Rebalancing 6p, 8p and 10p

[themeeman]

The Problem

The even numbered game modes of SH are not balanced in the slightest and are not played by anyone on the site. While 7p remains the most popular mode of course, with 5p and 9p seeing some play, the even numbered counterparts to these are not seen outside of the occasional gray game.

The reason for this is simple: They take an already lib-favoured game, and add an extra liberal. It is logically pretty obvious that this therefore cannot be balanced. There are many implications to this. For instance, the SE power is now made almost irrelevant. This is because, if you ja a fascist as president in HZ and they take gun, and shoot a liberal, instead of taking the game to equity and liberals being forced to topdeck the game at best, they will instead still be in a liberal majority situation. Even if fascists manage to take gun twice, which is already difficult, they are still only in equity and have to take TD odds, making fascist majority impossible.

Additionally, when there is an extra liberal, any conflicts give even more info to libs. For example, in 8p, instead of 3 conflicts giving 1 confirmed liberal, it gives 2, which is an almost impossible situation to lose for libs. Just 2 conflicts, which is a likely situation when you have an investigation power, guarantees maximum 1 fascist in the remaining 4 liberals instead of 3, making finding liberals much easier.

At a high level of play (1900+), many top players believe that normal 7p SH is lib favoured by anywhere from 60% to 65%. This means that 8p would probably be around 80% to 90% favoured, which is pretty bad, because ideally we would have diversity amongst the modes played, at least in my opinion.

Solution

I propose rebalanced versions of the modes, adding a new power I call the Double Bullet. This is a power that allows the president to shoot not just 1 but 2 players in succession. The new rebalanced boards would look as follows:

6p: blank / blank / deck peek (?) / double bullet / bullet 8p: blank / blank / SE / double bullet / bullet 10p: blank / inv / SE / double bullet / bullet

With HZ and VZ in the same positions, and the same deck.

The implications of a double bullet are that if a fascist is SE'd and passes in HZ, it means that they can achieve equity by shooting 2 libs, achieving TD odds and possible majority, like in the odd numbered modes. While it can also be used to the libs advantage, it benefits the fascists significantly more and makes the SE actually relevant.

The removal of an inv in 8p and 10p is because, as I established before, conflicting gives the libs a lot of info in these modes, and the inv essentially is a forced conflict. This will make games harder, since conflicting on the first two reds will be subopitmal, leading to games with either zero or one conflict, which are harder for liberals to win.

As liberal, while the safest strategy with double bullet would be to simply shoot both sides of a conflict to confirm a fascist is dead, I don't feel this is a huge problem because conflicts will be rarer with an inv removed, and it doesn't help solve the game; shooting two fascists is a much much better situation and will often be worth going for.

In 6p, I have left deck peek the same, however this can possibly be changed depending on how balanced it is, possibly replacing it with the peek and drop power.

Implementation on the Site

All that is needed to start testing this out is the implementation of the double bullet, which would be enough to make it worked in custom lobbies, and then later consider if it would be a good idea to make it into ranked modes.

Trivia mode

Adding the double bullet also makes 10p trivia mode more viable, where you have 3 double bullets followed by 2 bullets, and shoot the 2 worst answers.

[woaisthisgit]

good idea i agree. :)

[Lord-Zuko]

delete even playered games for april fools poggers

[realDerekTan]

I like the idea of a "double bullet" concept in even-numbered games since it's currently extremely difficult to win as the fascist role.

I'd like to suggest a slight improvement, which is to decrease the blues in the deck and increase the reds (i.e. <6 blues and >11 reds). The reason for this is simple: in a 7p fascists need 4 votes to pass, where they already have three votes; therefore they only need to sway the vote of one liberal to obtain a gun in HZ; in 6p, 8p, and 10p games fascists need to sway the votes of two liberals to obtain the "double bullet".

Due to the difficulty of "sheeping" two liberals instead of one, they should have better odds than usual on TD game. Since it's much more difficult to get a passing gun in a 6p game, I'd like to see it balanced to a point where if a fascist gets the double gun it's almost 100% on TD game. This would make it balanced for the fascists, as liberals should not get away with a "bailout blue" if they Ja a fascist in HZ.

[Lord-Zuko]

BBBBB TOPDECK GOGOGO

[Vigasaurus]

Yeah I can agree with most of the logic regarding the even-playered games, and that just double-bullet would need to show up first for play-testing. If there's more interest - I can add it to my docket (probably a couple months out), or if anyone wants to whack at it first, by all means.