Conquer Club

Mafia Math (For Town)

Discuss Mafia Games, roles, ideas for games, mechanics, and everything else related to the game here!

Moderator: Community Team

Forum rules
Please read the Community Guidelines before posting.

Mafia Math (For Town)

Postby jak111 on Thu Jul 03, 2014 1:17 pm

I pull out numbers from time to time in games, but it's something I constantly do behind the scenes to predict chance.

First off, we know if there's only one mafia party at work they are usually 1/3 the size of town or 1/4 the size of town. With games over 8 players almost always having 1+ 3rd parties.

So let's say we have a 16 player game. 4-5 players would be mafia with the chance of an additional 1-2 third parties.

So we've now created the possibility of 5-7/16 anti-town players.

That means we now have a 31-43% chance that each player is anti-town.

As a town player looking for mafia, you now can eliminate yourself from the list, leaving 5-7/15 anti-town players. Bringing your percentage chance of each player being mafia to 33-46%.

If you're a Vanilla townie, that's the best you can do until people begin to die (as each townie dies, the percentage increases and as each mafia dies the percentage decreases).


But, let's say that you are a Town Cop with suspicions of there being a God Father.

Night 1 you investigate Player A, he comes back as Town.

You can now be 93% certain Player A is indeed town assuming all players live through the first night.
1-(1/15)

Night 2 you investigate Player B after Player C is lynched and Player D dies the following day.

You can now be 92% certain that both Player A and B are town. (Notice the percentage drops a bit, that is because the Godfather is still alive, however the percentage is still going up faster for others)
1-(1/13)

With 13 alive, you can now be 45-63% that any OTHER player in the game is mafia over the mere 8% of the player's you investigated being God Father.


Now lets go into another role. A Town Watcher. Let's keep the same game on Day 3 now with 14 alive. Night two you watched player D die. But, there were three people to visit D in the night. One of which is of course the killer.

Ignoring the watch you would have a 38-53% Chance of randomly hitting anti-town with a lynch.

We will assume for this purpose that 2/3 of the ones to visit D in the night were town PR's and the other the killer. To randomly lynch in them is a 33% chance of hitting the killer.

However, if we eliminate these 3 from lynching others, we now have a 4-6/10 chance of hitting anti-town, or 40-60% chance. While by instinct you'd want to go after the killer, it may be wiser to instead go after anyone else.


Just some insight on different mafia math for town to up their chances of finding scum.
Highest Rank:
Major:2157

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers"

Jak Eliminator: Prison Riot [0/16] *Sign Ups*
User avatar
Private 1st Class jak111
 
Posts: 280
Joined: Mon Dec 28, 2009 4:24 pm
Location: At your deathbed.

Re: Mafia Math (For Town)

Postby edocsil on Tue Jul 08, 2014 12:59 pm

This has been bugging me a lot.

Numbers are interesting, but they really are useless in Mafia. They are used by scum to rationalize scummy moves. They can say some statistic with good, valid math (like yours) with fake numbers. They know the full picture, or at least more of it, and can easily screw with the town with their knowledge.

Also, many 3rd party come up ino, GF powers are hard to predict, and there are a whole slew of issues trying to apply math to a game that relies on gut, intent, and cross-examination.

In a simple setup C9, C9++, or other stuff like this numbers are a huge asset to town, but here on CC we are playing many faction games, cult games, big games where numbers don't apply well, or massively flavor driven games that are hard to set standard roles to.

I don't know, it's just my $.02
Edoc'sil

Commander9 wrote:Trust Edoc, as I know he's VERY good.

zimmah wrote:Mind like a brick.
User avatar
Sergeant 1st Class edocsil
 
Posts: 102
Joined: Sat Apr 28, 2007 8:09 am
Location: The Great State Of Minnesota

Re: Mafia Math (For Town)

Postby TA1LGUNN3R on Sun Jul 13, 2014 7:06 pm

edocsil wrote:This has been bugging me a lot.

Numbers are interesting, but they really are useless in Mafia. They are used by scum to rationalize scummy moves. They can say some statistic with good, valid math (like yours) with fake numbers. They know the full picture, or at least more of it, and can easily screw with the town with their knowledge.

Also, many 3rd party come up ino, GF powers are hard to predict, and there are a whole slew of issues trying to apply math to a game that relies on gut, intent, and cross-examination.

In a simple setup C9, C9++, or other stuff like this numbers are a huge asset to town, but here on CC we are playing many faction games, cult games, big games where numbers don't apply well, or massively flavor driven games that are hard to set standard roles to.

I don't know, it's just my $.02


+1

The predictive abilities of probabilities become less useful as complexity increases.

-Tails
User avatar
Sergeant 1st Class TA1LGUNN3R
 
Posts: 2699
Joined: Sat Jan 24, 2009 12:52 am
Location: 22 Acacia Avenue


Return to Mafia Discussions

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users

cron