XCOM Mafia [Concluded]

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Originally Posted by Manasi

EVEN IN POSTGAME ATPG MAKES POSTS HORRENDOUS TO TRY AND READ.

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:bow:

Sorry for subbing out, travel screws with things. I never used my shot because I knew it had to be on someone that I both wouldn't push the next day and also wouldn't die, because then I waste the shot. I also thought that there was a doctor of some kind, so I didn't think I could announce my target in advance to avoid them being lynched, so yeah, I basically just thought hero shots were all that were left. I just kept tinfoiling Monty and Csargo (lol all my reads) but never had the guts to pull the trigger. Overall, I need to reevaluate how I find scum. I'm so used to scum being the top posters, my top town reads, and generally exactly who I wouldn't expect, that I think I'm almost finding strong town scummy for the things that make them town. The problem is that I can't reign in my paranoia without losing, so basically, I'm going to fail at wildcards unless I roll scum. GG all, roleslist pls?

Read dead chat, wow, I should have expected the flavour not exactly matching game mechanics like that. In the end, I was right with basically everything other than the scum having more powers than I thought and being able to convert classes into Psi-ops.

Well, and my actual reads, but TBH I figured out about halfway through that my flavour knowledge was the only way I was capable of helping town.

GG well played

A lot of people demoed elevated play here

We've had a period of town rolling scum. Are we now in a period of early town domination fumbling in face of skilled scum ninjas? Jabbz' next game may decide.

Pizza, are you ok with me posting your meta-analysis of yourself?

Btw @Zack I was v sad to see all my protections cover targets, only for it never to matter because of BP or strongman

Y u

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

Btw @Zack I was v sad to see all my protections cover targets, only for it never to matter because of BP or strongman

Y u

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Poor design.

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

GG well played

A lot of people demoed elevated play here

We've had a period of town rolling scum. Are we now in a period of early town domination fumbling in face of skilled scum ninjas? Jabbz' next game may decide.

Pizza, are you ok with me posting your meta-analysis of yourself?

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Yeah. I don't think anyone will ever care, read it, and use it other than yourself, but sure.

It's useful meta, I can play against it as scum, but it's gonna be pretty friggen hard.

It's more useful for deciding if I'm towning.

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Originally Posted by Dp101

Read dead chat, wow, I should have expected the flavour not exactly matching game mechanics like that. In the end, I was right with basically everything other than the scum having more powers than I thought and being able to convert classes into Psi-ops.

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If anything, I'm not happy with how well people were able to guess game mechanics based on flavor. I did a much better job of that in Futurama, but still.

My next game will be its own universe to avoid this type of thing and give myself some room to breathe creatively.

It was a very strange thing for me to lead the town (to its doom, ultimately, but I was right about novice at least -heh!). I survived to the endgame, too.

I think I'll try it again.

Dp101, don't feel too bad about subbing out. Things happen.

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Originally Posted by Zack

My next game will be its own universe to avoid this type of thing and give myself some room to breathe creatively.

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Feel free to rip off ideas from games hosted by us and then, if we catch you in the act, feel free to call it a loving homage.

Barto you actually towned.

Moar of that, please.

Ultimate PIZZA Analysis for Justice

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

found it. I can post this in postgame, but here you go for now.

I haven't re-read this closely, it's a copy and paste, so if something doesn't make sense, ask me.

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

Why couldn't it be a slight tweak to be more engaged with D1 than you may have been in some other games? That's not exactly a radical departure, and if it's one of your best scum games, well that would surely be judged in retrospect.

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Start with this general pattern of how I approach the game.

Scum pizza:

Later stages of the game = more investment
Good chance of getting one more mislynch if I try hard = more investment
No realistic chance of being caught by cop, which is the single most frequent reason I ever lose a scum game = more investment
Odds I am forced to be the last wolf standing, because my buddies died = more investment
Odds we win the game or make it a nearly impossible final round to solve if I invest more this phase = more investment
Town is on a path to self-destruction this phase = less investment or less desire to change the situation, just keeping up appearances.
Size of game at game start = drastically less investment as scum, the bigger the game is. No way I want to trade myself for spewing a bunch of townies clear. Better to die and have my team be unknown. You can't help the folks that voted you early, but you can help preventing there being a bunch of additional townies cleared from your own actions.
Endgame = most critical for scum. Even 1 wolf can win the game if partners die early and it's not obvious who the partner is. But you need to have a good endgame regardless or you won by luck, and I don't aim for that.

