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Mafia Philosophy

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Given Zexy's retirement due to being promoted to admin, I might just have to come out of retirement so that y'all don't think us SMods have forgotten about you.
We'll have to find a way to outdo Holiday '15 and (what was the OC game where we hunted for scum in that race).
 
What happened back then?

Holiday '15 was an OC game that featured ME and I as masons. ME died almost immediately, confirming me as town, and the game was a roflstomp against all other factions as I led the show. Mafia killing ME ironically led to their demise. I did it in a pretty gruesome way, and suggest that you read the game if you wanna see some shenanigans. It's OC but most of the key points are out in the open.

I think the game that ME and I co-hunted scum under the assumption that we were both town was XYZZY Mafia (#NoBalance) perhaps...I can't recall, but we just made it a race to find scum. That was fun on the sides, because I just had a strong gut feeling that he was town.
 
Holiday '15 was an OC game that featured ME and I as masons. ME died almost immediately, confirming me as town, and the game was a roflstomp against all other factions as I led the show. Mafia killing ME ironically led to their demise. I did it in a pretty gruesome way, and suggest that you read the game if you wanna see some shenanigans. It's OC but most of the key points are out in the open.

I think the game that ME and I co-hunted scum under the assumption that we were both town was XYZZY Mafia (#NoBalance) perhaps...I can't recall, but we just made it a race to find scum. That was fun on the sides, because I just had a strong gut feeling that he was town.
Good times. :)
 
I think the game that ME and I co-hunted scum under the assumption that we were both town was XYZZY Mafia (#NoBalance) perhaps...I can't recall, but we just made it a race to find scum. That was fun on the sides, because I just had a strong gut feeling that he was town.

I reread it and found this gem to prove my suspicions:
>Maniacal Engineer and Elieson competing over who would crack the game open first. This means they didn't share info or their claims to each other which kinda held town back a little bit.

Zexy's gem reminds me of it, though TBH i don't know how much it really held town back since there was no legitimate reason for ME or I to trust eachother other than us just assuming the other was town

Please. If anything, this motivated both of us to work harder at solving the game, which upped both of our games significantly. It also pretty much allowed me to townclear Elieson fairly reliably as of D1, which is always nice. I was still paranoid, but whatever.

ME siad this and I wholeheartedly agreed~
 
It really didn't hold Town back at all. Neither of us was 100% certain about the other, but our competition drove both of us to perform as best as we could to crack the game.

Honestly, I think that ended up helping Town in the long run, especially since we both shared our info with the confirmed Town player.

That said, we both lost the competition, since we died, but it was fun, anyway.
 
sooo should there be a mafia philosophy 2.0 or what
Not necessary. This thread is really to discuss play styles and opinions/personal strategies used by players for approaching mafia games.

Speaking of, I suppose I can start up a conversation based on the previous two games I played, Pokémon Gen Three Mafia, and Prank Wars Mafia.

For starters, let’s get the basics down for those games.

Gen Three: OC game where I started off as Town, got killed, and subbed in as Mafia.

Prank Wars: NOC small sized game where I was the Town Cop.

ME1’s approach in Gen Three Mafia was to start up OC chats with all of the other players. Yes, I did this as Town. I hadn’t played Gen Two Mafia and was unaware of Mafia having a NK in the game, and assumed I could survive for a phase or two. As Town OC chats are very useful for keeping potentially sensitive information out of scum’s hands. Things like roleclaims and action coordination. It is always in Town’s best interests to use OC as a means of restricting access to private information. In fact, where Town failed in Gen Three Mafia wasn’t because they chose to take advantage of the OC. It was a combination of factors that boiled down to Town appointing the wrong leader, namely ME2.

ME2’s approach to the game was simple in theory and more complex in execution. Jump back into the game and immediately start a wagon on one of my scumbuddies. There had already been a little suspicion on him, and so I exploited that suspicion, gave a good sounding case, and had Town target MegaPod. The issue, of course, was that Town had no lynch in that game, and needed to depleat MP’s HP before he would flip. In the time between me subbing in and MP flipping, I was extremely vulnerable. One errant cop check, and I would have been history, but even that was part of the plan. If I had been outed as scum, it would have distanced me from MegaPod, thus clearing suspicion on him, at least for long enough that he could do some damage. As it so happens, I very nearly got cop checked on that in-between night, but my good buddy @DarthWolf accidentally stopped the check from going through by Jailing me for the night (in the hopes of protecting me if I was Town, or roleblocking me if I was scum. A good thought, but poorly executed.)
The issue with Gen Three Mafia, and where I openly exploited the setup was that Mafia had an instakill, while Town did not. In order to kill someon, Town had to depleat their HP. That took a couple of phases, at the very least, which allowed caught scum to at least survive into the following night and off a townie. I timed everything in that game to best suit my needs. After MegaPod’s flip, I gained a massive amount of credibility and became the Town Leader. I then went after two players who had been acting moderately suspiciously, but, since I knew they weren’t scum, I made sure to eliminate a couple of town’s PRs before the first one flipped. I also manipulated the cop into checking the player who would give me the biggest advantage in the thread. I was going to use the Town check result as leverage against the second townie I was targeting for a lynch, but the results were even better than I anticipated. Turns out, the player I had the Cop target was an unannounced Miller, and the scum result gave me an excuse to go after the third townie. I killed the Cop so that he’d flip at the same time as the scumchecked player, leaving myself as the only one who could explain that mess, and then resumed targeting the previous Town player, who had spent the whole game tunneling on the now flipped dead Miller. Of course, by that point, a couple of other players were starting to get suspicious of me, but it was too little, too late. The game was already over.

