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Big Mafia Mafia 3 - Game Over, Big City + A Fairy + Ditto Win!
- Thread starter UncleSam
- Start date
see yall again in mafia mafia 4
GG, even though we didn’t win, a huge thank you to Bass for recruiting me, I had a lot of fun as a wolf. It was really funny to go from literally zero information to a full sheet in about 10 minutes thanks to LonelyNess , I also had a lot of fun chilling in the Dumpster chat with you.
Also I already said this in discord but technically I achieved this promise when I got recruited, just not in the way that I was intending. Da Letter El I guess you still got avenged though lol
Also I already said this in discord but technically I achieved this promise when I got recruited, just not in the way that I was intending. Da Letter El I guess you still got avenged though lol
I had an extremely fun experience, thank you US for hosting and resolving the entire game on your own. It's cool to see the Smogon mafia revival last longer than one game
Thank you to the oldies for carrying Big City and thank you Laurel/Celever/JALMONT for entertaining me in the first half of the game. GGs mafia and psychopath
Thank you to the oldies for carrying Big City and thank you Laurel/Celever/JALMONT for entertaining me in the first half of the game. GGs mafia and psychopath
Good game, everyone. Well-fought to the end by the Cartel and neutrals.
This was a very stressful game for me to worry about if I sheeted a mole, if I was trusting someone I shouldn't, was I targeting right, etc.
It is my opinion that, having avoided moling or sheeting scum entirely, the village should've had an easier win. Most Bigs villages lose because a wolf or mafia infiltrates them and starts controlling actions - actually most Bigs villages just plain lose lmao, we went and looked. Sam's never designed a game town won until now. That it came down to this tight battle of balancing act by the wolf, and Sam even admitted if we got moled Bass would've had to balance against the mafia instead of for them, was extremely frustrating as a leader. To be like "wow I kept my info tight and scumhunted the entire Cartel and it disadvantaged my team??" The saltmines were open.
I think the village was slightly undersized. There was no real cushion for town if the KP against us is solely against us, AND we blocked 3 or 4 kills (1 psycho's, 2 or 3 Cartel). And my inability to force fairy to lose when she wasn't strictly incompatible with town meant there were 4 other kills against us as well. Too soft ;(
Sam cucked us hard. dak came up with a bigbrain scheme to mayorize a goon and have fairy kill it, but he said the mayor HAD TO BE town for it to count. zzz. No fun!
I disagree strongly with the design of all four neutrals. Ditto and Celever should have just been town/cartel respectively, fairy is a very outdated neutral design, and Bass... well we salted about it in deadchat quite a lot. I think Bass is a very bad role design, do not, please, make a role like this again, anyone looking to host a game.
I think that this game would have benefitted from a little more time in the oven. Sam's true love is multifaction design imo and he needs more time to cook on village roles/village fun. He's never been very adept at designing a "fun for the village" game because of all the complex mechanics he puts in, that present nice twists and turns but make it hard for villagers to be trusted/included/to not feel like wolf expansion pack roles. He was pretty close to having things really really good, and fell a little short in ways that lent themselves strongly to the saltmines.
I am glad to have helped bring town the win. We went through it emotionally and sleep-wise trying to figure things out in the steadfast squad chat (shoutout to Amy for claiming goon N0 instead of replying to my 'seeking support' post and avoiding being in the chat lmao). I can't thank bluedoom and especially dak enough for helping plan the actions and put the pieces together.
Also huge props to Pidge. After I criticized how he was too attention-getting as the Shedinja role in ipl's game he said "bet" and played his SUS AF role properly this game. He didn't fullclaim it to me which I think was very smart because "hey gimme everyone's alias lol" is the sussiest thing ever. He also somehow dodged the Cartel/Psycho ever inspecting him so they had no idea he was lurking in the shadows, waiting for his time.
I am glad Ditto was allowed to win with us, he was fun to play with. I think fairy played it on the up-and-up enough for town to never see her as a bigger threat than Bass.
Also big +1 to Sting Commander DLE who led the outting of the goons on N0.
And good job to billy for rounding up the troops after the coup attempt!
Shoutout to our final meandtheboys.jpg scheme: THE MAYORIZZLER, defeater of wolves.
Thank you for hosting, Sam, and thanks everyone for playing. Despite the emotional ringer this game put me through I enjoyed talking to everyone and I regretted I couldn't trust more people before the recruits deployed. This game turning into a 1v1v1 where the entire living village was in one chat together with the sheet open is a very strange dynamic for a big.
Probably the biggest shame is that the Undercover Cop never got to go on his suicide run at the cartel boss cause bluedoom overclaimed N0 (and LN then randed his alias to cop anyway) lol.
This was a very stressful game for me to worry about if I sheeted a mole, if I was trusting someone I shouldn't, was I targeting right, etc.
It is my opinion that, having avoided moling or sheeting scum entirely, the village should've had an easier win. Most Bigs villages lose because a wolf or mafia infiltrates them and starts controlling actions - actually most Bigs villages just plain lose lmao, we went and looked. Sam's never designed a game town won until now. That it came down to this tight battle of balancing act by the wolf, and Sam even admitted if we got moled Bass would've had to balance against the mafia instead of for them, was extremely frustrating as a leader. To be like "wow I kept my info tight and scumhunted the entire Cartel and it disadvantaged my team??" The saltmines were open.
I think the village was slightly undersized. There was no real cushion for town if the KP against us is solely against us, AND we blocked 3 or 4 kills (1 psycho's, 2 or 3 Cartel). And my inability to force fairy to lose when she wasn't strictly incompatible with town meant there were 4 other kills against us as well. Too soft ;(
Sam cucked us hard. dak came up with a bigbrain scheme to mayorize a goon and have fairy kill it, but he said the mayor HAD TO BE town for it to count. zzz. No fun!
I disagree strongly with the design of all four neutrals. Ditto and Celever should have just been town/cartel respectively, fairy is a very outdated neutral design, and Bass... well we salted about it in deadchat quite a lot. I think Bass is a very bad role design, do not, please, make a role like this again, anyone looking to host a game.
I think that this game would have benefitted from a little more time in the oven. Sam's true love is multifaction design imo and he needs more time to cook on village roles/village fun. He's never been very adept at designing a "fun for the village" game because of all the complex mechanics he puts in, that present nice twists and turns but make it hard for villagers to be trusted/included/to not feel like wolf expansion pack roles. He was pretty close to having things really really good, and fell a little short in ways that lent themselves strongly to the saltmines.
I am glad to have helped bring town the win. We went through it emotionally and sleep-wise trying to figure things out in the steadfast squad chat (shoutout to Amy for claiming goon N0 instead of replying to my 'seeking support' post and avoiding being in the chat lmao). I can't thank bluedoom and especially dak enough for helping plan the actions and put the pieces together.
Also huge props to Pidge. After I criticized how he was too attention-getting as the Shedinja role in ipl's game he said "bet" and played his SUS AF role properly this game. He didn't fullclaim it to me which I think was very smart because "hey gimme everyone's alias lol" is the sussiest thing ever. He also somehow dodged the Cartel/Psycho ever inspecting him so they had no idea he was lurking in the shadows, waiting for his time.
I am glad Ditto was allowed to win with us, he was fun to play with. I think fairy played it on the up-and-up enough for town to never see her as a bigger threat than Bass.
Also big +1 to Sting Commander DLE who led the outting of the goons on N0.
And good job to billy for rounding up the troops after the coup attempt!
Shoutout to our final meandtheboys.jpg scheme: THE MAYORIZZLER, defeater of wolves.
Thank you for hosting, Sam, and thanks everyone for playing. Despite the emotional ringer this game put me through I enjoyed talking to everyone and I regretted I couldn't trust more people before the recruits deployed. This game turning into a 1v1v1 where the entire living village was in one chat together with the sheet open is a very strange dynamic for a big.
Probably the biggest shame is that the Undercover Cop never got to go on his suicide run at the cartel boss cause bluedoom overclaimed N0 (and LN then randed his alias to cop anyway) lol.
Last edited:
Good game, was stressful playing the entire way lol
I totally played my role bad and if I had to replay it i wouldn't pubclaim Miller; that said I did claim the commissioner info part of my pm to ln mostly because I was searching for a good leader candidate; I needed a confirmed town leader asap because anything else would be bad if I got rand scanned n0(and that ended up happening). The last thing that I needed was town still unsure about who leader is, someone scans me and gets me lynched for it, because avoiding mislynches is also pro wincon anyway.
I made the mistake of just reading the first part of my role and claiming Miller instead of reading the entire role and understanding what my role was intended to do though.
I totally played my role bad and if I had to replay it i wouldn't pubclaim Miller; that said I did claim the commissioner info part of my pm to ln mostly because I was searching for a good leader candidate; I needed a confirmed town leader asap because anything else would be bad if I got rand scanned n0(and that ended up happening). The last thing that I needed was town still unsure about who leader is, someone scans me and gets me lynched for it, because avoiding mislynches is also pro wincon anyway.