So, those games will be middle-game/endgame heavy and early game light.

Specific exceptions can occur rarely. Otherwise this pattern works and I use it a lot. People are reading individual posts for scumminess rather than the overall approach I'm taking to the game anyway, and I can typically make my individual posts mimic my town game enough to fly. But the behavior is different and the approach is different, because I'm trying to achieve a much different aim.

I'm never approaching the game as: Be identical to my town game, because (a) I lynch, because I get lynched as town a lot (b) if I don't lynch I get murdered as town a lot, and therefore (c) I don't survive endgame situations as scum by mirroring my approach as town, it sticks out that I'm even alive. I have to make it look like I'm giving medium investment at most at the beginning. I am also specifically not playing for survival to endgame, but for a partner to win. I'm likely to lynch during play, it's just how I am, but I can set it up so that one or two of my partners have a fantastic endgame and town can't find them, if I can, that's my chosen and preferred method.

Some people play scum in such a way that they want to avoid being lynched as much as possible, I do not. I avoid being lynched to a point, and the point is when I've traded myself for enough townies (example in futurama, 7 townies is a good trade for 1 scummy pizza) or have made the overall team difficult to solve even if I do die. At that point, it's a good idea for me to be lynched, because that's another free round for my partners to skate through. And people don't know if my buddies bussed, protected, or had no opinion on me, because I try to average out those postures.

I approach it as: Survive day one, get as many mislynches as possible by pushing it myself or letting it happen, set up teammates for a good endgame, confuse people, derail discussion, make people focus on the wrong things, don't make the team obvious. Depending on who I'm playing against, that might mean playing in a way that would look like X and Y are my obvious buddies, but it can't be, because levels.


Town pizza:

First 3 phases of the game = most critical phases for town. Even day 1.

-You can die at any time, and several bad lynches puts town deep in a hole, especially if they did it to themselves and the scums walked away clean. You don't recover from that.

More people posting more substantively = more investment, because more I can analyze.
Size of game at game start = more investment in the game (to a limit, mashes plateau a bit because too much to read)
Sense that town is off to a bad start = more investment. (If I sense that town is doing very well, I worry a lot less. Otherwise I'm trying to right the ship)
If I am not being dogpiled = more investment because I can think clearly and I also think what I say will be considered.
Anytime mid-game to end-game = every round I am trying to completely solve the game as if it was the final round, with progressively better data.
I also almost never make it this far as town, so expect me to never ever phone it in.
Town games will be obvious that I'm town within those first 3 rounds, if you know how to read me at all, which people don't because paranoia plus aversion to pizza walls and mountains of individual posts.

If I get lynched in a game as town, it usually occurs before I can locate a scum or clear myself in any way. Some games the town is not in the mood to try to clear me and I'm not in the mood to try hard to clear myself. It's okay to be lynched once in a while, it's just a game.

When it's clear I'm going to be lynched as town I look for the wolves, because the townbloc shattered and no one is taking my opinions of who the townies are under any sort of consideration, so that's a bad investment of what little time I have. If I can find 1 scum and make suspicion go there convincingly, even if it's not enough to save me, it puts the idea into people's brains and gets them to not allow that person to skate through the game without any scrutiny. Since the only way my reads will be taken as genuine is with my head, and people aren't going to remember a big, complicated message, I have to focus it down to a solve or partial solve for scum only. Best guess for top scum, and push that as hard as possible, and hope it's right because town's already in bad shape at that point, and me being wrong and convincing people is not great. Still have to try.

If I'm a scum, depending on the game state, I can mimic this behavior because it's also useful in trying to get suspicion on someone else anyway. And it could be distancing or bussing so it's usually null.

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The other aspect of the multi-wagon you have discussed in the past is that it is often bad for scum precisely because they have not been able to avoid that distribution coming about. In that light it is plausible to see the Jowy lynch as involving at least 1 scum after the original 2 votes, a scum sufficiently dissociated from the thrust of the day and some of the specific wagons and their drivers, to come in and seal the deal before some townie shows up and places the exact wrong vote. There are so many scenarios involving this logic that one wouldn't even want to venture into them - well, other than someone like you. Why haven't you mentioned this possibility in its permutations, since it seems like just the sort of thing you would love to game out, if only for future reference.

