Let us analyze your games!

Yes I’ve admitted my vote on Ellie was a major mistake that was caused by a lapse of concentration.

But I still don’t understand why Ellie reacted the way he did to my outing as a treestump.
As pointed out it was like he conterclaimed me but his role was NOTHING like mine.

So I just did see HIM as SCUMMY and couldn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t.

It was a difficult game with you guys having so much meta.

The counter-claim was a semi-bluff.

I felt like your role was one that had to die relatively early unless you were like superpower town - I can go point out some posts that could probably have been tailored better later. As ffery mentioned the claim coming out in pieces certainly ddin’t help. Also I think I disagree the idea that the right thing to do is to first post claim a la miller, it’s probably best to play sickeningly protown and try to draw the NK? Even moreso than a miller. {Miller claim more often that not doesn’t lead to the target just getting offed, while with this role there’s a very high likelihood it does).

As for stuff concerning me:
I think the reasons why I WASN’T scummy and was “bait” so to speak had nothing to do with meta. In the sense that “meta-free” I don’t think you can prescribe any reasonable motive to each action tha tmade more sense as scum {counterclaiming, quiet end vote on bee, stuff with pyx, etc.}.

Sorry this has taken a bit! I started the writeup a week or so ago and lost the unsaved text in an involuntary reboot.

This game was the second playing of a 9 player setup that Micc created for a open setup contest. He won the contest, and this game was a lot of fun to play.

Here’s the game design:

setup

This is a 9 Player Open Setup which contains the following roles:
2 Arsonists
6 Trees
1 Firefighter

Setup Notes:
Arsonists have a single factional night action. They may choose to prime a single target, or to ignite all previously primed targets.
Firefighter blocks the priming of a target ONLY on the night in which they are being primed.
Trees become Tree-stumps upon being lynched, allowing them to continue posting in the thread.
Firefighter, Trees, Tree-stumps, and Arsonists are all vulnerable to being primed and ignited.
Players are not told when they are primed, Arsonists are not told if the priming was successful.
Tree-stumps cannot vote, and do not count as a vote for endgame purposes.

Arsonist Role PM:
[Player Name],

Welcome to Micro 379: Forest Fire!

You hate nature, and trees, and things that are green. The sight of the forest outside of your home fills you with disgust. In fact, if the whole thing went up in smoke and flames you wouldn’t be bothered one bit. Actually…that kind of sounds like a good idea…

You are an Arsonist, along with your partner [Player Name]. You may post in the thread and vote as you see fit. Your additional abilities are listed below.

Abilities:

  • Factional Communication: During the night phase you may talk with your partner [Private Topic Link]here[/Private Topic Link].
  • Factional Pyrotechnics: Each night phase either you or your partner may take one and only one of the the following actions:
    Prime a target for ignition by dousing them with gasoline.
    Ignite all previously primed targets by lighting them on fire and thus killing them.
    Win Condition:
  • You win when only Arsonist aligned players are left alive, or nothing can prevent this from occurring.

Confirmation:

  • Please confirm in-thread.

Tree Role PM:
[Player Name],

Welcome to Micro 379: Forest Fire!

Your leaves are green, your roots are long, and the creatures of the forest marvel at your very sight. Your life is simple, and quite frankly, that’s exactly how you like it. Kind of makes you wonder though…how long will things stay that way?

You are a Tree, and aligned with the Forest. You may post in the thread and vote as you see fit. Your additional abilities are listed below.

Abilities:

  • Stumped: Upon being lynched you become Tree-stumped. This means you will still be allowed to post in the thread, but you will not have a vote. Being killed in any other way overrides this ability, and will cause you to be removed from the game.

Win Condition:

  • You win when only Forest aligned players are left alive.

Confirmation:

  • Please confirm in-thread.

Firefighter Role PM:

[Player Name],

Welcome to Micro 379: Forest Fire!

You love nature, and trees, and things that are green. The sight of the forest outside of your home fills you with joy. In fact, if the whole thing went up in smoke and flames you might just consider suicide. Dang, you better keep your eyes open…never know what might happen…

You are a Firefighter, and aligned with the Forest. You may post in the thread and vote as you see fit. Your additional abilities are listed below.

Abilities:

  • Fire Prevention: Each night phase you may choose one other player to douse with water. The doused player will be immune to being primed for ignition during that night phase.

Win Condition:

  • You win when only Forest aligned players are left alive.

Confirmation:

  • Please confirm in-thread.

Game thread is here: Micro 488: Forest Fire

The player list had 4 (and eventually 5) hydras. All of the original 4 hydra heads had a great deal of experience with each other, as well as varying amounts of experience with the non-hydra players. Sometimes I refer to games like this where a majority of players are able to read each other well as “meta-circles”. If the players with a lot of experience playing with each other are a majority and mutually townread each other, then the less familiar players may get lynched by process of elimination (for good or ill).

