Hi friends, and welcome new players! Are you pumped for the start to a new year of mafia?
In order to encourage friendly interaction, better psych reads, and greater engagement with the game, especially for the new folks, I think we should find some times to hold "town meetings" via video chat. That's a separate topic though; our first order of business here is to figure out a good strategy for town given this game's unusual setup. Feel free to
post your own thoughts and claims on strategy here; I'll start by compiling a summary of some thoughts that ksedlar and I had while brainstorming.
The overarching theme is: Compared to both most live action games and most dead action mafia settings, this game's setup is very low on ways to obtain solid mechanical evidence of guilt, a problem that may be best (partially) mitigated through developing a centralized information system.
"Investigations"To elaborate: The only roles that allow town to get direct information on the identity of a killer are
priest,
gay knight, and possibly
stalker. Each of these is weaker than in normal implementations -- priests can't distinguish a negative result from a roleblock, gay knights investigate at their time of death and risk getting roleblocked if they reveal their intentions beforehand, and stalkers' results are easily obfuscated by taxi driving chains.
The result is that it will be VERY hard overall for town to get a nontrivial amount of kill info unless we work for it in very specific ways.
Here are a few other ways of identifying mafia without direct killer information:
- If there's a no kill day, then either the mafia responsible for killing that day was roleblocked, the kill target was jailed, or mafia did a no-kill day (if that's legal?), making roleblocker/jailer information relevant.
- Assuming some sort of mass-claim strategy (either public or private; more on this later), certain roles or target claims can be contradicted by stalking results.
Most of these sources of information (all aside from priest) are almost impossible to implement correctly without some form of role reveal. Which brings us to:
"Innocence Network"Gay knights are the premier provably-innocent role in this game (followed by visitors at at-most-one-mafia-barring-weird-edge-cases, and maybe stalkers given enough organization). A potential strategy is the following:
- Ask all gay knight pairs to claim
- Select one gay knight pair in some hard-for-mafia-to-manipulate fashion to be the dictators for the game, and have everyone relevant (that's probably everyone except priests and, until needed, vigilantes) privately role-reveal to them
- Allow this pair to dictate the actions of all roleblockers, taxi drivers, jailers, stalkers, and visitors in order to optimize information gain and semi-provable innocences (in particular, probably have at least two jailers dedicated to jailing them each night to keep them safe and healthy; even one suffices in a pinch as a deterrent)
- Win the game
The main benefit of this plan is: With all (town) roleblocking and taxi driving efforts coordinated, we can much more easily narrow down failure modes for deductions from priest and stalker results, and we can also much more easily catch people in lies via stalkers. This strengthens our otherwise minuscule information-gaining capacity greatly, to an extent that is hard for non-centralized strategies to match.
The main anti-benefit of this plan is: It runs the risk of either selecting a mafia dictator pair, who might not be revealed for a long time, or a pair of less active or less experienced players who don't have the energy and/or experience to coordinate town strategy effectively. Things also get messed up if some players are inactive and don't report their actions and observations / don't do what they're asked to do. Also, we might not have any gay knights (rip :'( ).
An alternative that ksedlar brought up is to have everyone besides the generally actionless roles (gay knights, vigilantes, and priests, who also really don't like being roleblocked on certain days) publicly claim, since this game doesn't have strong punishments for role revealing to mafia, and then cycling through public action dictators day by day, via some mechanism that avoids having too many mafia dictators. I'm not sure how well we'll be able to come up with a scheme that doesn't end up letting mafia dictate too much, so any ideas here would be much appreciated.
Miscellaneous thoughts on individual roles (read on for tentative suggestions for how to play)-
Priests, while limited in their power, are our main hope for directly catching mafia in a kill. Generally, you'll want to put relatively high-profile players on both your saint and sinner lists, with the "ones who are worse at being mafia" on the saint list to hedge against the possibility of a "saint kills sinner" trigger. When someone on one of your lists dies, you should, if there is a trusted gay knight pair dictating game, tell them the result, and otherwise proxy that information out through what's called a
proxy chain -- pick an arbitrary player with some probability $p$ and tell them: "I have the information that a priest found {set1} (not/)guilty of killing [player], assuming the priest was not roleblocked; feel free to proxy this further with some probability." Every person in this chain then continues the chain with some probability of their choice, and otherwise posts on an "Investigations" thread on the forums, "Priest [nickname the poster comes up with] found {set1} did(/not) kill [player]." After the first instance, stick to the same proxy chain while possible to avoid leaking more information.
The purpose of the proxy chain is to avoid giving mafia info on who the priest is, so that they can't target them specifically with kills or roleblocks.
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Gay knights are great, but also risky. See the proposed strategy on centralized dictation by a gay knight pair, above. If this is not the strategy we decide to take, NEVER reveal your gay knighthood unless you or your partner is about to be executed, in which case reveal it with enough time left before day end for us to pick a new target. Also, if your partner is dead, and we don't have a trusted dictator pair, probably find some way to proxy out the information of who you're planning to investikill so that we get the innocence information without risking you getting more likely roleblocked.
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Stalkers are a powerful source of information, both on potential killers and on the truth of role and target claims, but can only really be utilized fully in a centrally coordinated system. Without such a system, basically just stalk someone sketchy every day and report them (through a proxy chain) if they targeted someone who died (keeping in mind that this is very easily obfuscable).
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Taxi drivers are also best when coordinated; absent central coordination, your best bet is to drive yourself with relatively sketchy people, in the hopes that if mafia do try to kill you, they accidentally kill another mafia instead.
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Vigilantes should never publicly role-reveal until you've made your kill. Also, in most strategies you should only kill someone when it's been publicly decided that they should get vig-killed (e.g. if there are multiple outed mafia in one day somehow). You don't really need to role reveal even in a coordination scheme, until a need for vigs arises. A coordination scheme helps move roleblockers and taxi drivers out of the way for you to make a clean unredirected kill if necessary.
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Roleblockers are, again, best when coordinated; absent central coordination, just roleblock non-publicly-innocent people at random (with preference for sketchier folks) and report your target through a proxy chain if there's a no-kill day.
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Visitors are the "prove all except one are innocent barring weird edge cases" role. Absent central coordination, do make sure to visit someone every day so that you can claim your visitor record later if necessary.
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Jailers are really good, especially if there are public innocents like a gay knight pair. Without central coordination, though, basically treat yourself as doctor for high profile innocent-seeming targets that don't have super important roles to use who also doubles as a roleblocker.
-Finally,
Arsonists win the easiest with a town win, but for obvious reasons shouldn't want to publicly reveal their role. Town appreciates any support you can offer and will attempt to offer it back in return
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That's all for now; please share any strategic thoughts you have, especially re: the viability of one of the mass-reveal-to-trusted?-centralized-coordinators plans! Also someone else please start a town meeting scheduling process separately oops
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