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There are a lot of possibilities I don't mention because I already go into too much detail about my thoughts that I'm confident on. In that situation I had the Jowy wagon as all townie or dp, and dp actually looked better after jowy flipped town. If he was scum that vote should have been more automatic, imo. Plus he had been under the gun d1 and I wanted to give him a day, and I think that was a good decision. I stand by it. Turned out to be the good choice, too. Our day 2 was very productive and it busted the game open.

I feel like... your instincts about me are often backwards, but not always. I'm just odd to you and vice-versa. Which will always make me difficult for you to read, and I cop to you being difficult for me to read.

This meta may help, but it won't help you in a situation where I don't produce as much on day one because that day one was mostly absentee townies and lack of content. There were a lot of engaged townies this time.

I feel like you need a good three days to have a shot at reading me. Before that, I haven't gotten into my groove and my reads are bad, I need data to do good analyses. After that, it's too late if I'm scum.

Evaluate me late on day 3. Lynch me day 3 if I've failed to look townie.

I should be pure by day 3, like dp101. And like him, if I don't get enough space to do my thing, I never find anyone, and never get clear, and I can look scummy to people if I'm even a little off. And I have range, so even town games won't be identical.

It's okay to be wrong, but I'm a d3 read, not a good d1 read.

I mean, if I under-perform to the point I look like the last 3 scum games, mark me down as wolfy as hell and let people know. Or if you otherwise get such a read, let people know. But since I will rand town more often than scum, and you get better read on my slot by day 3's efforts from me, you'd be able to find me townie when I'm town more often just before mid-game.

My d1s as town, even when they're townie, tend to suck. That's why my reads re-evaluate so much. But even based on that little bit, novice dropped all d1 for me and Manasi dropped by n1, and I found some townies. That's a good day 1 for me.

Even if no scums found, more townies found than the mafia can kill per night, is a solve. That's what I can reasonably aim for. And then I re-evaluate the townies that don't belong in my town, like Manasi.

That's my whole process, when I'm serious and my town is serious, in a game this size.

I'd play it about the same as a town power role, I feel my reads are more important than my power, unless I'm the cop or the vig. And even then, I want to have excellent reads, because it really helps those roles perform well.

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Originally Posted by Askthepizzaguy

Barto you actually towned.

Moar of that, please.

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I actually towned while being a vanilla townie. I think that's the point. And for some reason the scum never killed me. I don't know how long it will take for the shock value to wear off.

The thing is, what if I do it while being a scummioso? :verycool:

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Originally Posted by El Barto

I actually towned while being a vanilla townie. I think that's the point. And for some reason the scum never killed me. I don't know how long it will take for the shock value to wear off.

The thing is, what if I do it while being a scummioso? :verycool:

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Try it out. The point is that I can then read your posts and use the force to sense the dark side in you or not.

If you can sneak past my/town's bullshit detectors as winston did, ultimate gloryaments.

GG to town for a fairly impressive performance nailing 75% of the scum team in short order, but thankfully Winston was deep enough to set the stage for Nips to prevail. We had some fairly bad luck early on (targeting a BP player N1, blocking Cuth when he was poisoning Pizza, Pizza being resurrected, etc). We had all the role names by D2 and suspected that the sectoids were masons and that if we killed one we would kill the other. When pizza turned out to be one we knew that wasn’t the case, but that put even more weight on killing GH when he resurrected him. Turns out that killing GH also killed off Pizza the second time when we used Novice’s day kill. A lot of D2 was trying to kick the can down the road and preserve Novice at least one more day so he could use his day kill. The Pizza lynch was too juicy of a target to resist.

I'd classify my play as mediocre at best. RL conspired against me more than normal (on vacation and moving houses all happened during this game) and I fell back into my comfort scum zone.

Bleh.

I thought this game was pretty much impossible to lose at one point, so RIP.

Sorry again for my outburst after the Pizza lynch, that was most unlike me, and I at least straddled some lines if not crossed them. I just get really frustrated when I can't stop lynches I want to stop - and it was functionally my fault for not being around most of the day due to real life circumstances.

I may or may not play again some day, we'll see. Thanks for hosting Zack.

Please play again. We could use warm active bodies with wim. Some games don't even fill.

Crimson was Superman.

Sooh was Wonder Woman.

Csargo and Barto Pokemon-referenced.

Cuth lasted pretty long.

Manasi unleashed the tricks.