In this game, one of the hydras in the meta-circle was scum, and one of the less familiar players was their partner.

Regarding my/my hydra’s play in this game, Empire had become scary-accurate at reading me (and he obvtowns himself as town easily most of the time). As a town hydra I started the game feeling confident that I didn’t have to worry about being mislynched. That confidence turned out to be a little premature! My partner, Nachomamma8 was extremely time-crunched and had a scumread on a god-tier player (the Rancid Broderick Drake hydra) because of the way they attacked a player who had a somewhat weak (but still quite town) entrance to the game. Due to the time crunch, I wasn’t able to understand Nacho’s scumread well enough to convey it to the rest of town, and that lack of a coherent reason for the scumread caused suspicion to swirl around us at times. Rancid flipped to scumreading us and pushed that read for a good portion of day 1.

Still, it was a strong town and we easily lynched the scum player who wasn’t part of the meta-circle. Nacho was against that lynch.

If I’m reading people honestly, I have townreads of varying degrees on everyone except for Yuriko. This means I am reading the game wrong. The only thing flipping Yuriko tells me is if I’m reading the game wrong (yay), or if I’m reading the game super super wrong (boo). Saying that I am not willing to lynch Yuriko today or that I don’t want to lynch Yuriko today is probably being overdramatic, I do think she’s the likeliest to flip scum but I’m not ready to flip her right now, especially since a Yuriko townflip would honestly just break me.

He wanted to hunt for the non-obvious scum, and worried that Yuriko would flip town, and then the lack of any other decently strong scumreads would end up being a disaster later in the game.

The scum player in the meta-circle had quite effectively beaten off our day 1 push, and we had reluctantly concluded they were probably town before day 1 ended.

So, on the next game day, we settled on another player outside the meta-circle for the final scum. That lynch was almost a foregone conclusion before they were replaced by Metal Sonic and hitogoroshi in their newly minted Gyre and Gimble hydra.

Metal Sonic had just played a profoundly good and nearly successful scum game in the 2015 Team Mafia series. He had gotten one of my teammates (Nacho) lynched, and while doing so, had convinced us he was mistaken town. After that experience, I was on high alert and it took more convincing than usual for me to back down from my scumread of their slot.

This was the first (and so far only) time I’d played with hitogoroshi, though I’d played in a couple of fascinating games that he designed and hosted. Metal Sonic when replacing in as town back then was quite good at making himself obviously town. But, hitogoroshi was an unknown quantity (though his reputation indicates he’s scary-good at the game). The amount of quality analysis they were able to put into the game quickly rendered them unlynchable, and process of elimination (as well as Metal Sonic and hitogoroshi’s scumcase on Rancid) sold the day 2 lynch target to the rest of town.

One of my favorite parts of this game was the opportunity to play again with Soft-spoken, who had a strong reputation at Epic Mafia. Empire, Regfan and Bbmolla are also Epic Mafia veterans. All the polite gasps of admiration as they shared their EM pedigrees was one of many delightful moments in this game.

The win, itself, was almost anticlimactic. Rancid Broderick Drake had done a fantastic job of mollifying suspicion on Day 1. Although the easy mislynch disappeared thanks to the Gire and Gimble hydra replacing in, I think process of elimination would have eventually led to Rancid being lynched. The game would have been considerably closer, though.

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Thanks, ffery! It’s a nice and refreshing perspective from the point of view of your hydra.

What were your thoughts on the BBmolla slot during the course of the game? If I recalled correctly, they weren’t doing much and were albeit difficult to sort.

Bbmolla dropped a firefighter tell early in the game. I never really suspected him after that. Before that, I was hoping that Bbmolla and Tammy would interact in ways that would help me sort them both.

Bbmolla has a minimalist playstyle that I sometimes find hard to read.

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Would you guys mind analyzing me?

I’m sure I did plenty wrong, it’s been ages since I’ve actually played maf.

I will do this shortly!

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lel ck analysis

The thing is I don’t think tn really did anything wrong that game. He played a pretty solid game.

I got taken in by Katsuki’s LIES. :<

Game revolves around the vig shooting properly in that game. Pretty much just a solo carry game. I don’t think there was much you could do except not get taken in by katy’s Lies

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Well, from your perspective, all the things I said made sense.

Sorry for the delay!!!

Game: CUTIE MAFIA - SUPER SNUGGLES (SNUGGLE PHASE 2)

First things first. Day 1: Not your fault, not anyone’s fault. Everyone loves a good meme (though in this case there were 2 scum on the wagon incl. hammerer, I don’t think you can always rely on this and push based on this, which you didn’t do, something I agree with), and sometimes memes backfire and you end up with a page 1 lynch and not much to go off of on page 2 and day 2.

That being said, you did an excellent job obvtowning Day 2, and early, too. I think playing from behind in a smallish game is very difficult, and town certainly was behind from Day 2 and that mentality forces some play differences, particularly more aggression since scum just wants to lurk amongst the panicky chaos, and you cannot take that route unless you have obtowned.

