Mafia: Lemmings 2 Edition

[Clam]

Clamifornia Beach drew a record crowd of 9 lemmings this summer. (Whether that’s a record high or record low, I’ll leave up to speculation…) Among them are…

• 5 innocent lemmings, who actually came to this swimming beach to swim unlike the rest of you suspicious folks
• 1 scooper who, distrusting the other beach bums, brought a shovel with which to poke around at nights
• 2 rogues, who brought a flamethrower for lighting the clampfire but were quickly corrupted by its power…
• Poor old Jimbo McLemming
• And, as noted - No surfers.

Tragically, our friend Jimbo didn’t make it through the first night. But while the rogues were out seeing to him and most of you were snug in your sandcastles, somebody was snooping around the village...

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The roles have been assigned and you’ll get yours by PM shortly. The Scooper will then have 24 hours to choose who to spy on first. After that, Day 1 dawns and the fun begins in earnest

Note: due to RL commitments I'll post Day 1 a couple hours early, provided the Scooper gets back to me (otherwise it'll be a couple hours late).

[Clam]

You, the seasonal residents of Clamifornia Beach, have woken on this early summer’s morning to the terrible news that Jimbo McLemming has gone missing. His sandcastle is empty – his clampoints are gone, and even the flag is missing. Did he swim too far out to sea and get swept away? Did he wander too near the clam on the way home? Was he buried alive in the sand? Whatever happened, it surely wasn’t an accident. Late last night you heard two faint “yippee”s in the sandcastle complex. These two must have done it! But you couldn’t pin down the direction, and of course all lemmings have the same squeaky voice so you couldn’t identify them that way either.

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You may now discuss publicly (by posting in this topic). You may vote for any player to be munched. Remember that this time execution is by majority vote, i.e. 5 of 8 players have to vote for the same player. If a majority is not reached, the day ends 72 hours from the time of this post and nobody gets munched.

[Ramon]

Pretty quiet around here! I accuse NaOH for the murder of Jimbo McLemming!

[mobius]

well it looks like Ramon is quick to point the finger! A little too quick if you ask me.....

 

[ccexplore]

If we are going to reference past games, I guess geoo has no choice now but to talk about the optimal strategy or else risk suspicion of having a special-role agenda.

[NaOH]

Thanks, Ramon. I really appreciate the vote of confidence. 

Since we need a majority vote, actually offing somebody will be difficult. However, it's strictly necessary, since every day nobody gets clammed is more beneficial for them than for us. Basically this means we need to bandwagon together so we can get enough votes in; at least we can have a chance at winning this if somebody is offed. I was planning on just blindly seconding the first accusation I saw to get some momentum going, but... well, I know for sure that's a bad idea in this case.

Sooo instead, I'm going to blindly second the next person to vote for somebody (other than me! Yikes), just because I'd like to see somebody offed. Even at the risk of a rogue lemming seeing this and capitalizing.

Here are some thoughts I had about making accusations:
-Ramon already voted against me. I don't want to start a schism, since the rogues can do smart things with group divisions (such as plant one on each side), so I'd like to discourage anybody from accusing Ramon. Besides, even though he accused me, it seems that he was just trying to kick off the game, rather than specifically eliminate an innocent lemming. No hard feelings.
- The most important trait an innocent surf... ah, swimmer can have is being good at psychology. This means, all else equal, we should put low weights on Simon and... geoo? geoo is at least good at logic. And ccexplore helped crack the Lemmings 1 file format, I believe, so there's a smart cookie too. (And geoo I know did the same for L2.)
- This leaves people whom I don't know well enough to be sure they're good at psychology. RubiX, Giga, möbius, and I'm a bad psychologist. (You can tell because I just put my own name on this list.)
-Clam is going to munch us all anyway, and you know it.
-RubiX spent the entirety of last game as a ghost. All else equal, maybe let's be nice and go for the remainders? Giga and möbius.

[Simon]

I was a little busy these days and only read IRC instead of writing much there, but people have cleanly refrained from discussing the game there. It's good sportsmanship to keep it in this therad.

Wildly accusing out of the blue is viable. At 8 players, a vote of 5 must be scratched together in 2.5 days remaining, with everybody voting for only one other player. I can't bring it over my heart to kill the bunny that doesn't post bunny pictures and thus uses a drawn approxiamation for avatar. So, I'll randomly accuse ccexplore for now -- but I will probably pull back this accusation later, if people agree with this:

It might be interesting to not lynch at all now:

• 1. Prolonging the game gives the detective more turns to investigate.
• 2. Higher win rate by sheer luck. On a bad lynch today, the next day starts with 2 mafia versus 4 townsfolk, and every lynch must be accurate. (When the day starts with equal mafia and townsfolk, mafia wins.) On the other hand, when lynching no one today, the next day starts with 2 mafia versus 5 townsfolk, guaranteeing higher hit rates on all future lynches, and one bad lynch is still allowed!