I made the mistake of just reading the first part of my role and claiming Miller instead of reading the entire role and understanding what my role was intended to do though.
The biggest oopsie this game (idk how to format):
N3:
Distract succeeded.
During the night, Redless (alias Rhode Island) revealed himself to you:
UncleSam said:
Dear Redless, you are The Sacrifice.
Alias: Rhode Island.
You’re a heroic soul ready to give your life for the Big City. Or at least someone who lives there.
Once during the game, you may submit “NX - Sacrifice self for <Alias>”. From that point on, if <Alias> is targeted with any negative ability, including kills or votes during the day, you will step in and take their place as the target. This ability will fail if used on someone with a different allegiance (but you may still try again until it succeeds).
When you use this ability, the fact that you have done so will be revealed to your target, as will your entire Role PM. Their entire Role PM and username will also be revealed to you. If you ever die for them, you will still be able to talk to them post-death.
Once you are bonded to someone, neither of you will be able to change allegiance for any reason. Until then, however, you could.
You are allied with the Big City. You win if the Big City eliminates all threats.
The two of you are now soul bonded. He has been added to this conversation, and you will be added to his. You are effectively twins henceforth.
(This wasn't my fault btw)
N3:
Distract succeeded.
During the night, Redless (alias Rhode Island) revealed himself to you:
UncleSam said:
Dear Redless, you are The Sacrifice.
Alias: Rhode Island.
You’re a heroic soul ready to give your life for the Big City. Or at least someone who lives there.
Once during the game, you may submit “NX - Sacrifice self for <Alias>”. From that point on, if <Alias> is targeted with any negative ability, including kills or votes during the day, you will step in and take their place as the target. This ability will fail if used on someone with a different allegiance (but you may still try again until it succeeds).
When you use this ability, the fact that you have done so will be revealed to your target, as will your entire Role PM. Their entire Role PM and username will also be revealed to you. If you ever die for them, you will still be able to talk to them post-death.
Once you are bonded to someone, neither of you will be able to change allegiance for any reason. Until then, however, you could.
You are allied with the Big City. You win if the Big City eliminates all threats.
The two of you are now soul bonded. He has been added to this conversation, and you will be added to his. You are effectively twins henceforth.
(This wasn't my fault btw)
GG everyone.
???
you (and dak) did great before yall died, but don't flatter yourself for that one lol. you had no bearing on how i played this game and i'm proud of how i played in ipl's, it was fun and i'd do it again in the same position.
i enjoyed the execution of the bastard mechanics this game. the multiple fake psychopath flips were funny and really made it feel like some kind of 'mystery' you have to solve. i thought it was weird how close the game was despite village lynching correctly each time and not completing randing night actions and getting decently organized despite the looming fear of conversion.
also i liked i didn't really have to use my brain once i became relevant, just copy paste messages and let other people do the brain work
.mekkah did great in handling convos with bass. kudos to billy as well for doing all that he did when i first unlocked dead talking.
shoutouts to saberslasher for us having an entire convo in forums DM even though we could literally just use discord.
Here are the messages I sent to the Commissioner
The following day Yeti used the code word and while I was initially thinking I wasn't gonna talk to them so early, when I found out it was Yeti I thought fuck it.
I was convinced that someone else was also getting these messages, so I wanted to plant false seeds.
I initially started making different codes for whoever was listening to crack, but then I thought I'd start sending random wikipedia entries to confuse them. This message was roleblocked
It was at this point that US refused to send any more messages from me to Yeti
I was sure I was gonna die the night I did so I started writing this message, but then I tried to get the Mafia to spare my life for a few days and got rid of this message as to not antagonize them.
i didn't literally think it it was just a compliment of your play here
Postgame
Apologies to those that this postgame disappoints - it will primarily be focused on the design of the game, philosophies behind things, an analysis of what worked and what didn't, and then a brief rundown of what happened and some notable plays that occurred.
Design Philosophy - General
I wanted this game to allow for the maximal possible skill expression regardless of role. I know that this became a meme, but I did honestly want to set out towards this aim. Towards this end, I settled on an (almost) totally split mafia similar to Oberon in the game Resistance. I felt that this setup allowed for the most possible plays, both from a village and from a mafia POV.
I also knew that I wanted the role strength in the game to be fairly high, and resilient to bad luck on all fronts. I knew that comeback mechanics had worked well in Metroid Prime 2 and decided to implement those pretty strongly in this game.
After last game, I liked the idea of including recruits so that the Cartel and Psycho could patch whatever holes they felt they had in their lategame planning / role strength. I also thought this would make the village play a little more flexibly and be a bit easier to mole / spread paranoia amongst, which were both themes I wanted to explore.
Finally, I wanted there to be some additional neutral roles that had to perform a balancing act between the major factions (being the Big City, Cartel, and the Psychopath). As such, I made three other neutrals: The Assassin (the go-between between the Village and Cartel), The FBI Agent (Village and Psycho), and The Anarchist (Cartel and Psycho). In the end, I made the FBI Agent and the Anarchist overly friendly towards the main factions and not enough towards the Psycho, so neither really fulfilled their original intent in that regard. The Assassin played pretty much as I had hoped it would, thankfully, and ended up pretty actively playing both the mafia and village without ever taking too strong of a side with or against either one.
Design Philosophy - Big City
I had seen most big villages win simply by having a large number of non-interactive, uninteresting roles that acted as an amorphous blob that overwhelmed bad mafias. If those villages ever lost majority or got into a tricky endgame situation, they invariably lost due to having zero unknown / unexpected role power and no ability to make a comeback whatsoever. I thought that was horrible and set out to design pretty much the opposite of that. I really tried to make the village roles strong and interactive, and have a lot of cool / unique connections for players to explore.
There was a lot of consternation, however, about how I balanced that - I set up the numbers to be balanced around the village having effectively 11/6 kills per cycle (1 vote + 1/3 jail + 1/2 vigilante) at base, and the mafia + wolf having 2.5 kills per cycle. I then assumed village would have one misvote and two recruits against it and then calced a ratio of 2.5 / 1.83 from the result. This is all a long version of explaining how I originally (when the game had 50 players) arrived at 31 villagers (including Ditto) and 17 mafia (including Celever) - 31 -> 28 villagers minus two recruits and a missed vote, 17 + 3 (Psycho and two recruits) = 20, and Assassin I figured would be about 2/3 of a Cartel and 1/3 of a villager - the result was a ratio of 20.66 to 28.33, which is a ratio of 1.37, or almost exactly 2.5 / (11 / 6). I threw in one goon and one villager with the change to 52, not a huge difference.
Now admittedly the 1/3 jailkeeper wasn't a 'real kill', and the village suffered from a number of undercooked roles that I needed to put a bit more time / thought into. I'll list my design concerns with the other factions later, but strictly from a village perspective the changes I would make if I could make a 'patch notes' would be:
- Include one additional villager and one less Cartel goon
- Have that additional villager be a backup Jailer called the executioner, who kills jailed goons after N cycles (maybe 3 or 4)
- Include the steadfast and miller text in the OP so that other factions could more effectively fake claim
- Update the Lawyer role to be a forger so that the village would have a way to hide their best roles from mass inspection by the mafia
- Move the one-shot redirect back to the Mayor, which is where it started and never should've left
- Update some of the shitty village roles to be stronger at base form (Conspiracy Theorist, Secretary pre-upgrade, most of the cops, and The Poll Worker all needed to be stronger / more interactive)
- Make a real role as the 52nd role in the game instead of The Mime, I honestly just winged it because we had two extra signups
- Tone down the banker and make the extra life an active, to make it clear that the wolf (or others) would be able to absorb it
- Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting
Actual Play - Big City
The Big City played well in general, though not as well as they think they did. DLE did a great job of moling the Cartel early and getting some valuable information, and Yeti / Dak did a great job of rounding up the villagers and keeping things organized without sheeting any moles.
Their problems lay more in execution than anything else, however. Yeti / Dak got fooled by the Psycho kill frame, which admittedly is a tough thing to guess but in my opinion they had better options than blowing a vigilante shot on it. They also weren't explicit enough about keeping LonelyNess in the dark, and so LN got a LOT of village info for free just from talking to people that he probably should not have been able to get.