You did, and you took the leader role. And you made it far less comfortable to be scum than it normally would be, and I know I felt that, and I think Katsuki did as well. The only thing I think you could have done differently (and this may very well be a personality thing and not a mafia improvement thing, as I do agree with the below comment that in this setup the vig has to have brass balls and accuracy to bring things back around and you were not the vig, so it is unfair to expect you to singlehandedly win this game) is that you let off the gas a little bit once there was infighting going on between people and you weren’t sure of their alignments, and you let them argue with each other and it felt a like the chaos was back in the thread, and I don’t think the MS lynch would have happened in the manner that it did had you been more forceful in controlling and moderating the ongoing debates.

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FTR the reason I self hammered was I was townreading obvtown tn at day 2, but the problem was he was scumreading me, and we were behind, so without full 100% town agreement there’s no way we can get a scum lynch. Plus that means I was on the table and might have been a vig target so it means I have to die to give town a better chance to win and the vig, whoever it was, to shoot right. Unfortunately they shot wrong but everyone makes mistakes!

I guess this means that tn should indeed in future stop getting taken in by KATSUKI’s LIES, but I don’t really know how to give helpful constructive advice for that specific part :frowning:

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TN was fine letting me whisper sweet nothings into his ear IMO

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I let things go too far, second guessed myself, and voted town :sweat:

I’ve never actually been obvtown before :blush:

I was a lot more right than I thought I was at first, that’s not something I’m used to, so of course I assumed I was wrong on my (chesskid/katsuki) scumreads.

:blush:

Helllo, I’d like Fferyllt to analyze my most recent game:

White Flag Mafia

(I replaced in) Thank you.

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Hi Ranmaru. Welcome to Mafia451!

I’ll have a read through your game and get back with my thoughts either this weekend or Monday.

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Analysis for @Ranmaru

Game: White Flag Mafia

I thought the catch-up posts and reads lists were good. They looked town to me, which is at least half the battle in a mountainous game. You looked assertive in terms of asking players for content - reads lists, asking them for thoughts on other players, etc, but it became pretty repetitive, and other players began to react like they were finding your playstyle and pushes obnoxious (postie at the start of day 2 is a good example of this). The ratio of requests for data versus doing something with the data seemed a little off. It could have been happening outside the game thread, maybe?

I liked that you tried to take on some leadership on day 1 a la post 828 and 835. Did you feel like you were successful?

You weren’t the only person dogpiling srceenplay, but your demands for content from him while continuing to vote him and voicing that he was the best lynch wasn’t going to get him to cooperate with you if he was town. It’s hard to say, of course, but giving him a little bit of slack at that point could have encouraged him to do something besides fight his lynch. As either alignment more content would have been good, but if he was scum even the illusion that your read was softening might have meant some associations hitting the thread.

This was an interesting post. It looked like a srceen townflip wouldn’t change your opinions about your other scumreads, so these reads were independent of each other.

Looking at your day 2 reads, they changed a lot. Your read on postie did a 180 between late day 1 and the start of day 2, for example. You had different people as scum at different times, and to your credit you had every scum in your scumpile at different times, but seemed to be easily pushed away from scumreading the actual scum. Think about what they did to change your mind, and think about whether you gave them a roadmap for changing your mind via the way you presented your reads. Also, think about what contributed to your scumreads of town players and whether the reasons should have been considered scum-indicative.

This post would be a good one to look at in terms of scum-indicativeness since you kept coming back to a scumread on LQ at various points in the game.

How often do you catch scum by focusing on this kind of word choice? Did you have meta reasons to think that LQ was more likely to say “not scum” as one alignment vs another? Also this post has a fair bit of hectoring. “do you care about getting your reads right?” “I want your full reads list I asked for it and you never gave one”.

I feel like these kinds of repetitive requests for information, and then browbeating a player if they didn’t give you what you wanted in their next series of posts, added a lot of low-level content that wasn’t needed in order to form a read of you and may not have helped in forming reads of the players you interacted with, either.

Overall, you often tried to direct town - to put down votes, to consolidate votes, to vote your current scumread, to give reads, to answer questions, etc. But, at the same time, your reads changed a lot. So, if leading, you were switching directions a lot, and if not leading, you were making a lot of noise, not all of which was productive.

Do you feel confident in general about your reads accuracy and your ability to lead. Do you think that this game was anomalous for you? If not, maybe focus on one of those skills and hone it more before trying to do both at once. And try to consolidate your posting a little more. Out of your almost 900 posts in that game, a lot of them were one-liners, and some were repetitive. It’s tempting to respond to every little thing in game (I have a tendency to do this especially when I feel lost, trying to claw my way to some strong reads), but it can overwhelm your own most-meaningful content, as well as giving scum cover and an excuse to hide.

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