Resistance Unspoiled Thread

The Game Room
21

Something I just noticed: In addition to the two other stated reasons to mistrust HookerChemical, she’s also the one that posted that it’s good strategy for the spies to vote succeed on the first mission. Now, it makes sense for Town to post that… after the result of the first mission is revealed, so people don’t get complacent about a success. But there’s no benefit to Town to say that beforehand, while it could be an effort to coordinate with other Scum.

Were I in the game, at this point I would reject any team proposed by Hooker, or with her on it.

And with saying that, I realize that there’s a big difference in how this game works and how Mafia works. In Mafia, once you’ve identified the single most fishy person in the game, you have all the information you need for the round. It’s good to try to continue hunting, for the benefit of future Days, but in the end, on any given Day, you’re only lynching one person. Here, though, you always need to be considering who all the Spies might be. It’s easy enough to keep Hooker from doing any damage, but if some other Spy is on a team, they can still bring the game one mission closer to their victory condition (which is awfully darned close).

22

By my reading, that post happened before roles were sent out. Otherwise I’d be behind this 100%.

I would note that sinjin quoted that post in-game, though. I don’t like the currently proposed team for that reason.

23

On the other hand, somebody needs to start raking HC over the coals for this one pretty soon. This statement has no substantive value other than being a subtle way of saying, “look at me, I’m town”. It’s strikingly similar to the post that sunk Menocchio, the Alpha Wolf, way back in M1 (that lynch was famous for being the first instance of the “third vote” reasoning, but IMO that wasn’t anywhere near as damning as his “look at me, I’m town” post).

On another note, it occurs to me that in the long run, it’s probably more valuable for the resistance if team leaders do not include themselves in the mission. IMO, the resistance is better served by having the team leader express their opinion on an additional player, even if there is a higher chance of a resistance leader adding a spy to the team. Early in the game, they can absorb the occasional failed mission in exchange for additional information.

This game I think gives a good idea as to why this is important. Not only has the resistance learned that (at least) one of story, tex and maha are spies, they also know that JohnnyBravo chose a spy to go on the mission. If JohnnyBravo was a spy and put himself on the mission in place of the other spy, the resistance would have less information right now.

24

My goodness. I just don’t understand everyone else. In my opinion, everything that HookerChemical has been saying has been spot on. The players really were way too quick to approve a team. And now that that decision is biting them in the butt, they are still turning on HookerChemical.

Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. 40% of the players are spies. And if I’m right and HookerChemical is [town] then 44% of the non-HookerChemical players are spies!

My read is that HookerChemical knows the game better than anyone else and has played it before. If she is a spy, then she is playing the role of ‘helpful townie’ to game credibility (and achieving the exact opposite!). Anyway, HookerChemical is clearly trying to guide a sensible approach to the game, regardless of her alignment.

Gah.

And all this nonsense about 100% accept being just as useless as 100% reject needs to be debunked ASAP. Yes, those specific votes don’t yield information, but with a reject, you GET ANOTHER VOTE!
With an accept, there are no more votes. To me this is a major difference.

Which is why I think storyteller is the spy in that group of three.
(1) The team was clearly 1 spy, 2 [town]. If it were a different make up, I’m certain the mission would have succeeded.
(2) a townie storyteller would have seen the benefits of rejecting the first team. Instead storyteller put the burden of proof on a clear benefit for reject while offering no clear benefit for accept. This doesn’t sound like the storyteller I know.

Why is it that most everyone is playing with the point of view that one needs a reason to reject? In my opinion, the game is clearly set up so that the default should be reject and one should have a reason to accept. Even if that reason is ‘this is the third team and I don’t like the people slated for 4 and 5,’ that’s at least a reason.

Ironically, the probability of storyteller being a spy actually goes down with the failed mission. At the beginning of the game everyone has a 4/10 chance of being a spy (40%). With 1 in the 3 being a spy, all of their probabilities go down to 33.3% while everyone else goes UP to 42.9%.
[If I were a townie, then everyone else would start the game looking like 44% spy, then storyteller, Mahaloth and TexCat would look 33% spy, and everyone else would look 50% spy!!!] Holy Crap!

The person I most suspect of being a spy (besides storyteller) is JohnnyBravo. First, I get the impression that he knows what he is doing but is being coy about it. His team proposal was calculated. He gave a reason that shows a high level of calculation. Furthermore, he attacked HookerChemical, which I feel a newbie would be less likely to do. HookerChemical at least is being upfront about being knowledgable about the game and having experience with it.

Mathematically, the probability of a townie JohnnyBravo choosing exactly one spy in a group of three is about 55% so one could argue that JohnnyBravo’s probability of being a spy is 45%. [that was a quick calculation, I’m sure I made a mistake somewhere].

I’m not sure if people will see this or not, but one of TexCat, storyteller and Mahaloth should be on the next team. They actually are the LEAST likely to be spies at this point.

This is a strange game. I’m beginning to think that the game hinges quite heavily on face-to-face gameplay. Furthermore, I think the game benefits more from rapid play. Voting down a team in a realtime game would mean the game gets extended by a minute or two. Here on this board, voting down a team adds two days to the game length. That’s going to hurt down the road.

Finally, I think the game design favors spies. Online even more so. Spies need to sabotage 3 missions, but there are FOUR spies! In the video version on TableTop, there were 2 spies and still 5 missions. That means at least one spy needed to sabotage two missions. In the current game, there is no such requirement. At this point, I strongly question HookerChemical’s statement about the first team nearly always succeeding. A team with 1 spy on it should always sabotage, it would seem.
But clearly, they put themselves into a bad position by not looking at more teams and getting more votes. There is no other way to suss out the spies. Relying the mission failures won’t work. They will need multiple fails to figure out who is a spy based on mission successes alone, which of course would lose the game.