Finally and most importantly, their night actions left a lot on the table. I mean this from the village as a whole's perspective, not from the perspective of what the village leaders were ordering. Bus driving Blazade into the kill from A Fairy on Night 3 was the most crucial mistake they made in this regard, but they underutilized a lot of roles that had much more potential than was realized, including:
- The Sacrifice (Redless)
- The Curator (Martin, who probably should've been targeted by The Sacrifice)
- The Journalist (LightWolf, who primarily was used to just check goons when he could've been Psycho hunting)
- The Mime (idled) and The Mimic (waited three nights then just copied M2H anyway, who was available way earlier)
- The Escort (roleblocked Ditto / The FBI Agent, and only roleblocked / strength sapped Pennsylvania on the Cartel over the course of like six nights alive)
Basically, it felt like the village night actions were never anywhere close to being maximally efficient. Some of this is just the nature of being a Smogon village, but I do think that this one had an unusually high amount of missed opportunities.
I do want to call out one role that I was particularly happy with how it functioned / was played:
- The Psychic / Pidge - I said this on the postgame chat, but I honestly think that nobody on the village was having fun until this role and The Summoning Circle discord server was activated. This role basically salvaged the village interest in the game and made it so that a LOT more people got invested / involved than otherwise would have. Pidge played well from a player perspective too, so just really well done all around here.
I also want to give props to the villagers who gutted it out post-Yeti / Dak and played through to the end, including billymills, LightWolf, zorbees, Mekkah, Patos, theangryscientist, Whydon, Realiti, Blakers, Redless, and ChaosNinjaGaming. Special props (bet you thought I forgot about him) to Bluedoom, who imo had a really rough first cycle or two but who I watched grow as an OC player to a massive degree over the course of this game as part of the village leader core. He went from claiming to LN on N0 to literally submitting all of the village night actions by N11, including the action set that won them the game. Spectacular turnaround.
Design Philosophy - The Cartel
I've heard the Cartel described as an 'amorphous blob' and I would generally agree with that sentiment. It was meant to be a faction that was not reliant on any particular players and that was susceptible to village misinformation / moling, but that was incredibly resilient and flexible while having sufficient numbers to be able to tank hits for a while and potentially even win a straight firefight against the village with some assistance from the Psycho.
I know that a lot of the mafia felt that the 'vanilla' nature of the goons made fake claiming harder, and that complaint is not unjustified. However, there were a lot of tools available to the Cartel to help with fake claiming that weren't utilized properly / at all, so I think this is a combination of design and Cartel faults on this one.
For the patch notes / changes I would have made:
- As mentioned above, add in the steadfast / miller text to the OP to help with fake claiming.
- Add in some additional situational tools for the late game with prohibitive strength costs, including a vote stop (cost ~60), an ensure (~20), and a bus drive (~10-15).
- Make it clear 100% that the FBI Agent is a neutral that needs the Cartel dead, and add in that The Anarchist is a neutral that needs the Big City dead. As a side note, I would've also given the Anarchist an anonymous line to both the Psycho and the Cartel to help it coordinate the anti-village forces (and probably remove the Psycho anon line to the Cartel as a means of forcing the Anarchist to be the coordinator between these anti-village forces).
- No, I would not give the Goons individual abilities.
Actual Play - Cartel
LN did a great job of blitzing out during N0 and getting a TON of free info. Sadly, the Cartel gathering of goon claims did not go as well, and they lost a number of claims to DLE that they really should not have. I think that timezones played a big role in this as SB. and Tommy were often not around at deadline, which is a pretty lame way to lose claims and have goons outed over. I do think that this was kind of the nature of the game though to some extent, and was good play by DLE primarily.
The Cartel night actions tended to be a bit more timid than I'd have personally gone for (not promoting Night 0, going for 26 tracks instead of a handful of full inspects, choosing to kill their inspection results rather than killspecting in the early going), but very few of them were objectively 'wrong'. The only two that were pretty clearly overly greedy were not Negative Safeguarding Utah the night it was open to a kill, and not beneficial safeguarding LN to protect from the Martyr when they knew Fairy was killing him.
The Cartel united around N3 or so, and started playing a lot better once they reached the state of being a cohesive unit. I think the individual goons were really struggling with a lack of direction or information prior to that, which is sort of the nature of the game but they had options to keep claiming later open (rather than just the open gooning that a few of them chose).
Their negotiations with the Psycho struggled initially due to being overly cagey with sharing village information and just generally being unwilling to deal with the Psycho as an equal, but it seemed like LN (on the anon account 'The Mafian') was able to establish a stronger rapport with Bass and they worked together very well until LN died.
Ultimately the Cartel nearly won, and had a few 50/50 guesses needed in order to win. Considering how badly they got clapped early, this was quite the accomplishment, and a testament to their resilience (both in role power and player fortitude). Respect the attempt and the fight they displayed, even if the large number of tactical and deception errors meant that I am not sure if I'd say they 'deserved' to be so close to the win.
Design Philosophy - Psychopath
Well this role was referred to as 'my baby' by more than one player in this game, and I will admit that I spent a lot of time on it. I think it a neat / clean combinations of abilities and information that gave it a good amount of versatility without having a stupid number of roles - indeed, on N0 it had a grand total of 0 actions! Obviously this changed (and in quite a hurry) down the line, but I do think that people forget how weak this role was in the early going.
Overall the hope was that this role would be rather strong and able to balance the two factions against one another, then straddle the line between the two and ride the snowballing nature of the role to a victory.
Alternatively, this role had a lategame win con of making a hidden recruit that then gets a sneaky upgrade related to faking it's own death and a 'defibrillator' revive, as a callback to the Mafia Mafia 2 defibrillator temporarily reviving the wolf.
Patch notes / changes I would make:
- Include goon strength as an option for what it can absorb, to encourage hitting the Cartel more.
- Give it a straight-up LPV but say that you cannot survive more than one vote (plus the Minion swap, if they opt for that).
Actual Play - Psychopath
Bass played really well this game, even though I think he is beating himself up over his handful of (relatively minor imo) mistakes. I think he did a great job of getting the millers on his side and squeezing some good info for free out of that, while sliding under the radar of the town for about as long as he reasonably could.
I think he was a bit of a pain for the teams to negotiate with, unfortunately - I think he was a little too focused on antagonizing the village with auxiliary abilities that he could have used as a negotiating tactic. He ultimately bought himself enough ill will from them that they were legitimately considering just throwing to the Cartel to make him lose, and he had to go hard enough in the other direction to stay alive that he ended up actually pushing them too far into the 'strength' column when the village got an upgrade that he didn't expect.
Ultimately wolves are really REALLY hard to win with in big mafia games, and he came really close to doing so. Now maybe he knows how Snype felt after LoTR mafia. Either way, surviving to the last ten alive is a significant accomplishment and he ALMOST pulled it off.
Awards
Best Big City: Yeti
Best Cartel: LonelyNess
Best Neutral: Bass (A Fairy played quite well as well, but imo had the easier path to victory)
Thanks to everyone for playing, and hopefully Blazade can post the (six hour!) video postgame at some point in the next few days.
Apologies to those that this postgame disappoints - it will primarily be focused on the design of the game, philosophies behind things, an analysis of what worked and what didn't, and then a brief rundown of what happened and some notable plays that occurred.
Design Philosophy - General
I wanted this game to allow for the maximal possible skill expression regardless of role. I know that this became a meme, but I did honestly want to set out towards this aim. Towards this end, I settled on an (almost) totally split mafia similar to Oberon in the game Resistance. I felt that this setup allowed for the most possible plays, both from a village and from a mafia POV.
I also knew that I wanted the role strength in the game to be fairly high, and resilient to bad luck on all fronts. I knew that comeback mechanics had worked well in Metroid Prime 2 and decided to implement those pretty strongly in this game.
After last game, I liked the idea of including recruits so that the Cartel and Psycho could patch whatever holes they felt they had in their lategame planning / role strength. I also thought this would make the village play a little more flexibly and be a bit easier to mole / spread paranoia amongst, which were both themes I wanted to explore.
Finally, I wanted there to be some additional neutral roles that had to perform a balancing act between the major factions (being the Big City, Cartel, and the Psychopath). As such, I made three other neutrals: The Assassin (the go-between between the Village and Cartel), The FBI Agent (Village and Psycho), and The Anarchist (Cartel and Psycho). In the end, I made the FBI Agent and the Anarchist overly friendly towards the main factions and not enough towards the Psycho, so neither really fulfilled their original intent in that regard. The Assassin played pretty much as I had hoped it would, thankfully, and ended up pretty actively playing both the mafia and village without ever taking too strong of a side with or against either one.
Design Philosophy - Big City
I had seen most big villages win simply by having a large number of non-interactive, uninteresting roles that acted as an amorphous blob that overwhelmed bad mafias. If those villages ever lost majority or got into a tricky endgame situation, they invariably lost due to having zero unknown / unexpected role power and no ability to make a comeback whatsoever. I thought that was horrible and set out to design pretty much the opposite of that. I really tried to make the village roles strong and interactive, and have a lot of cool / unique connections for players to explore.
