Suggestion for newbie game setup

[Yosarian2]

I understand that the old newbie setup was unbalanced, because the cop/doc team was just too strong when a cop knew he could safely role-claim on day 1, but reading through and having been in a few of the new newbie games it appears to me that the new setup is unbalanced in favor of the mafia; it seems like it's very hard for the town to get 2 out of 3 lynches right without a cop. So, for another possible newbie game setup, how about just have a setup where every newbie game has a cop, and there's a 50/50 chance that there's also a doc? In other words, the only two possible setups would be:

Cop, doc, 2 mafia, 3 townies
Cop, 4 townies, 2 mafia

with a 50/50 chance of each one being used.

It seems like that would prevent the breaking stratagy of the day 1 cop claim, but would leave a somewhat more balanced game then the random setups we have now. What does everyone think?

[Yosarian2]

I think you're just seeing a swing of the balance toward mafia for a while. Read back to some of the *original* newbie games, and you'll see that scum won a lot of those, too, until the town developed some strategy/skill. It's entirely possible to win a game without a cop; it just requires more skill and less reliance on one power role.

Now that I just finished the last newbie game where I was scum and so can talk about it, let me just say that in the current setup it seems much too easy for scum to win. Sure, there are other ways to find a mafia game without power roles, but the best ones involve several days of posts and voting records to look at. It's very hard to get much out one day of voting records, and without a cop, I just don't think the game is balanced.

Halo Freak: Starting at night with 7 people dosn't work. That would mean that the town would have to hit on day 1, or they would lose. I don't think that would be a good intro to mafia. You could make it an 8 person game and start at night, though.

[Yosarian2]

Yeah, I know that the newbie games had gotten to the point where they were almost always won by the town, but I contend that the reason for that is that the cop/doc pair is too strong, especally in a game that small where a protected claimed cop can investigate most of the town very quickly. If there was just a cop and no doc, it would be more interesting and require more skill on the part of everyone, especally the cop.

In fact, I might modify my origional suggestion to say that perhaps every newbie game should be

2 mafia
4 town
1 cop

That way the mafia has to learn the skill of picking up on cop tells, and the cop has harder choices to make involving when to claim or if to claim without the "safety net" of a doctor.

In my opinion, a balanced game without any power roles would look more like this:

7 townies
2 scum

Or something like that. Without power roles, it usually takes a few days of vote counts and such in order to figure out who the mafia are, if the town and mafia are of about equal skill. Now, it might be good to run some games like that in newbie, but in a 2 scum 5 townie setup, the scum just don't have to work very hard to win; the town can really only win if the town gets very lucky, or if both scum make very serious play errors.

[Yosarian2]

(shrug) All right, then stick to my origional proposal where there's a cop and a 50/50 chance of a doc.

I wouldn't mind if it was a case of town 30%/mafia 70%, but from what I've seen, it looks to me like in a game without a cop, the town wins less then 30% of the time. Much less then 30%.