Mini 917 -- Precision Mafia (Game Over)

[Seacore]

I think it's a little too hard to orchestrate though. But maybe I'm just work-distracted and can't think straight.

Or maybe you're scum trying to dissuade town of a working strategy.

Delicious

FOS: Seacore

Is that why I raised my specific concerns right above the comment you quoted? And have engaged with the idea since? Yeah, out of context quotes for the scum-win

[popsofctown]

Out of context? If that line is so dependent on other parts of the post, why did you yourself put a line of space away from the rest of it?

[Seacore]

It's out of context because you are claiming all I did was say that, and offered no other specific criticism, when you are ignoring the fact I did.

Disagree with that criticism, fine. But it was there.

[fhqwhgads]

It's out of context because you are claiming all I did was say that

No I didn't.

[AlmasterGM]

@pops - Fair enough, I suppose my immediate qualms are answered. However, we should keep in mind that 1) all we are getting out of this the equivalent of a cop investigation, not an auto-win or anything and 2) Our commander must claim if he "receives a guilty," and unless there is a doc around to protect him, he'll die after that, meaning no more bonus CP and no more "investigations."

@fhq - There are two unknown factors in CP calculation - number of scum and commander bonus. If these factors are solved, we will know exactly how many CP each team has. The scumteam will have no more than 6-9 CP. The max that can be spent per player per day is 10. Thus, we gain the ability to trade a boatload of CP for the equivalent of a cop investigation. This will work regardless of whether we have a commander around, too.

@Iec - What is your opinion of pop's proposal?

@Seacore - Your negative attitude does not match your positive attitude. E.g., you say "I'm all for breaking the setup, I just want to evaluate it," and then you give some terribad reason as to why it sucks and say, "yeah this plan just won't work." You don't try and offer a fix, either. This makes you suspect.

[Iecerint]

My supposition is that town probably has an abundance of CP. (My guess is that scum has 0-1 commanders and town has 1-2 commanders. Otherwise, the Mod's pre-game speculation that reluctance to use CP might look scummy would not make sense.) Given that abundance of CP, I think that using a bunch of CP to potentially narrow down scum D2 would be a fairly wise use of CP, especially since unused CP doesn't carry over to subsequent days.

I should confess that I skimmed the last page or so before my post. It started to look a little vacuous. So if his plan was amended somewhere in there, I may've missed it. I should also add that I think we should slightly favor killing whoever just wasted the CP, in the interest of saving CP (i.e. CP is no longer abundant after you've potentially wasted however many points of it). This problem wouldn't exist if everyone was disciplined about FoS's, though.

Another thing I should point out is that when I indicated my disappointment that it wouldn't be VC mafia per se pre-game, the Mod indicated to me which VC character my role would have been had this remained a VC-themed game. This makes me wonder whether the roles in this game are just ciphers of VC characters (e.g. whether he made VC mafia, and then de-flavored the roles to broaden the appeal of the game). I'm not sure that too much speculation in this direction would be fruitful (might just distract from other issues), but it is potentially something to keep in mind as we see a few more flips.

[popsofctown]

What is VC mafia?

Are you sure it's ok to disclose this mod interaction?

It's no problem as long as he doesn't discuss specifics (e.g. my player was X). If anyone else is curious, let me know. I didn't have any of the flavor written, but I will tell you what character you would've been.

[Iecerint]

VC is Valkyria Chronicles. That's where the CP stuff comes from; it's a combat mechanic from the franchise. This game was originally a VC theme game, but the Mod decided to broaden the theme out of worry that VC was too obscure. That information can be found in the queue.

I didn't explicitly request permission to share it, if that's what you mean, but I have no reason to believe I've done anything naughty. The tone of the correspondence was "Hey, since you're a VC fan, you'd be X given Y." It was really parenthetical. For all I know, he was just injecting some custom flavor on the basis of my stated interest.

If you're rather asking whether it's wise to disclose the information for strategic reasons, I certainly think it is, yes. Scum are already in a position to make those kinds of generalizations because they presumably have access to one another's roles.

[Seacore]

Given that I seem to be popping up as 'second most suspect' to a lot of people, regardless of whether I think it's for reasonable points or not, I'd be willing to burn as many CPs as is decided.

But pops, am I correct in understanding that Day 1 we'd have nobody waste the extra, so we'd have a comparison point?

[AlmasterGM]

I just realized we can use this CP-burn plan multiple times per day. This could lead to some massive breakage if used correctly. For example, the town currently has 20-30ish CP. Lets say three players burn 5 extra CP each. If, according to the commander, the town is missing a bit more than 15 CP the next day, it means ALL THREE of those players are town. If we are missing less than 15 but more/around 10, one of the players is scum. And so on. Yes, this makes things a bit less definite than forcing one player to burn at a time, but if it works, the results would be killer. THREE confirmed townies? Yes, please.