There was a lot of consternation, however, about how I balanced that - I set up the numbers to be balanced around the village having effectively 11/6 kills per cycle (1 vote + 1/3 jail + 1/2 vigilante) at base, and the mafia + wolf having 2.5 kills per cycle. I then assumed village would have one misvote and two recruits against it and then calced a ratio of 2.5 / 1.83 from the result. This is all a long version of explaining how I originally (when the game had 50 players) arrived at 31 villagers (including Ditto) and 17 mafia (including Celever) - 31 -> 28 villagers minus two recruits and a missed vote, 17 + 3 (Psycho and two recruits) = 20, and Assassin I figured would be about 2/3 of a Cartel and 1/3 of a villager - the result was a ratio of 20.66 to 28.33, which is a ratio of 1.37, or almost exactly 2.5 / (11 / 6). I threw in one goon and one villager with the change to 52, not a huge difference.
Now admittedly the 1/3 jailkeeper wasn't a 'real kill', and the village suffered from a number of undercooked roles that I needed to put a bit more time / thought into. I'll list my design concerns with the other factions later, but strictly from a village perspective the changes I would make if I could make a 'patch notes' would be:
- Include one additional villager and one less Cartel goon
- Have that additional villager be a backup Jailer called the executioner, who kills jailed goons after N cycles (maybe 3 or 4)
- Include the steadfast and miller text in the OP so that other factions could more effectively fake claim
- Update the Lawyer role to be a forger so that the village would have a way to hide their best roles from mass inspection by the mafia
- Move the one-shot redirect back to the Mayor, which is where it started and never should've left
- Update some of the shitty village roles to be stronger at base form (Conspiracy Theorist, Secretary pre-upgrade, most of the cops, and The Poll Worker all needed to be stronger / more interactive)
- Make a real role as the 52nd role in the game instead of The Mime, I honestly just winged it because we had two extra signups
- Tone down the banker and make the extra life an active, to make it clear that the wolf (or others) would be able to absorb it
- Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting
Actual Play - Big City
The Big City played well in general, though not as well as they think they did. DLE did a great job of moling the Cartel early and getting some valuable information, and Yeti / Dak did a great job of rounding up the villagers and keeping things organized without sheeting any moles.
Their problems lay more in execution than anything else, however. Yeti / Dak got fooled by the Psycho kill frame, which admittedly is a tough thing to guess but in my opinion they had better options than blowing a vigilante shot on it. They also weren't explicit enough about keeping LonelyNess in the dark, and so LN got a LOT of village info for free just from talking to people that he probably should not have been able to get.
Finally and most importantly, their night actions left a lot on the table. I mean this from the village as a whole's perspective, not from the perspective of what the village leaders were ordering. Bus driving Blazade into the kill from A Fairy on Night 3 was the most crucial mistake they made in this regard, but they underutilized a lot of roles that had much more potential than was realized, including:
- The Sacrifice (Redless)
- The Curator (Martin, who probably should've been targeted by The Sacrifice)
- The Journalist (LightWolf, who primarily was used to just check goons when he could've been Psycho hunting)
- The Mime (idled) and The Mimic (waited three nights then just copied M2H anyway, who was available way earlier)
- The Escort (roleblocked Ditto / The FBI Agent, and only roleblocked / strength sapped Pennsylvania on the Cartel over the course of like six nights alive)
Basically, it felt like the village night actions were never anywhere close to being maximally efficient. Some of this is just the nature of being a Smogon village, but I do think that this one had an unusually high amount of missed opportunities.
I do want to call out one role that I was particularly happy with how it functioned / was played:
- The Psychic / Pidge - I said this on the postgame chat, but I honestly think that nobody on the village was having fun until this role and The Summoning Circle discord server was activated. This role basically salvaged the village interest in the game and made it so that a LOT more people got invested / involved than otherwise would have. Pidge played well from a player perspective too, so just really well done all around here.
I also want to give props to the villagers who gutted it out post-Yeti / Dak and played through to the end, including billymills, LightWolf, zorbees, Mekkah, Patos, theangryscientist, Whydon, Realiti, Blakers, Redless, and ChaosNinjaGaming. Special props (bet you thought I forgot about him) to Bluedoom, who imo had a really rough first cycle or two but who I watched grow as an OC player to a massive degree over the course of this game as part of the village leader core. He went from claiming to LN on N0 to literally submitting all of the village night actions by N11, including the action set that won them the game. Spectacular turnaround.
Design Philosophy - The Cartel
I've heard the Cartel described as an 'amorphous blob' and I would generally agree with that sentiment. It was meant to be a faction that was not reliant on any particular players and that was susceptible to village misinformation / moling, but that was incredibly resilient and flexible while having sufficient numbers to be able to tank hits for a while and potentially even win a straight firefight against the village with some assistance from the Psycho.
I know that a lot of the mafia felt that the 'vanilla' nature of the goons made fake claiming harder, and that complaint is not unjustified. However, there were a lot of tools available to the Cartel to help with fake claiming that weren't utilized properly / at all, so I think this is a combination of design and Cartel faults on this one.
For the patch notes / changes I would have made:
- As mentioned above, add in the steadfast / miller text to the OP to help with fake claiming.
- Add in some additional situational tools for the late game with prohibitive strength costs, including a vote stop (cost ~60), an ensure (~20), and a bus drive (~10-15).
- Make it clear 100% that the FBI Agent is a neutral that needs the Cartel dead, and add in that The Anarchist is a neutral that needs the Big City dead. As a side note, I would've also given the Anarchist an anonymous line to both the Psycho and the Cartel to help it coordinate the anti-village forces (and probably remove the Psycho anon line to the Cartel as a means of forcing the Anarchist to be the coordinator between these anti-village forces).
- No, I would not give the Goons individual abilities.
Actual Play - Cartel
LN did a great job of blitzing out during N0 and getting a TON of free info. Sadly, the Cartel gathering of goon claims did not go as well, and they lost a number of claims to DLE that they really should not have. I think that timezones played a big role in this as SB. and Tommy were often not around at deadline, which is a pretty lame way to lose claims and have goons outed over. I do think that this was kind of the nature of the game though to some extent, and was good play by DLE primarily.
The Cartel night actions tended to be a bit more timid than I'd have personally gone for (not promoting Night 0, going for 26 tracks instead of a handful of full inspects, choosing to kill their inspection results rather than killspecting in the early going), but very few of them were objectively 'wrong'. The only two that were pretty clearly overly greedy were not Negative Safeguarding Utah the night it was open to a kill, and not beneficial safeguarding LN to protect from the Martyr when they knew Fairy was killing him.
The Cartel united around N3 or so, and started playing a lot better once they reached the state of being a cohesive unit. I think the individual goons were really struggling with a lack of direction or information prior to that, which is sort of the nature of the game but they had options to keep claiming later open (rather than just the open gooning that a few of them chose).
Their negotiations with the Psycho struggled initially due to being overly cagey with sharing village information and just generally being unwilling to deal with the Psycho as an equal, but it seemed like LN (on the anon account 'The Mafian') was able to establish a stronger rapport with Bass and they worked together very well until LN died.
Ultimately the Cartel nearly won, and had a few 50/50 guesses needed in order to win. Considering how badly they got clapped early, this was quite the accomplishment, and a testament to their resilience (both in role power and player fortitude). Respect the attempt and the fight they displayed, even if the large number of tactical and deception errors meant that I am not sure if I'd say they 'deserved' to be so close to the win.
Design Philosophy - Psychopath
Well this role was referred to as 'my baby' by more than one player in this game, and I will admit that I spent a lot of time on it. I think it a neat / clean combinations of abilities and information that gave it a good amount of versatility without having a stupid number of roles - indeed, on N0 it had a grand total of 0 actions! Obviously this changed (and in quite a hurry) down the line, but I do think that people forget how weak this role was in the early going.
Overall the hope was that this role would be rather strong and able to balance the two factions against one another, then straddle the line between the two and ride the snowballing nature of the role to a victory.
Alternatively, this role had a lategame win con of making a hidden recruit that then gets a sneaky upgrade related to faking it's own death and a 'defibrillator' revive, as a callback to the Mafia Mafia 2 defibrillator temporarily reviving the wolf.
Patch notes / changes I would make:
- Include goon strength as an option for what it can absorb, to encourage hitting the Cartel more.
- Give it a straight-up LPV but say that you cannot survive more than one vote (plus the Minion swap, if they opt for that).
Actual Play - Psychopath
Bass played really well this game, even though I think he is beating himself up over his handful of (relatively minor imo) mistakes. I think he did a great job of getting the millers on his side and squeezing some good info for free out of that, while sliding under the radar of the town for about as long as he reasonably could.
I think he was a bit of a pain for the teams to negotiate with, unfortunately - I think he was a little too focused on antagonizing the village with auxiliary abilities that he could have used as a negotiating tactic. He ultimately bought himself enough ill will from them that they were legitimately considering just throwing to the Cartel to make him lose, and he had to go hard enough in the other direction to stay alive that he ended up actually pushing them too far into the 'strength' column when the village got an upgrade that he didn't expect.