Now, I will point out that, having died as town and subbed in as scum, I would have won that game no matter which major faction won, which means I could have continued to play as Town and still won, but that’s just not how I role...errr roll.

Anyway, town’s major mistake in that game was the fact that, after MegaPod flipped, they immediately trusted me. It definitely helped that the two Town players I made cases against were already under some suspicon. I had all of the information I needed to coordinate night actions and attacks, and I had full command of the scum kill. Knowing who to kill, and when to kill them, is crucial for scum. Dragging out jd’s death for as long as I possibly could to continue riding on the coattails of MegaPod’s flip with no Town deaths on my hands, was the key here. His surviving the night by 1HP was no accident.

Now, AE will, and has, cited this as a reason to not use the Town Leader system for solving games, and I will admit that the TL system is not without its flaws. However, the problem here wasn’t the TL system itself, it was how the TL was appointed, and the fact that other players were barely OCing with each other. Even in a TL system, players need to communicate to each other. As I said in the game thread, if all of your information is going through a single conduit, and that conduit is scum, you’re sunk. The Town Leader system does not come at the exclusion of communicating with other players and, in fact, OCing with other players can help verify that your TL is, in fact, Town, by making sure that information is flowing where it needs to flow. Like I said in my analysis of ME1’s strategy, Town’s prerogative is to use OC to control the flow of information. It is in their best interests to use OC both as an extra means of scumhunting and to control access to vital information. Town trusted me too heavily and didn’t communicate with each other enough. That, combined with a little math and strategic timing, is how I won the game so easily.

I took my use of math in Gen Three Mafia and used it a bit in Prank Wars Mafia. I was the Cop in Prank Wars Mafia. For the record, I hate getting important PRs, either as Town or scum, because my basic assumption in every game I play is that I am going to die early on. If I’m Town, Mafia is going to want to off me very early on (see: Christmas Mafia and Gen Three Mafia). If I’m Mafia, I always assume that I will get caught. Having a role as important as Cop is a detriment to my fatalistic playstyle, and is usually not a good role for the TL to have, since the ideal TL has a role that is either not valuable, hard to kill, or detrimental to kill. Nonetheless, the game was 9 players.
I assumed that Mafia would kill me N1 as their default target, so my plan was to survive D1 and claim at the start of N1.
WCS: I wasn’t believed by the Town Doc or the Mafia had a Strongman shot up their sleeve and got killed anyway. In the case of the latter, I would have at least died using up a powerful Mafia ability.
But where did the math come in? Well, given the 9 player setup, I figured we were talking either 7:2 or 6:2:1. There was no way that three mafiosos existed in a game this small. With two mafiosos, 1 Cop, and 1 Doc, the odds of randomly hitting Cop and/or Doctor were just as high as randomly hitting scum on D1. Now, I’ll grant you that I knew who the cop was, but the average player did not. So I stalled out most of the day with mathematical arguments as to why a NL was the best approach to the day, and waited to see who bit.
We mislynched on D1, but that improved the odds of my check catching scum from 2/9 to 2/8, or 1/4 (assuming no GF) or from 1/9 to 1/8 (assuming GF).
I checked the one player that I have trouble reading on N1, and, because of my claim, survived to tell the tale.
Given that I hadn’t died or been blocked, I now knew that scum had no Strongman or Roleblocker, and so I figured their main role was informational, presumablely Role Cop. As such, the next move was to make that role worthless. I had already claimed, and Max claimed to verify my claim. Two Town PRs were in the open, as were two passive roles, and two townies were dead. 4/7 live players had claimed, with no Doc as yet. This significantly narrowed down the PoE for who to lynch on D2, since we didn’t want to potentially off the Doc. The 5th player claimed a JOAT “backup” role with 1x shot of all three Town PRs. A nice claim and used to verify the second Town PR and one of the inactive roles. Granted, said role turned out to be phony, but it narrowed things down further. The doc claimed, and, with 6/7 players claimed, the focus shifted on the 7th player. Mafia’s Role Cop was now useless.
As it turns out, that 7th player was scum Godfather, which auto cleared my town checked player and the other inactive role. Going into N2, 4/6 players were in the clear. One Town PR and the JOAT were still in PoE.

I scanned the Town PoE N2, assuming that they would do as I requested and track the JOAT. I could then use my check to verify if the results they provided were valid or if they were lying.
As it turns out, they tracked the Doc instead, but that didn’t hamper my plan at all, since he turned out as Town, nobody died, and we lynched the second scum on D3.

Mafia, to me, is all about trying to accomplish as much as you can in as little time as you can, and to attempt to cripple the other faction as you do so.

In Gen Three Mafia, I crippled the Town by taking over OC and getting all of the role claims.
In Prank Wars, I crippled the Mafia by using WIFOM to ensure my survival N1, and then making their PR useless as of D2.

Not sure if the above will help y’all defeat me any time soon, especially since I adapt my strategies and moves every game depending on factors such as: game size, OC/NOC, and the role I receive, but hopefully it helped y’all learn a little something.
 
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