To recap, we can make up to one bad lynch in the entire game, whether or not we lynch today.

-- Simon

[NaOH]

Okay, as promised, I'm voting for ccexplore (edit: bold). I reserve the right to change my vote later, though.

However, I am highly suspicious of Simon's post.

Prolonging the game gives the detective more turns to investigate.

Yeah, okay, this is true, but it's a very minor advantage compared to the cons, especially since the detective will gain information regardless of whether somebody dies today or not.

Putting the minor gain aside of getting the detective more time (which will happen anyway), intentionally preventing anybody from being clampitally punished just means giving the mafia a free extra night

2. Higher win rate by sheer luck. On a bad lynch today, the next day starts with 2 mafia versus 4 townsfolk, and every lynch must be accurate. (When the day starts with equal mafia and townsfolk, mafia wins.) On the other hand, when lynching no one today, the next day starts with 2 mafia versus 5 townsfolk, guaranteeing higher hit rates on all future lynches, and one bad lynch is still allowed!

It's strange that Simon should say this, since over IRC a few weeks ago he presented some irrefutable arguments that having an even number of players is far more advantageous for the innocents than having an odd number of players, IIRC. I'll see if I can dig up the logs.

[Simon]

The paper I quoted in IRC last week assumes that N mafia vs N townspeople leads to a random lynch. The mafia prefers an endgame with 1 mafia vs 2 townspeople at day, compared to 1 mafia vs 1 townsman.

Clam's rules make N mafia vs N townsfolk a win for the mafia. Thus, the better endgame for the mafia is N mafia vs N+2 townspeople now, and not anymore N mafia vs N+1 townspeople.

This is an important change and reverses odd-even.

(If people don't agree still or point out errors, I'll be up for lynching.)

-- Simon

[GigaLem]

Living in a beach area all by myself now is quite the journey
but I better watch myself around these parts
*Puts a weapon into my holster*

[NaOH]

Oh yeah, okay, Simon's right. I think. Somebody should check his math. I'm too tired.

I think it's actually beneficial then for us to switch to an odd number of players. At the moment, if two people die every day/night pair, this will end up with, in all likelihood, N mafia vs N+1 townspeople, which is optimal for townsfolk.

Hmm. My vote stands, regardless.

And I am a skeptical fish.

[Clam]

48 hours left in Day 1. Votes so far:

ccexplore: 2 votes (Simon, NaOH)
NaOH: 1 vote (Ramon)

Remember to bold your votes to make sure they get counted! (Apologies if this wasn't in the rules, but it was established last game anyway.)

[ccexplore]

I was out for most of the evening (UTC-7), and yay, I came back to this an hour or so ago.  I guess I'm going to have some trouble falling asleep tonight.

I'm definitely confused right now on two things:

  a) Is Simon's no-lynch suggestion better than NaOH's lynch-someone-today suggestion?  I do have to say at least Simon's point #2 sounds convincing, but coming from me, an accused person, I guess it doesn't mean much.

  b) If Simon truly believes no-lynch is better, isn't he undermining confidence in his own suggestion by making a random accusation right now?  "I don't think it's in the innocent lemmings' interest for anyone to be lynched today, but let me cast my vote onto someone random to get the ball rolling on getting someone lynched anyway, even though I think it's worse strategically?"  I can't even quite tell right now what exactly he means about the possibility of pulling back his vote--is he saying that if it looks like I'll end up with 5 votes he'll then withdraw his vote to pull it back to 4 instead?  Or maybe the other way around (4->5)?

Well, enough thinking over this, it just makes my head spin.   I need some major sleep and thus probably won't be online for the next 12 or so hours.  Guess I will see how things go after that (then again if today is any indication, I should probably just expect more silence ).

[Simon]

Well, enough thinking over this, it just makes my head spin.

It was just to get lynching done in time (2 days left for a vote of 5) in the situation where people don't accept my proposal. It's easier to pull back (5 -> 4) the vote than to organize a last-minute lynch.

I'll be around in the upcoming hours to see what others think. Should there be a sudden rabble, I'll change my vote. You don't sound overly suspicious after all.

-- Simon

[Ramon]

Good, now there's a few statements we can work with  I retract the accusation of NaOH for now (I unbolded it in the previous post as well).

Let's have a look at the player list (in alphabetical order as not to favor anybody):

ccexplore
geoo
Giga
Jimbo McLemming
mobius
NaOH
Ramon
RubiX
Simon

So far, geoo and Rubix haven't said anything. Perhaps they want to stay under the radar. Giga has let out a role-play post that didn't actually contribute to the discussion at hand. Simon, ccexplore and NaOH have brought up a couple of valid points that we can start working on, and möbius had apparently been very eager to quickly point that finger at me...