Ultimately wolves are really REALLY hard to win with in big mafia games, and he came really close to doing so. Now maybe he knows how Snype felt after LoTR mafia. Either way, surviving to the last ten alive is a significant accomplishment and he ALMOST pulled it off.
Awards
Best Big City: Yeti
Best Cartel: LonelyNess
Best Neutral: Bass (A Fairy played quite well as well, but imo had the easier path to victory)
Thanks to everyone for playing, and hopefully Blazade can post the (six hour!) video postgame at some point in the next few days.
lol all good theni didn't literally think it it was just a compliment of your play here
Thank you to Sam for hosting the game. I had a really fun time for the most part with my role.
Teammate shoutouts:
Tommy: I'm really glad I got an opportunity to be on a team with you after my encounter with you in IPL's game as emergency host. I feel like you and I worked really well together and I genuinely enjoyed our conversations on general mafia philosophy. You've fully convinced me that banning copy pasting role PMs is the way to go.
Charlie: You worked so hard to gather goon claims only to be screwed over by bad timezone luck and an annoyingly effective counterclaim from DLE. I was so frustrated for you and i can only imagine how frustrated you were for yourself. You were instrumental in establishing the beginnings of our negotiations with Bass though, so you definitely came back from a rough beginning to be helpful to the squad. I'm only sad you weren't able to be more active from the midgame onward after your death.
Flandrs: I'm not going to pretend that you were the best teammate ever. You definitely have room to grow. But I do genuinely appreciate your activity level and your willingness to try... even if that effort was not always aimed effectively.... Please learn to be more agreeable in the future. I PROMISE it will serve you better than being so abrasive. Oh and don't ever fucking text your teammate's alias to someone for a laugh again......
Gmax: Absolutely horrendous start to the game obviously, but once you were in the fold, you're always a joy to have around to plan actions and in general be in chat with. Will always be hilarious that you were the first goon outted and the last goon alive.
shade: Was recruited, helped us kill laurel, said roughly three words, died, made no further comment. Absolute legend.
askaninjask / Ehmcee / piuchester / rssp1 / CaffeineBoost / Aura_guardian: You all along with gmax claimed to DLE or pubclaimed goon so fast it made our head spin and then even when you were in the mafia chat didn't really do much of anything to help the team which is a real shame because a few of you i've played with before and you're competent players so this level of pubgooning was so surprising to me. Shoutout to askaninjask though who did assist with the last couple cycles worth of negotiations with Bass. You did help put us in at least a reasonable position to continue to have a path to victory.
aria / Clouds / Jalmont / SirFish: The goons who didn't pubclaim but also didn't get a chance to play either due to being jailed or killed early. Aria had the best fake claim of all the goons and i was so sad that she got thrown into jail because it seemed like she had a real chance to at least not be immediately suspicious like the rest of the team. Clouds unfortunately got stuck in a position where he ignored Yeti for too long and couldn't really claim and then got inspected / killed by a fairy so never had an opportunity to really shine. Jalmont was both the best and the worst goon. Worst for vouching for DLE as a troll because people actually believed him and caused the pubgoons to go to him as a result, but best goon because he didn't out himself to anybody. I will also give him props, he tried his best to get back into the game after being released from jail and did negotiate quite a bit with Bass before his death.
Genisu / NightEmerald: The early rands/deaths. Genisu literally never talked to us before being inspected and lynched. He did make an appearance in the mafia chat, but never really said much of anything. NightEmerald made an attempt to help plan later on in the game which was a welcome change of pace given the declining activity of the rest of the team as the game wore on, but i do wish he'd been more active the whole game through.
Anywho, this post is long enough. I also want to shout out to Bass, sunny, Yeti, and dak for being really fun to play with even though we weren't teammates. I had a great time trying to mole the village and talking to the village leaders was both stressful and exciting. Plus you guys are just fun to talk general mafia philosophy with. And as far as Bass and sunny, i felt like our time negotiating before my death was where both of our factions thrived the most and I really enjoyed the mutual respect we paid each other during collaboration. I wish you'd have won if it couldn't have been us.
Thanks again to Sam and i'll see you in 6 months to a year. I need a break.
Teammate shoutouts:
Tommy: I'm really glad I got an opportunity to be on a team with you after my encounter with you in IPL's game as emergency host. I feel like you and I worked really well together and I genuinely enjoyed our conversations on general mafia philosophy. You've fully convinced me that banning copy pasting role PMs is the way to go.
Charlie: You worked so hard to gather goon claims only to be screwed over by bad timezone luck and an annoyingly effective counterclaim from DLE. I was so frustrated for you and i can only imagine how frustrated you were for yourself. You were instrumental in establishing the beginnings of our negotiations with Bass though, so you definitely came back from a rough beginning to be helpful to the squad. I'm only sad you weren't able to be more active from the midgame onward after your death.
Flandrs: I'm not going to pretend that you were the best teammate ever. You definitely have room to grow. But I do genuinely appreciate your activity level and your willingness to try... even if that effort was not always aimed effectively.... Please learn to be more agreeable in the future. I PROMISE it will serve you better than being so abrasive. Oh and don't ever fucking text your teammate's alias to someone for a laugh again......
Gmax: Absolutely horrendous start to the game obviously, but once you were in the fold, you're always a joy to have around to plan actions and in general be in chat with. Will always be hilarious that you were the first goon outted and the last goon alive.
shade: Was recruited, helped us kill laurel, said roughly three words, died, made no further comment. Absolute legend.
askaninjask / Ehmcee / piuchester / rssp1 / CaffeineBoost / Aura_guardian: You all along with gmax claimed to DLE or pubclaimed goon so fast it made our head spin and then even when you were in the mafia chat didn't really do much of anything to help the team which is a real shame because a few of you i've played with before and you're competent players so this level of pubgooning was so surprising to me. Shoutout to askaninjask though who did assist with the last couple cycles worth of negotiations with Bass. You did help put us in at least a reasonable position to continue to have a path to victory.
aria / Clouds / Jalmont / SirFish: The goons who didn't pubclaim but also didn't get a chance to play either due to being jailed or killed early. Aria had the best fake claim of all the goons and i was so sad that she got thrown into jail because it seemed like she had a real chance to at least not be immediately suspicious like the rest of the team. Clouds unfortunately got stuck in a position where he ignored Yeti for too long and couldn't really claim and then got inspected / killed by a fairy so never had an opportunity to really shine. Jalmont was both the best and the worst goon. Worst for vouching for DLE as a troll because people actually believed him and caused the pubgoons to go to him as a result, but best goon because he didn't out himself to anybody. I will also give him props, he tried his best to get back into the game after being released from jail and did negotiate quite a bit with Bass before his death.
Genisu / NightEmerald: The early rands/deaths. Genisu literally never talked to us before being inspected and lynched. He did make an appearance in the mafia chat, but never really said much of anything. NightEmerald made an attempt to help plan later on in the game which was a welcome change of pace given the declining activity of the rest of the team as the game wore on, but i do wish he'd been more active the whole game through.
Anywho, this post is long enough. I also want to shout out to Bass, sunny, Yeti, and dak for being really fun to play with even though we weren't teammates. I had a great time trying to mole the village and talking to the village leaders was both stressful and exciting. Plus you guys are just fun to talk general mafia philosophy with. And as far as Bass and sunny, i felt like our time negotiating before my death was where both of our factions thrived the most and I really enjoyed the mutual respect we paid each other during collaboration. I wish you'd have won if it couldn't have been us.
Thanks again to Sam and i'll see you in 6 months to a year. I need a break.
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Btw I have now had one (1) scumgame*.
*Whilst playing as a gimmick account limited to posting song lyrics/names in a 109-player mash that I explicitly said I wouldn't sheet beforehand (due to the aforementioned player count).
Or, in a wording moreso in the spirit of said account,
https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/45107-Pokémaf-Generation-3-Mash?p=7927476#post7927476
*Whilst playing as a gimmick account limited to posting song lyrics/names in a 109-player mash that I explicitly said I wouldn't sheet beforehand (due to the aforementioned player count).
