Assassination Mafia Analysis - Page 3

On May 18 2015 06:38 justanothertownie wrote:

I can't. I just know that to me your play usually looks very very similar as long as you are not on the chopping block. That's when your alignment becomes really obvious as town.

On May 18 2015 05:08 justanothertownie wrote:

Well, obviously. Because you didn't know the scumteam.
The game is prove for why 3ps suck so much. Punishing the better team etc.

On May 18 2015 06:58 Xatalos wrote:


Then again, I remember someone saying that the scumteam is defined by their best player while the town is defined by its worse players. I certainly think HF deserves to win after playing so well despite the crushing start. Most would have given up at that point, I think. It goes without saying that a 3P is defined by the individual player

On May 18 2015 07:03 yamato77 wrote:
Honestly this game becomes way harder for town if the KP roles miss or just don't shoot. There were a multitude of mistakes from townies that were game losingly bad but town KP roles bailed them out.

mafia played bad enough to get shot, and that's essentially the story of this game.

On May 17 2015 22:09 justanothertownie wrote:
I am highly amused that someone made the effort to analyse my day2 play like I actually tried to win at that point. I am also highly irritated that someone said I should have pushed BH harder night1 when I was not only completely out of posts but also doing so to some degree. Preventing Palmar from getting shot is Palmars job, his team cannot make up for his stupid pushes.
And a BM flip would certainly not have incriminated me because after the second nuke I pushed noone but him - I did not defend him or try to avoid his lynch at all. I mean you guys can claim you would have caught the whole mafia team day1 or close to that but before I believe that I want to see you actually do that in a game nowadays without loads of additional information. Let's say I have my doubts.

Still an interesting read. Thanks for all this effort.

On May 23 2011 02:59 Ace wrote:
Anyway I shot Incognito last night. I said I was going to do it like 10 times in the thread. Welp, shit happens :D

...

4.) Back to Incognito

If you think I'm scum because Incognito died scrub your brain. I've already explained that he was playing Scummy from the beginning but we're not going to rehash that. Read the thread if you want.

On May 17 2015 22:40 justanothertownie wrote:
Essentially I am a little annoyed at how much flak I get here. I did not play a good game - that is for sure. But almost noone was really scumreading me anymore by the end of night1. Palmar on the other hand is not only doing nothing to push scumagenda but also being scumread by most of the important people which leads to him being shot as our most important role. Still people say he played well and I didn't and that it is my fault he got shot. Yeah, right.

On the same note, mafia did not punish GB hard enough for his two big mistakes: pardoning BM and executing blazinghand. Palmar attempts to push hard on people’s tame reactions after GB pardons BM, but this doesn’t go nearly far enough. There is totally room for chaos/panic/a well placed day vig shot, especially after the BH execution.

This shows a clear lack of knowledge about the gamestate. There is NO way anyone gets away with pushing GB here because of how obviously town he is.

On May 18 2015 01:55 GlowingBear wrote:
This is the first time I see good players advocating against constant reads post.

I've alway advocate the "post what you see", because it generates discussion. Generating discussion will have people dropping information in thread. Information in thread means you have instruments to work with.

If you take a game like Avogadro's Mini Mafia, for example. A lot of townies lurked and it was impossible to figure out their alignment because there simply wasn't enough information in thread.

That is why I posted the flawed reads case early on. It's based on weak arguments, but of course it got people talking. I don't see why that it is bad. Can someone clarify it for me?

Also, regarding this:



I got marv doing this with Onegu. He was Mafia.

But I also got oats doing this with other people he raised suspicions and never revisited.

How do you differ when a townie do and a Mafia do?

On May 22 2014 20:30 Ver wrote:

Why is everyone constantly asking questions, getting mad when others don’t answer their questions, and always wanting to have a conversation.

Winning as town isn’t about playing 20 questions, it’s about identifying people who are trying their hardest not to let you figure them out. Sometimes I feel people mistake this whole “lets have a conversation” or “answer my questions!!” as an ends whereas it is just a means, and usually not a very effective one. I haven’t asked a single question or looked at anyone’s responses to questions when analyzing whether someone is mafia yet. All of my intuition/analysis has come from looking at reactions to situations, and congruence of words/actions/persona. That’s it, just those two factors.

