[SETUP] Bonnie, Clyde, and the Other Guy

[RadiantCowbells]

I think this game is actually very scumsided in practice.

[RadiantCowbells]

Disagree; Mafia can make it difficult for town to lynch successfully day 1, but risk giving them a lot of information going into day 2.

Mafias best play is to pair their weakest scum with the strongest town and just out as scum and lalalalalalala spam the thread. No associations will realistically be made with that slot. Scum get to hard defend each other due to mechanical reasons so there won't really be associatives there. It's difficult to tell scum apart from town in this game and with the strongest townie absolutely only impacting 1 lynch and scum having complete control over who gets paired with who, they should realistically win nearly all the time unless two scum players are completely unable to play scum.

[RadiantCowbells]

It's a huge deal

Say that a lobby contains NSG Creature and Sakura Hana followed by a bunch of weaker players. Most games, that's enough to win. But in this one, NSG gets paired with the weaker scum to silence her and Creature and Sakura Hana get paired together so neither can independently townspew their slot. Scum choosing the pairings doesn't show up on EV but it massively changes the game if you have meta on the players.

If the lone scum outs and town lynches that pair, the 2 Town pairs effectively become Mason Lovers to each other. The two scum players have no advantage whatsoever in this case - it reduces to a 1:3 Nightless Hydra game, really.

They're going to become Mason lovers to each other D2 anyway and the difference here is that scum are choosing exactly who is hydrad with who.

[RadiantCowbells]

No one on D1 is going to support lynching their own Hydra pair because it's self resolving anyway, and by just treating the third scum as a burner slot you remove all ability to scumhunt by associatives.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think scum should win this no less than 65% ish of the time

Even in current site meta of town being favored to win most games

[RadiantCowbells]

Strongest town is going to influence 1 lynch no matter what. They don't have to influence 2.
When I say strongest scum player, I mean that there are 3 scum players and 2 of them are stronger than the third.

[RadiantCowbells]

If you don't pair scum with the strongest town, then the strongest town is going to end up cleared anyway and clear another slot with them.
This way, your ability to lynch other slots is unaffected. Conftowning a slot doesn't make all that much of a difference if they're not getting lynched anyway.
If you pair with the weakest town player, you're wasting the potential ability to mislynch that player and you're leaving the strongest town player in play to spew a pairing town.

[RadiantCowbells]

Obviously there's edge cases where strength of reads isn't at some equivalent level to ability to towntell, but largely in this game I think the priority is to focus on having two mislynchable pairings, and very few games with 7 townies don't have 4 mislynchable players. If a strong player as either alignment was in play for example I think it would be more likely that they were put into a pairing where they could be paranoia lynched, but the vast vast majority of currently active players who are -good at mafia- have one alignment that's significantly better than the other alignment.

Mountainous 9p for example requires the lynch of the 2 scum that were rolled with 3 mislynches to lose. This game requires the lynch of the two stronger scum players, versus four mislynches. It's better than mountainous for sure particularly because 1 scum can bring down the other but that "two stronger scum players" is a big deal and you have a lot of control over the gamestate and the narrative by selecting the pairings.

[RadiantCowbells]

The names that I chose basically all of them are able to clear their slots as town simply by existing, and weren't selected for any other reason really.

[RadiantCowbells]

I feel like that would make it less fun.

Not just less fun: I think it would also make the game significantly harder for town.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think that this game plays very differently than the EV would dictate because of how many advantages scum have that aren't reflected in EV. I don't think 65% is absurd at all.

[RadiantCowbells]

I think you're misunderstanding
Scum get to pick 2/3 of the scum pool as their 'players' so they are

on average

better.
That does not mean that they are by default the 2 best players in the game.

If you draft 3 people and pick the best 2 you're going to get players than if you just draft an arbitrary 2 of those 2/3 of the time
I think the sheer spread of scum winrates speaks for itself in terms of the fact that 2 stronger scum players are going to do better than 2 weaker ones?

Rather than looking at EV I like to judge mafia by exactly what proportion of hypothetical town the mafia need to be townier than.
Most (balanced) setups require scum to be townier than more than half of the townies.

[RadiantCowbells]

If you assume the following

1) scums and town's towniness are distributed at random
2) scum correctly choose the scum player to exclude
3) scum correctly choose the top 3 towniest players to pair with scum and pair together
4) lynches are determined by average towniness of both relevant players
5) scum on average screw up and pair the two townier of the bottom four players together to create a more formidable opponent (partially counterbalancing the fact that 4 is excessive)

then this setup sims at 64.4%. I think the only point in contention there would be 3. I don't think scum make mistakes there that spectacularly often.
Perhaps I'm imposing my own awareness of the meta on everyone else but I'm rarely surprised by people having breakout town games

How often do you think that scum are going to be wrong on who is not going to be lynchable from the start of the game?

[RadiantCowbells]

And this all ignores the chilling effect that the essentially associationless gameplay is going to have on town players. I would expect people to perform below rand in this setup for that reason.

[RadiantCowbells]

By the way, order to be lynched in 3 way, BOTH townies have to scumread you over the other townie because if one townie scumreads the other over you, you win. Whereas you can hammer whoever you want if one scumreads the other.
That's 1/2*1/2 = 1/4 odds.

I'm keeping all the other voting aspects out of the sim but if I add them back in and plug this into my normal game simulator that skews the odds even further in scum's favor.