Or, in a wording moreso in the spirit of said account,
When you finally see, the worst side of me, we'll finally be, eye to eye.
https://www.mafiauniverse.com/forums/threads/45107-Pokémaf-Generation-3-Mash?p=7927476#post7927476
i wasnt in cartel chat but i honestly wonder if they did genuinely think i was idling. i tried to idle that night, with the strategy of "they surely protect ln tonight, and presumably will know if i took the shot. if i idle i earn some trust and then can get ln the next night". obviously i then went to dinner or went to the convention center or wherever and came back to sam's response of "you can't idle with a valid target known to you" - i never told anyone that you had told me that, so LN presumably came out of our conversation happy enough thinking that i was idling. i had even prepared a "sorry sam said no but i was too busy to warn you" story had they actually protected LN and come to me with receipts, but that ended up being not necessary.
i feel bad a bit this game. i spent a lot of the most important days (for my wincon) ignoring messages from genuinely important people in the game because i was at PAX - i had no idea i was going to pax when i signed up, and then won while i was at pax. when i got my role pm, it didnt occur to me what i was getting into, and it took me a few cycles before i finally got in touch with anyone. i made a fake pm, the FBI Agent, which i thought was a plausible-sounding town role that might actually need a few town dead by the end of the game. shows how much i knew at the start, lol - shoulda gone with IRS Auditer, but apparently there was an actual town role named Auditer or smth?
the first massachusetts vote was wildly rough for me, but in a positive way, even if it meant little in term of the long play of the game, it really felt like a turning point for me. i opened up the smogon page in private browsing to count votes to see where things were at during that day at some point, because i didnt want to indicate ever that i was online - i had gone invisible on discord before even leaving for pax. i had both sides in my ears trying to encourage me to vote their side, and i fully ignored all those messages except for Sam to chat out where i was at a bunch (as well as assure him that i would vote before dl) - my logic ended up being that town had more votes than cartel, likely had a mayor hiding somewhere, and that bass probably had a BPV or something similar anyway. the next 3 mass votes kinda proved that :P
additionally, from my pov through the whole game, i was never scared of cartel, given i had the bpv and cartel had started off on a worse foot - i felt confident that they didnt have the resources to burn through my bpv, meaning that my major worry about being removed from the game was being voted out, which cartel didn't control. this is why i was much more willing to align with town even though during major periods of time i was just cleaning through my town kill obligations, and less willing to so publicly align with cartel (see the mass vote).
i honestly was never really worried about being removed due to lack of targets. i knew that town was able to elect new mayors, and i had an inkling that applied to the police commish and the jailor as well. i was given maine as a named cartel target super early on by Charlie, accidentally i think, so whenever folks were talking about that stuff in the back of my mind i felt secure knowing that i could grab a named cartel if i wanted, and that the town named targets would keep regenerating - something Yeti confided in me once Ampharos ended up dead.
Yeti - you were fun to interact with! there was always a touch of animosity from my pov, which is understandable, and i think in a different world i probably dont even try to contact the cartel at all had things gone better. when you died i panicked, because you had mentioned how your inner circle were much less open to working with me than you had been, which ended up not being the case.
billy - you reached out to me after Yeti died, and I admittedly felt like I had to keep you a bit at arms reach at that point, since i was chewing through my town kills and yeti had primed me to think that 2nd generation town leadership would want me out sooner. the kentucky/kansas dichotomy and cartel's voice in my ear also didn't help. sorry for the backstab of blakers, but i gained little from waiting longer when i knew i was useless to full-sheeted cartel and town.
bluedoom - I'm not sure why you reached out to me? I assume it was a post-yeti/dak scramble to put leadership back together, but uh, thanks for reaching out to me lol! you gave me an out to delay my communications by like a cycle, panicking about the death of two named leadership and kicking the LN/Massachussets can down the road (especially because, at this point, Bass had found me and was begging for my silence)
Charlie - I'm glad I was paying attention enough to not reach out to DLE and go, "hey you're leading cartel right" - thanks for working with me for the brief time that you did, and while i didnt end up using the maine info you gave me (felt safer to go with ln given that i figured they certainly protected maine that night), im glad i was able to open up chat with mafia early enough so that when you died there was a good chain of connection to keep me in touch with y'all.
Tommy - genuine question, that night where i told y'all i randomed vermont to investigate and that town hadn't given me any direction for my investigation, did that just miscommunicate to y'all? because that obviously became a pivotal investigation for my endgame, but was there a reason y'all didnt encourage me off of it? regardless, sorry Tommy specifically for parrying all of the "you are more closely aligned with cartel than town by design" - the bpv/town vote dynamic was where we differed, i felt unable to throw in so hard with cartel - town could kill me, y'all couldn't
GMax, Caff, Ehmcee - fun to chat with yall for the brief time i did. i have much less to say here admittedly, i needed a named town kill and y'all needed those dead asap, so im glad we were able to make that work.
Lonelyness - i'm so sorry, friend. like i mentioned to tommy, i randed vermont, found the mole, and then went, "oh boy here i go killing again" - i genuinely wanted to idle, even if it was from a mindset of building up trust with cartel to immediately turn around and backstab it. sorry for outing you!
Bass - dunno why you stuck your neck out so much for me, but it was appreciated. i mean, i get that you wanted to hide the kill failure stuff from town, and i wish we had been clearer with each other that my failure wasn't a mark against me in the fiction i tried to sell billy. admittedly, it seems like billy wasn't quite believing me anyway due to other info he had about mass, but yeah unfortunate circumstances. thanks for trying to help me get across the finish line!
billy - you reached out to me after Yeti died, and I admittedly felt like I had to keep you a bit at arms reach at that point, since i was chewing through my town kills and yeti had primed me to think that 2nd generation town leadership would want me out sooner. the kentucky/kansas dichotomy and cartel's voice in my ear also didn't help. sorry for the backstab of blakers, but i gained little from waiting longer when i knew i was useless to full-sheeted cartel and town.
bluedoom - I'm not sure why you reached out to me? I assume it was a post-yeti/dak scramble to put leadership back together, but uh, thanks for reaching out to me lol! you gave me an out to delay my communications by like a cycle, panicking about the death of two named leadership and kicking the LN/Massachussets can down the road (especially because, at this point, Bass had found me and was begging for my silence)
Charlie - I'm glad I was paying attention enough to not reach out to DLE and go, "hey you're leading cartel right" - thanks for working with me for the brief time that you did, and while i didnt end up using the maine info you gave me (felt safer to go with ln given that i figured they certainly protected maine that night), im glad i was able to open up chat with mafia early enough so that when you died there was a good chain of connection to keep me in touch with y'all.
Tommy - genuine question, that night where i told y'all i randomed vermont to investigate and that town hadn't given me any direction for my investigation, did that just miscommunicate to y'all? because that obviously became a pivotal investigation for my endgame, but was there a reason y'all didnt encourage me off of it? regardless, sorry Tommy specifically for parrying all of the "you are more closely aligned with cartel than town by design" - the bpv/town vote dynamic was where we differed, i felt unable to throw in so hard with cartel - town could kill me, y'all couldn't
GMax, Caff, Ehmcee - fun to chat with yall for the brief time i did. i have much less to say here admittedly, i needed a named town kill and y'all needed those dead asap, so im glad we were able to make that work.
Lonelyness - i'm so sorry, friend. like i mentioned to tommy, i randed vermont, found the mole, and then went, "oh boy here i go killing again" - i genuinely wanted to idle, even if it was from a mindset of building up trust with cartel to immediately turn around and backstab it. sorry for outing you!
Bass - dunno why you stuck your neck out so much for me, but it was appreciated. i mean, i get that you wanted to hide the kill failure stuff from town, and i wish we had been clearer with each other that my failure wasn't a mark against me in the fiction i tried to sell billy. admittedly, it seems like billy wasn't quite believing me anyway due to other info he had about mass, but yeah unfortunate circumstances. thanks for trying to help me get across the finish line!
Things I enjoyed about this game:
* the dynamic of goons early on to decide who they were going to claim to & when
* seeing that i had the 2nd alias alphabetically and going "well hope i'm not scum lmao" then being scum & living to the final cycle of the game anyway
* eventually being a driving force to get goons on the right page & claim to the correct team
* negotiating with bass in the endgame
* team chat was fun once I re-engaged with the game in the final few cycles
Things I found annoying/strange:
* Total inability to remove specific night actions from the game via kills (game had 500 copy abilities, many important abilities were factional)
* Every faction other than us had bus drives + copies, making reasoning about night actions literally a guessing game
* Mekkah randomly getting a secret bus drive to lose us the game is kind of strange
* the depth of how little there was for me to personally do for most of this game after i claimed mafia to a villager
Other thoughts:
* Why didn't the cartel think it was a priority to gather the goons early? There was a lot of equity lost by letting so many goons claim to DLE. At the time that I claimed, DLE had the public backing of 2 other players while SB had 0. This was enough to get me to claim, and I feel like I claimed pretty late compared to other goons.
A lot could have gone into helping goons before D2. If SB had said "Claim to me or don't claim, the mafia may have an opportunity to find some of you without you claiming", I wouldn't have claimed to DLE. If SB had said "Claim to me" and another member of the mafia had said "SB is confirmed mafia, claim to us or no one", I wouldn't have claimed to DLE. The lack of clear communication in public to goons was obviously a disaster.