[Iecerint]

I'm not sure I understand. Do commanders have access to residual CP totals after each night phase?

[AlmasterGM]

However, the remaining command points in the party's pool will be shown privately to all Commander units at the end of every night phase (before the next day's points are replenished)

[Iecerint]

Amazing. That almost seems too good to be true.

[Cobalt]

at this point I don't see any way town can lose based on CP abuse. Shall we begin by having fifi burn some points?

[Seacore]

Yeah, I like that. We can definitely afford it.
And the results would either be
1) Three confirmed town - Sweet
2) 2 townies and a scum - worst case scenario, but still nice
3) 1 town and 2 scum - even sweeter than 1
4) 3 scum - sweet enough to enduce orgasm

[Seacore]

Enduce? Really Seacore? What the hell is wrong with your spelling these days... induce

[Iecerint]

If final CP is less than 0, are Commanders told that end-of-night CP was (e.g.) "-4," or simply that no CP remained?

[Seacore]

Well, we need a baseline for tonight don't we?

We're either going to kill fifi, or as him to burn some points and kill somebody else.

Getting him to do both is not so good. Because either he's scum, and won't burn the points, or he's town and we're killing him and losing points.

[AlmasterGM]

Well, we have to lynch somebody today before we get the results of the plan (commander units get their data at the end of every night), so I say we lynch fifi today (he's the most likely to be scum and the VI if he's town) and pick three different targets to use the CP plan on.

Amazing. That almost seems too good to be true.

I am very afraid of this ... but I have to admit, it seems to work.

[Iecerint]

My point is that if exact numbers are only given when at least 1 CP remains, that gives an incentive to be slightly more conservative.

[Seacore]

So, lets get some votes going for this plan, as it'll only work if we all agree to do it (minus the filthy scum who will obviously try to screw it up)

1) We kill fifi today.
2) We do not burn points in a special way today, giving us a baseline.
3) Everybody with a PR decides to either use it every night (best option) or never use it (may be only safe option for some PRs)
4) Town commander quietly observes how many command points we have left and keeps silent.
5) Day 2, we decide who to lynch in the usual way, but also select 3 players to burn 5 of their points with 4 random votes before landing on the actual lynchee (why waste more CPs than we have to)
6) Night 2 should progress similiarly to night 1 with the town Commander observing the points
7) If all three chosen 'burners' come up as town, the Commander stays silent. If any other situation occurs, the Commander speaks up
8) Rinse and repeat, hopefully with a Doc protecting the Commander.

Thoughts?
Particularly, does anybody have an issue with point 7?

[Cobalt]

I think cops with guilties should claim before commanders with maybe-guilties, but other than that nothing.

[AlmasterGM]

Why would we wait until tomorrow to do this when we can start now?

AFA Number 7 goes, I think it depends on how good our commander feels they are at breadcrumbing. If they feel skilled, then they should remain silent and leave us a clue so they can bag another three "investigations" the next night whilst still retaining the knowledge from the first night. If they think they are going to fuck it up, then they should just claim it right away.

[Iecerint]

I think we're potentially OK to use CP today. Assuming that the Commanders are aware of how much extra CP they generate, producing a baseline is unnecessary. As such, the baseline is only useful to players who are not the Commander, but the Commander must reveal himself to make the baseline known to them. So I don't understand the need to establish a baseline CP D1. Assuming the Commander is competent at counting, choosing some burners should help us out today.

I do like the rest of your plan, though 3 burners may be superfluous. At the very least, we should lower the number of burners as the number of players drops.

Let me know if I am missing something critical.

[Seacore]

My point is that if exact numbers are only given when at least 1 CP remains, that gives an incentive to be slightly more conservative.

Lets look at things here, in a worst case (for this plan) scenario

There are 12 players, lets say there are only 8 on the town team. Either 4 scum, or 3 scum plus SK.

With fifi dead and a townie night killed, we'll be down to six town (as I said, worst case scenario) that'd put us on 18+x. 15 points would be spent on this plan, with 3 of those points being used for the actual lynch of the day. With 10 players left, another 3 points would need to be spent. Lets assume all these points come from town.
There goes our 18 points. So we need to hope that the commander's bonus is = to our PRs.
With 8 town players, I'd imagine we don't have any more than 4 PRs (is that a safe assumption) and I think the commander bonus could easily be 4 (possibly not a safe assumption.

So with this fairly worst case scenario, we're still okay.

The upside to this, is that if the above scenario takes place, compared to how many points we have left tonight. It means the commander might be able to see that no scum voted at all on that day (maybe) and that the scum stayed silent. If one or two of the voters of the day were scum, that gives us a breathing room for it to almost definitely work.

I think. The commander bonus variable is a headache (and rightfully so)