anything that kept flips from happening.

[davesaz]

^ p much that. anyone not voting davesaz should have to explajn why they dont think the ari kill is incriminating to th guy who knew where he was.

>It was softed, and I don't think it was such a vague soft that competent scum wouldn't pick up on
>Dave can actually get away with publicly killing Ari, if anything he'd know the insider knowledge he has makes it a risky kill
>It's a pretty bad NK compared to a CO?

Someone specifically wanted me to confirm the soft. I'd be suspicious of that.

[davesaz]

Are you talking castle murder?

Here is one.

[davesaz]

Porkens wtf dude? Wait till we take Votato's power, why do you want to play the game flipless?

Ran across this while looking for more posts asking about the soft.

[davesaz]

Lol ok Auro’s I só is the scummiest I’ve seen.

Dave, if aero is in your castle I’d say just hill hostage now.

Auro is definitely the scum among the nobles.

VOTE: auro

Interesting.

[davesaz]

VOTE: Porkens

[davesaz]

Hmm, Tipsy missing from the chart, what's up with that?
It's unclear to me how a coup works. One reading of the OP could mean only those with armies in the capital can vote.

[davesaz]

Remind me who wanted the COs kidnapped? I wanna know if it’s the same ones expecting results.

For coup I think we each vote for two. I’m open to input but if you know me you’ll know I won’t pledge to follow it. I only really trust myself rn.

[davesaz]

Kill auro

[davesaz]

Town and tired of messing around in case you're wondering.

[davesaz]

Dave, why would you try to kill me as you went down...?

Mostly for the GoTness. I didn't know if it really was a hammer or not.

Lately it feels like all the people who town read me are scum trying to buddy.
Didn't want this to be a 3rd game where I failed to do anything about you if you were scum.
Turns out I was wrong this time...

[davesaz]

Dunno why Dave didn't talk about half the players in the game.

Didn't have any opinion on them. It was a huge mistake to overlook the no flips thing when repping in.

[davesaz]

Auro's kill them all strategy was very strong of course.
The unfortunate thing about it is, if it's possible for a noble to be scum then it could be a scum noble laying out the strategy.