I understand the Cartel saying "why did all these goons claim to village, stupid play from them". But more than half of us did it, including veteran players & new players. So maybe there was some fault in the Cartel play.
Without goons, the mafia had 3 chances to mole effectively (counting SB out). If 2 cartel members came forward and gathered goon claims, we would have had 17-2 = 15 chances to mole. We ended up only being able to mole via LN, who was eventually found out & we had no hope of any sheet access to the village for the rest of the game. In a normal game, as village leaders die, the sheet has to get passed to more and more untrustworthy people, and the mafia gets extra attempts to become the village lead. But because we only had 3 moling opportunities, we were all found out extremely quickly.
So the only hope we had of winning became reliant on the wolf, who was only targetable by the village & hence would only ever die in a situation where the village was so confident they'd win that they choose to kill him. An annoying spot.
* the dynamic of goons early on to decide who they were going to claim to & when
* seeing that i had the 2nd alias alphabetically and going "well hope i'm not scum lmao" then being scum & living to the final cycle of the game anyway
* eventually being a driving force to get goons on the right page & claim to the correct team
* negotiating with bass in the endgame
* team chat was fun once I re-engaged with the game in the final few cycles
Things I found annoying/strange:
* Total inability to remove specific night actions from the game via kills (game had 500 copy abilities, many important abilities were factional)
* Every faction other than us had bus drives + copies, making reasoning about night actions literally a guessing game
* Mekkah randomly getting a secret bus drive to lose us the game is kind of strange
* the depth of how little there was for me to personally do for most of this game after i claimed mafia to a villager
Other thoughts:
* Why didn't the cartel think it was a priority to gather the goons early? There was a lot of equity lost by letting so many goons claim to DLE. At the time that I claimed, DLE had the public backing of 2 other players while SB had 0. This was enough to get me to claim, and I feel like I claimed pretty late compared to other goons.
A lot could have gone into helping goons before D2. If SB had said "Claim to me or don't claim, the mafia may have an opportunity to find some of you without you claiming", I wouldn't have claimed to DLE. If SB had said "Claim to me" and another member of the mafia had said "SB is confirmed mafia, claim to us or no one", I wouldn't have claimed to DLE. The lack of clear communication in public to goons was obviously a disaster.
I understand the Cartel saying "why did all these goons claim to village, stupid play from them". But more than half of us did it, including veteran players & new players. So maybe there was some fault in the Cartel play.
Without goons, the mafia had 3 chances to mole effectively (counting SB out). If 2 cartel members came forward and gathered goon claims, we would have had 17-2 = 15 chances to mole. We ended up only being able to mole via LN, who was eventually found out & we had no hope of any sheet access to the village for the rest of the game. In a normal game, as village leaders die, the sheet has to get passed to more and more untrustworthy people, and the mafia gets extra attempts to become the village lead. But because we only had 3 moling opportunities, we were all found out extremely quickly.
So the only hope we had of winning became reliant on the wolf, who was only targetable by the village & hence would only ever die in a situation where the village was so confident they'd win that they choose to kill him. An annoying spot.
charlie did say this to me
"we can prove ourselves to goons that actually claim alias to us but i understand that might be a tall ask atp. if you are a goon i would ask at minimum you dont claim to anyone else claiming to be mafia atm because fmpov that is basically you killing yourself"
but i guess that wasn't clear enough or widespread enough to make it to all of the goons, he definitely could've said something to that effect publicly
"we can prove ourselves to goons that actually claim alias to us but i understand that might be a tall ask atp. if you are a goon i would ask at minimum you dont claim to anyone else claiming to be mafia atm because fmpov that is basically you killing yourself"
but i guess that wasn't clear enough or widespread enough to make it to all of the goons, he definitely could've said something to that effect publicly
So a few thoughts:
First, I think the most enjoyable part of the game for me was probably the first few cycles when I initially formed the miller alliance. It helped me establish some credibility with the village leadership and also gave me two very important pieces of information that I would later exploit heavily: pulsar being the The Conspiracy Theorist, and knowledge of Hydro's role and alias. The former shared the latter's alias in miller chat and later on the role PMs of the FBI Agent and The Assassin which were very useful pieces of information to have since they were not obtainable with the mafia's mass inspect brigade, and killing Ditto was an important component of helping them make a comeback later in the game.
I think framing Hydro was probably the only single bastard element in the entire game that was able to effectively trick the village, and this play opened up a lot of interesting opportunities for me. Hydro's role in of itself was nearly ideal as recruit material (in particular knowledge of village numbers at any time and LPV/BPV) but at the same time was also a great frame target because the role was highly plausible as a wolf fake claim AND was a miller on top of that. I had planned two possible paths that could have come out of this, one being that the village would waste a lot of time trying to get him cleared of suspicion first before shifting their attention back on me (after which point I'd recruit him while letting myself die), or conversely alter the fake psycho PM right before he would get lynched to make him appear to be the real wolf. Instead he was just shot no questions asked by zorbees, which surprised even me. I think with how the game played out, sunny was still the optimal recruit choice from a mechanics perspective so I didn't lament the loss that much (though LN did, because the mafia also really wanted to recruit him!), but if I was able to delay myself from being outed for a cycle longer, I might have felt different.
I also had a lot of fun drafting the fake Psychopath PMs, both in the beginning of the game (I had lots of elaborate ideas before settling on the rather basic but surprisingly believable one I picked) and later after being outed, which mainly were just a means of letting me have some fun while dealing with the very stressful planning that came later.
The very minor mistakes that I beat myself up over (mainly earlier in the game) that Sam is referring to are as follows:
The most stressful parts of the game were definitely my last two cycles where I was still alive, mainly because I was walking on this incredibly narrow tightrope where the village could instantly end the game for me if I harmed them too much (since they would kingmake the mafia over me) or too little (if they believed they could win the game without me, they would definitely try to get rid of me anyway). The line between these two extremes (in terms of numbers) was actually extremely thin. If I had managed to survive the D11 lynch, I would have certainly had a very high chance of winning outright, but getting there was the insanely difficult, perhaps impossible part since I have been told I would have likely just been lynched had I chosen to stab them instead of getting bus driven into the mafia.
I will also say that I admit my late game negotiations with the village were probably the weakest aspects of my play. I do want to set the record straight that not all of this was on me and that the village made several unreasonable demands of me first before we made any real attempts at negotiations whatsoever (that being asking me to kill goons multiple times when doing so would put me in a position where I couldn't win), and also that not being able to talk with the leaders directly through Pidge seemed to have led to some big miscommunications over what my demands really were, but I do acknowledge some of my other demands were not reasonable anyway (like the mimic's absorbed role), that I failed to realize how big of a deal the cursed hooks were to them, and also some of my cheeky behavior in general. I remember reading some logs in the village deadchat later where Sam thought Mekkah was going to easy on me in the negotiations, but I disagree heavily with this. With the misgivings both sides felt towards each other, I think he balanced the demands really well, and this is ultimately what led to me deciding to do the actions I did on N10 that got me bus driven and effectively clinched the win for them. Even though he sort of gave it away when he didn't try to argue against the 5/3/1 numbers which were better for me than for them, I do think he (and bluedoom) deserve more credit than they are getting in all of this.
One other point I wanted to mention was how well the mafia played. I think in the beginning of the game, both Sam and I were kind of ranting a lot about how badly they were playing and how cagey they were in sharing info with me (with charlie being the exception), and that other than the hydro vig misfire, I think Yeti and dak played a cleaner game overall while they were alive. However I think once LN handled the negotiations with me himself, our relations became a lot better and we had a lot of fun strategizing together, something which I lacked the opportunity to do earlier since I was basically alone on that front for most of the game. There were points later on where I didn't understand their decision making (like being killed due to being stingy on spending strength on safeguards), and also two of their players idling when I tried to contest my first lynch. I found out later that the latter was on purpose since they knew that they could only win if the village lynched me first, so in that respect I think this was a very clever strategy on their part. Even yesterday when talking to dak, I had a firm belief that the village outplayed them most of the game, but now that I have a more complete picture, my verdict on this is less clear.
Finally I want to comment a bit about balance since my role got a ton flack for being insanely overpowered. Even I thought it seemed to be the case at first when I started the game, and there are certain things I do think should have been adjusted (in particular what Sam mentioned about LPVs, and not giving me a vote+6), but I do think you all have to remember that in spite of everything I got, every faction still had a shot of winning the game and in particular I think the extra buffs the village got with their votes and the hidden bus drive effectively cancelled such perceived imbalances out. If anything, I think the mafia had more reason to complain about how my role was balanced than the village did based on the tools they had, and I think their strategy to save their kills until I was lynched made sense given their situation. I have been on the other side in one of Sam's past games (LoTR mafia) and I also attempted to kill the wolf multiple times and failed, then bitched endlessly about how broken that role was (yet still won anyways due to a coinflip). But once I was put in this position myself, I came to understand that without those tools it would be nearly impossible to have any real shot at winning the game, since being a one man show means your mistakes are much more unforgiving than they are for the other players, not to mention the stress and difficulty in strategizing and negotiating on your own. I think in retrospect there were only a lot of wolf wins in some of the older big OC games due to how much easier it was for them to mole the village, but in this game fully moleing was a lot more difficult if not straight up impossible. If there is one comment that does sort of resonate with me, I think this really would have been better as a 2nd faction with no wolf role at all, though others have pointed out that true 2v1 setups are very unfavorable to the village.
