Re: Pirate Ship Mafia III [Concluded]
I think the core of the balance problem is that the townies control all deaths. In a normal mafia game, the townies mandate the lynch, but the mafia use the nightkill for their own nefarious ends; in the Pirate Ship games (and group-action type games in general) the townies still control the lynch, but they also control the nightkills. The captain and officers are basically untouchable if they avoid suspicion, which is very often going to be the case, making them unstoppable mafia destroying machines. The mafia had no way to neutralize Visorslash here, and his ability to go unchecked was a huge burden to them (see also: mafia being unable to counter me in II). Maybe this is mitigated if a mafioso manages to get into an officer position (or even the captaincy), but that's unlikely, and unfair to hinge such a pivotal swing on the (low) probability of that happening.
This means that the mafia are a a big disadvantage in battles of attrition, which mafia is most of the time. The town only needs to eliminate three people, and they control the lynch and all of the kills. Any person's efforts to counteract a kill will naturally look suspicious (see the block stopping the spaceman kill) because one mafia dying is a huge blow, while one townie dying is negligible.
This might be mitigated by recruitment, where the mafia can win by attrition by rivaling the town in sheer force of numbers, but conversion availability and success is quite limited, and they don't count as full members anyway and can be safely ignored by the town (as in this game I said, rather blatantly, that I did not care about finding recruits and was not going to even try to do so). The mafia are thus caught in the awkward position of not having the advantages of a conventional mafia team (reliable kills) or a cult (power in numbers).
The scum need a boost in one direction - they need to become better at killing or better at recruiting in order to stand a chance of defeating the town. It might even be worth considering including two such factions, which could potentially force the town to keep the mafia around as a counterbalance against the cult, though this would really only work with a much larger game. As it stands, the mafia don't have a clear path to victory - a short game means they can't eliminate the townies in time, and a long game means the original members can't survive long enough.
Potential solutions that I suggest to help the mafia survive the attrition game:
- Keep recruitment in its limited form seen here, in that not very people are susceptible and it's a fairly involved process, but converts are considered full members and have to be eliminated. eg the game keeps going since Csargo is still alive.
- Make recruitment easier and/or faster, but keep the converts as junior members who suicide when all original mafia are eliminated.
- Keep recruitment the same, but enable the mafia to counter vig groups more effectively. This could mean more powerful and/or more available roleblocks, increased survivability and/or protection (which in turn could make people suspicious of townies with food/strong bonus), easier avenue to perform mafia kills, etc.
Secondary actions for the mafia is a great step in the right direction, and I think any of the paths listed above will make the mafia better able to stand a real chance at conquering the town, and clever implementation could even further hamper "spreadsheeting" as a strategy. I must also mention that including immediate alignment reveals might be necessary in a game with more powerful recruitment, and of course is a greatly appreciated convenience.
edit: also also some of the changes I suggested will incentivize townies to participate in vig groups already more than they are, so you might want to do something about that. Maybe frequent killers are more susceptible to recruitment, or descend into madness, or there's incentive to perform actions other than vigging.
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Originally Posted by TosaInu
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