Winston was smooth like ICan'tBelieveIt'sNotButter!

Auto emerged with late purity.

Pizza returned unto the bosom of Our Father. He is with all of us now.

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Originally Posted by crimson_snow

I may or may not play again some day, we'll see. Thanks for hosting Zack.

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Please play again. One of the reasons we targeted you N1 is because I thought that your insights were spot on and impressive given that this was your first game here. We tried to kill you because of the threat we sensed you were, and then had to kill you next night because those senses were bearing out.

And you don’t really have fault in getting frustrated over the pizza lynch either. We as scum took advantage of the option of lynching pizza and influenced things appropriately. You can argue if that was ultimately good play or not, but there was certainly impure intentions behind it.

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Originally Posted by Askthepizzaguy

Try it out. The point is that I can then read your posts and use the force to sense the dark side in you or not.

If you can sneak past my/town's bullshit detectors as winston did, ultimate gloryaments.

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And let you finally figure me out? I've been doing this for seven years.

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Originally Posted by BSmith

GG to town for a fairly impressive performance nailing 75% of the scum team in short order, but thankfully Winston was deep enough to set the stage for Nips to prevail. We had some fairly bad luck early on (targeting a BP player N1, blocking Cuth when he was poisoning Pizza, Pizza being resurrected, etc). We had all the role names by D2 and suspected that the sectoids were masons and that if we killed one we would kill the other. When pizza turned out to be one we knew that wasn’t the case, but that put even more weight on killing GH when he resurrected him. Turns out that killing GH also killed off Pizza the second time when we used Novice’s day kill. A lot of D2 was trying to kick the can down the road and preserve Novice at least one more day so he could use his day kill. The Pizza lynch was too juicy of a target to resist.

I'd classify my play as mediocre at best. RL conspired against me more than normal (on vacation and moving houses all happened during this game) and I fell back into my comfort scum zone.

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Ah-ha! I see the reasons for the lolCuth event now.

And I was right about novice being curiously around for the event of the kill.

Remember, the commandment states that thou shall not metagame in vain. Not that thou shall not metagame.

All in all I had it down to 2 people in the Final 4 round. I had auto as lock town. I thought Fredwood was scummier than Nippleston. I might have been convinced to change my vote, but my main suspect was still Fred… well, as Unitedstatesians say, hindight's 20/20.

Also, yes, @crimson_snow, by all means do come and play with us again. You'll notice that the scum even gave you the proper welcome, i.e. murdering you brutally on Night One. If that is not a vote of confidence, I don't know what is.

Well, we tried to brutally murder him N1, but we had to do it twice...

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Originally Posted by El Barto

And I was right about novice being curiously around for the event of the kill.

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The kill would have happened at mid-day at the earliest, or later if we hadn’t given the order yet. As it was we gave the order pretty much immediately at the start of day so novice didn’t need to be present at the actual time of the kill.

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Originally Posted by BSmith

Well, we tried to brutally murder him N1, but we had to do it twice...

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So you gave him a double vote of confidence.

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Originally Posted by BSmith

The kill would have happened at mid-day at the earliest, or later if we hadn’t given the order yet. As it was we gave the order pretty much immediately at the start of day so novice didn’t need to be present at the actual time of the kill.

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I arrived at the right conclusion for the wrong reasons… so novice was right about his being online in the thread being neither here nor there. It was actually PIS!

vote: novice

Those were all the correct kills all game. Can't fault a single kill choice.

Yes, except, possibly, trying to kill crimson_snow twice. I can't remember whether he'd already said he'd been the kill by then. Monty was a good kill even before his :59 post.

GG everyone, and special thanks to all the subs.

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Originally Posted by El Barto

Yes, except, possibly, trying to kill crimson_snow twice. I can't remember whether he'd already said he'd been the kill by then. Monty was a good kill even before his :59 post.

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My thoughts on the matter at the time:

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Originally Posted by BSmith in Scum QT

Well assuming he is telling the truth then he is just a vanilla townie now so no longer has an ability that can hurt us. Might be better to hit elsewhere to potentially remove another power. Removing his voice might outweigh that though.

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I'm a bit late to the party, but great job to the scum team and thanks to Zack for hosting! :bow:

Sorry I wasn't more active when I was around, but I think I added value to my slot.

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Upon my death, I am ordering you to kill Novice with the fires of a thousand suns as penance for your failure.

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wellll

at least i did that

gg all