Anyways I think I have gone on for long enough and wanted to thank Sam again for hosting this game and deeming me worthy enough of being assigned this role. It was very stressful to the point where I am not sure I would ever want to do it again, but I can't say I didn't have any fun either. Specific shout outs to sunny, for being roped in by me and sticking around to help provide some support when I was under a lot of stress late in game.
First, I think the most enjoyable part of the game for me was probably the first few cycles when I initially formed the miller alliance. It helped me establish some credibility with the village leadership and also gave me two very important pieces of information that I would later exploit heavily: pulsar being the The Conspiracy Theorist, and knowledge of Hydro's role and alias. The former shared the latter's alias in miller chat and later on the role PMs of the FBI Agent and The Assassin which were very useful pieces of information to have since they were not obtainable with the mafia's mass inspect brigade, and killing Ditto was an important component of helping them make a comeback later in the game.
I think framing Hydro was probably the only single bastard element in the entire game that was able to effectively trick the village, and this play opened up a lot of interesting opportunities for me. Hydro's role in of itself was nearly ideal as recruit material (in particular knowledge of village numbers at any time and LPV/BPV) but at the same time was also a great frame target because the role was highly plausible as a wolf fake claim AND was a miller on top of that. I had planned two possible paths that could have come out of this, one being that the village would waste a lot of time trying to get him cleared of suspicion first before shifting their attention back on me (after which point I'd recruit him while letting myself die), or conversely alter the fake psycho PM right before he would get lynched to make him appear to be the real wolf. Instead he was just shot no questions asked by zorbees, which surprised even me. I think with how the game played out, sunny was still the optimal recruit choice from a mechanics perspective so I didn't lament the loss that much (though LN did, because the mafia also really wanted to recruit him!), but if I was able to delay myself from being outed for a cycle longer, I might have felt different.
I also had a lot of fun drafting the fake Psychopath PMs, both in the beginning of the game (I had lots of elaborate ideas before settling on the rather basic but surprisingly believable one I picked) and later after being outed, which mainly were just a means of letting me have some fun while dealing with the very stressful planning that came later.
The very minor mistakes that I beat myself up over (mainly earlier in the game) that Sam is referring to are as follows:
- When I claimed to Yeti, I edited my alias into my fake claim PM (The Gamer) before pasting the whole thing to her. However I left the editor open instead of saving the changes, and this caused the text to have excessive whitespace between sections that you normally wouldn't see after pasting it. I was very scared that I had already outed myself instantly, but thankfully she was at work and probably didn't have the time to really look at my PM in more detail, so I was able to edit the whitespace out in time. As it turns out there was another inconsistency with quotation marks that was found in just about every other fake claim edited by Sam that the village would notice later on anyway.
- During some early negotiations with Tommy, I accidentally revealed that I would instantly lose if 2 of the 3 remaining neutrals would win before me. In theory, this sort of thing could have been exploited by the mafia later on to really screw me but in practice the odds of Celever and Ditto meeting their win conditions were pretty much non-existent anyway, especially with the game state being what it was.
- I had thought that LightWolf successfully tracked me on N6 due to a bad bus drive on myself, when in reality I didn't understand that his role doesn't technically target anyone, and so could not be redirected by bus drive.
The most stressful parts of the game were definitely my last two cycles where I was still alive, mainly because I was walking on this incredibly narrow tightrope where the village could instantly end the game for me if I harmed them too much (since they would kingmake the mafia over me) or too little (if they believed they could win the game without me, they would definitely try to get rid of me anyway). The line between these two extremes (in terms of numbers) was actually extremely thin. If I had managed to survive the D11 lynch, I would have certainly had a very high chance of winning outright, but getting there was the insanely difficult, perhaps impossible part since I have been told I would have likely just been lynched had I chosen to stab them instead of getting bus driven into the mafia.
I will also say that I admit my late game negotiations with the village were probably the weakest aspects of my play. I do want to set the record straight that not all of this was on me and that the village made several unreasonable demands of me first before we made any real attempts at negotiations whatsoever (that being asking me to kill goons multiple times when doing so would put me in a position where I couldn't win), and also that not being able to talk with the leaders directly through Pidge seemed to have led to some big miscommunications over what my demands really were, but I do acknowledge some of my other demands were not reasonable anyway (like the mimic's absorbed role), that I failed to realize how big of a deal the cursed hooks were to them, and also some of my cheeky behavior in general. I remember reading some logs in the village deadchat later where Sam thought Mekkah was going to easy on me in the negotiations, but I disagree heavily with this. With the misgivings both sides felt towards each other, I think he balanced the demands really well, and this is ultimately what led to me deciding to do the actions I did on N10 that got me bus driven and effectively clinched the win for them. Even though he sort of gave it away when he didn't try to argue against the 5/3/1 numbers which were better for me than for them, I do think he (and bluedoom) deserve more credit than they are getting in all of this.
One other point I wanted to mention was how well the mafia played. I think in the beginning of the game, both Sam and I were kind of ranting a lot about how badly they were playing and how cagey they were in sharing info with me (with charlie being the exception), and that other than the hydro vig misfire, I think Yeti and dak played a cleaner game overall while they were alive. However I think once LN handled the negotiations with me himself, our relations became a lot better and we had a lot of fun strategizing together, something which I lacked the opportunity to do earlier since I was basically alone on that front for most of the game. There were points later on where I didn't understand their decision making (like being killed due to being stingy on spending strength on safeguards), and also two of their players idling when I tried to contest my first lynch. I found out later that the latter was on purpose since they knew that they could only win if the village lynched me first, so in that respect I think this was a very clever strategy on their part. Even yesterday when talking to dak, I had a firm belief that the village outplayed them most of the game, but now that I have a more complete picture, my verdict on this is less clear.
Finally I want to comment a bit about balance since my role got a ton flack for being insanely overpowered. Even I thought it seemed to be the case at first when I started the game, and there are certain things I do think should have been adjusted (in particular what Sam mentioned about LPVs, and not giving me a vote+6), but I do think you all have to remember that in spite of everything I got, every faction still had a shot of winning the game and in particular I think the extra buffs the village got with their votes and the hidden bus drive effectively cancelled such perceived imbalances out. If anything, I think the mafia had more reason to complain about how my role was balanced than the village did based on the tools they had, and I think their strategy to save their kills until I was lynched made sense given their situation. I have been on the other side in one of Sam's past games (LoTR mafia) and I also attempted to kill the wolf multiple times and failed, then bitched endlessly about how broken that role was (yet still won anyways due to a coinflip). But once I was put in this position myself, I came to understand that without those tools it would be nearly impossible to have any real shot at winning the game, since being a one man show means your mistakes are much more unforgiving than they are for the other players, not to mention the stress and difficulty in strategizing and negotiating on your own. I think in retrospect there were only a lot of wolf wins in some of the older big OC games due to how much easier it was for them to mole the village, but in this game fully moleing was a lot more difficult if not straight up impossible. If there is one comment that does sort of resonate with me, I think this really would have been better as a 2nd faction with no wolf role at all, though others have pointed out that true 2v1 setups are very unfavorable to the village.
Anyways I think I have gone on for long enough and wanted to thank Sam again for hosting this game and deeming me worthy enough of being assigned this role. It was very stressful to the point where I am not sure I would ever want to do it again, but I can't say I didn't have any fun either. Specific shout outs to sunny, for being roped in by me and sticking around to help provide some support when I was under a lot of stress late in game.
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For anyone who didn't get to join, enjoy the video postgame call! Quality's shit but the audio is what matters here and I kind of slapped this setup together on the fly. I said most of my thoughts in that call so I'll just say, thanks again for the game! It was a good time, I always appreciate Sam's hosting, and all of you are wonderful people to play with. Until next time.
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I appreciate all the kind comments on my negotiation skills BUT feel the need to reiterate that me initially agreeing on 5/3/1 wasn't even me trying to be deceptive, it was me looking at bigger number for village and thinking "yeah seems about right". Then I learned about my revive, and after a lot of brainstorming we came to the conclusion bus drive was the role to revive, and that Bass's kill was the one to redirect since we knew where it would go.
I don't really want to add on all the tl;dr too much so I'll reiterate that this game's peak was definitely Summoning Circle when Pidge was alive. Thank you all so much for playing and hosting.