To be precise, I don’t feel it is very useful to put potential mafia on their guard, and it’s just distracting to townies to bombard them with questions (unless you are using questions as a subtle means of directing their focus onto something you want. This is great). I believe the best ways of figuring out mafia lie one step beyond their words. I don’t care about what they say, I care about the context, the framework. Because mafia pay all their attention to what they are saying, and not in the box in which they say it.. Focus on what others don’t.

Create an event or force them to react to a circumstance; this disarms them (as they don’t feel threatened). Ask Ace a question and he’ll give very townie sounding answers. Let Ace do what he wants, force thread development, and he reveals himself by seeing the right things and not taking any action on it. Ask Vayne a question and he’ll say whatever, but ignore him and he’ll tell on himself by complaining about scum trashing the thread then spam it up himself and only focus on irrelevancies.

Of course, some may have gotten good mileage out of this method in games I haven’t read. But if you are a big proponent of conversations and question answering I want you to carefully look at your best mafia reads and figure out exactly how you drew those conclusions. How much does question answering factor in? I feel questions have much, much more power in live games; in forum mafia there’s an inevitable filter (no matter if it is a “real time conversation”) that really detracts from its usefulness.

In fact, I feel questions/conversations best serve mafia actually because proper mafia play relies on planting an idea in the mind of a townie, then letting them push their idea, fail, and take the blame for it while you sit on the sidelines and laugh. Questions are the best way to subtly implant that kind of idea (whereas mafia tend to react to questions more defensively inside their head and get more prepared, making it tricky to read into their answers). Ace does this very well for example.

For the future, try making provocative statements and thread situations instead of relying on sissy questions to create useful reactions and disjoint mafia personas.

On May 18 2015 02:03 marvellosity wrote:

This is what made me laugh about the analysis about mafia planning. I played pretty ok most of d1, but I cannot allow for BM shooting nukes off without warning, and I can't allow for Xata (and jat to an extent, especially early) just being very suspicious by playing not very strongly.

And I cannot count for Palmar making this terrible, terrible push on sandroba (and then me) that basically only comes from mafia.

Most of you are too young (lol) to remember Bureaucracy mafia (another Ver game), but in that game mafia-Palmar made a nonsensical push on obviously town syllogism. Just history repeating itself. Which obviously puts me (who is supposed to know Palmar better than anyone) in an extraordinarily difficult position. Because town-me strings up Palmar immediately.

My point being, it was never a failure of planning etc on our part - we didn't need janitor, even in hindsight with the analysis going "omg why not pick janitor" - no, we did not need janitor at all. What we needed was scumteam members not to do random terrible shit on their own accord, not to place other members in terrible positions for no reason, just solid play.

Another funny aside is that both days the game lasted, we lynched a townie. I managed to make the d1 wagons from mafia-town to town-town. What we lacked was playing a solid game, people not doing terrible shit for no reason.

Sure, by Day 2 GB is obviously town (partly because mafia let him gain that status unchallenged). And his Day 1 posting (besides the pardon) is fairly decent, so many people think he's town. But GB's pardon is certainly anti-town. Unless the town is ripping itself to shreds, you can't expect as mafia to just be able to coast along without challenging people's bad behavior. Ace does this all the time. Someone makes an anti-town move? Attack them and put on the heat. Make them slip up in their attempts to defend their actions and nit pick at their mistakes. Of course, their guilt is fabricated, but that's what makes you the mafia!

As mafia, you already know who's town and who's not, so it might be "obvious" that all the town thinks that way. This might make you too conservative because you think that "obviously no mafia could be so bad as to..." Wait a second...thats exactly what happened to BM and GB!! "Those moves are so bad...could they be town?" GB happened to be town, but BM mafia. It's easy to trap yourself into a corner since you know you're guilty (of murdering townspeople in cold blood). To play well as mafia, you need to be able to step outside of the mafia shoes and picture what a townie knows and what information could cause them to second-guess themselves. As mafia, you have to be willing to pick some fights to make people trip up - especially if they're actually starting to piece things together. And of course, even if it turns out that you're wrong and nobody is really willing to change their mind on GB being scummy, its not like this dooms you to being lynched. Townies go into tunnelmode all the time. You won't really look that out of place by attacking GB. I mean, look at how GB got away scot-free by pardoning a mafia AND lynching a townie!!!