I'm just going to post stuff. Best move for town and best moves for scum are intertwined, there's no way we're going to figure out what it means for us without informing the scum. They're the informed minority, that's their advantage and there's no changing that. But we simply can't go into this eyes wide shut.
6 triumvirate 6 vanilla: 6 confirmed innocents
3 triumvirate 9 vanilla: 3 confirmed innocents
5 triumvirate 7 vanilla: 2 scum in triums, 1 in vanilla
4 triumvirate 8 vanilla: 1 scum in triums, 2 in vanillas
Scum aren't retarded. 6 trium claimers is close to autowin for us, as has been posted many times, so
they won't do that
.
9 vanilla claimers means 3 confirmed innocents, but they're also the power roles. So then we're guaranteed to lose one power role every night, modulo doc protects, which (3/4 chance of town doc role * 1/3 chance of chosing right trium to protect = 1/4 = bad odds) isn't that likely. So we've very likely (2/3 ish) lost the cop role by the dawn of day 3. That's two investigations. Not liking this.
I think the next two are more likely as they cause us problems, and I have no idea why people haven't considered that scum will claim different to each other. On the bright side, they can't kill off the power roles without increasing the chances of outing their own, but that's more than balanced out by the fact we're going to have to be very careful about who we lynch.
I think the worst case is 5 tri 7 vanilla. We can then pick from finding the 2/5 scum triumvirate claimers and look forward to losing all power roles if we're wrong, or get to weed out one scum from the seven vanillas - this does not fill my heart with joy. We don't have any confirmed innocents, the most we know is the two of the five triums are scum, which doesn't tell us much. If we mislynch vanillas (likely) 3 times, then the scum win with 3 kills (12-3-3 = 6, 3/6=50%), and we probably don't have enough time to narrow down the triumvirate group enough to get a good lynch. If we mislynch in there even once, it's vanilla, and the one vanilla scum is going to screw us in the endgame.
4 tri 6 vanilla is roughly the same, only we've got more chance of finding the vanilla scums. But it's still quite bad.
By the by, I am convinced the scum has already done something similar to the above working-out. I am also
very
interested that spurgistan says "Just seems like this set-up is just about the least conducive to a mass-claim there is" because virtually all setups nowadays are designed to be resistant to a mass-claim. Mods spend great deals of time and effort to figure out setups that won't be trivially breakable, and this is the first thing anyone'd think of. Indeed I did think of it soon as I saw the setup, and discarded it as probably a bad idea without thinking for very long. I really don't think it's coincidence that the idea has appeared. Part of the reason for not posting my thoughts for a bit was to see who was going to argue against it - spurgistan gets town points for at least being willing to think about it.
A lot depends how much you value the confirmed innocents, if it goes that way, but mostly it doesn't. Some of it is night choices and which triumvirate dies (remember, even they don't know which power they are), but most of it looks quite bad to me. Also, remember that if there's scum in the triumvirate group, we'll
have
to lynch right or lose all the power roles. My gut says a lot of the the outcomes end up with us playing vanilla and one/two scum will cruise to the endgame knowing they don't have to worry about power roles and can just play safe. I'm really not convinced this improves much on playing standard - we can just ask people who look scummy to claim, and if we get more than 3 trium claimers, we've narrowed down the scum.
I really do not like the trade. Discuss.
Succinctness is pro-town.
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. ~ Gregory Benford