I guess there is a very strong luck component to this game.

25

I’m caught up now.
Gah, Storyteller, now you start making sense.

What the players still don’t grasp is that without team rejections, they will NEVER have enough information to win. Heck, even with team rejections they won’t have enough information, but accepting everything from the beginning isn’t going to get them anywhere.

I think this is the type of game that will require many play throughs to get an idea on how the game really works and the strategies involved.

HookerChemical is trying to teach, but they aren’t listening.

26

Why are you so convinced that there was exactly one Spy on the first mission? It’s most probably just one, but taking that as an ironclad assumption is going to distort any other probability calculations you want to make.

And for all the folks saying that online is harder because you can’t watch faces and so on, that’s true, but on the other hand, you can also analyze much more deeply, and hold people to task for exactly what they’ve said. The same dynamic occurs in Mafia, of course.

27

I don’t have my copy of the game at hand, so I don’t know if MG is using the format it has for 10 players and I also don’t have notes on wins and losses for playthroughs but my recollection is that when spies fail the first mission, Resistance wins. There’s just not enough room to hide in a team of three at the very beginning.

Chronos, it’s just insanely ballsy to throw anything but Succeed if you’re not the only Spy on the very first mission.

28

I feel that 1 spy in 3 is a fair assumption to make. 2 spies and the risk of both failing the mission would be severely detrimental to the spies. I’m sure it could happen, but I doubt it.

I’m certainly not well versed in this game. If failing the first missions well established as a bad deal for spies in the game then I’m ready to be educated.
I do wonder if that is a matter of the real-life situation. In a face-to-face game, everyone would know that 1 of the 3 is a spy and grilling three people won’t take a whole lot of effort. However, on this online game, there really isn’t any opportunity to grill and gauge reactions of the 3 suspects. Also, there is the ‘fact’ that the 3 are actually LESS probable spies than anyone else.
One spy exposed in a group of three doesn’t seem all that bad. No one knows which one is the spy, and they likely won’t know until the game is over.
Could you explain how this spy is exposed? Or why the spy needs to hide?

29

I really hope that those posting that they will vote to accept this team are lying.

30

Maybe experienced players would consider it extremely ballsy. But we have a lot of inexperienced players, here. And even aside from that, it’s a “Scum wouldn’t do that” argument, and those are always pretty shaky.

Suppose that it were accepted wisdom that “if there are two or more spies on the first mission, they should all let it succeed”. And suppose that everyone in the game were experienced enough to know that. And suppose that the first team was in fact chosen to include multiple spies. A spy might then reasonably conclude “Well, my teammates on this mission already know that all spies should let this mission succeed, so none of them are likely to sabotage it. That means that, if I do sabotage the mission, there’s only a very small chance of a double-sabotage. And everyone else also knows that all spies should let this mission succeed if there are multiple spies on the mission, so if the mission gets a single sabotage, then all the Townie players are going to proceed through the game working from a false assumption.”. And so, the spy who’s thinking all of that sabotages.

Which, of course, proves that “multiple spies on the first mission should always vote succeed” isn’t actually the optimal strategy. The true optimal strategy, assuming perfectly logical players, would be a hybrid strategy, with each spy having some probability of voting succeed, and a complementary probability of voting fail, each determined independently via dice rolls or whatever. Yes, this strategy does carry with it the risk that you’ll lose the game. Every strategy carries that risk-- You can’t eliminate it, only minimize it. Now, I don’t know what the optimal probability is for a spy to vote fail, and it might be fairly small, but it’s definitely not zero.

31

I think it is a matter of risk/reward. The reward of sabotaging that one mission doesn’t outweigh the risk of exposing two spies.

32

That depends on just how large the risk is, and just how large the risk is depends on how large everyone thinks the risk is. If everyone thinks that the risk is too large, then the actual risk is very small.

33

I see your point.

But I still think there was exactly one spy in the first team. This game requires assumptions. One can’t play without making assumptions because solid choices need to be made and short of an exceptional circumstance, no one will ever be solidly outed as a spy or townie.

34

…And, septimus has just convinced me that there almost certainly was only one spy in the first team. As he says, the assumption of two or more spies implies a lot. And of two options in a puzzle, the one that implies more is always the incorrect one.

35

Ha. That’s funny. septimus’s observations are making me re-think the 1 spy in three belief. I think septimus is spot on on his observations and the reveal of possible signaling from Mahaloth about voting to succeed is compelling.

Furthermore, septimus has clearly given the entire situation a large amount of thought. I doubt a spy would take the time to build such an elaborate case. Right now septimus is the towniest town that ever towned.

The past day has had me confused about Mahaloth. His statements about not really understanding the game, and not realizing that a single fail would fail the mission were perplexing at best. Then he muttered about not knowing what to do, but that he would approve the 2.1 proposed team. He just saw a quick approval of team 1.1 end in disaster. He is driving me nuts. Then he reversed and voted to reject (which I wholly approve of) but then he simply states that he changed his mind.

WHY DID HE CHANGE HIS MIND!!! Gah! And no one seems to care. That’s kind of important information.

And to top it all off, I can’t reconcile why Mahaloth is acting so “scummy.” All that he has done screams “Hey look at me, I’m so freaking scummy!” I can’t believe a spy Mahaloth would believe such a thing.
Although it would be sheer genius if Mahaloth was trying to get pegged as being a spy because Texcat or storyteller are also spies and he wants to take the fall so that they can be ‘trusted’ again. That’s way too convoluted, so I doubt it, but it would be way cool.

Septimus is also spot on on his analysis of how stacked the 10-player game is against Town. In light of this, I find it strange that MentalGuy specifically asked for a 10th player, when playing with 9 seems like a more reasonable balance.

36

Actually, septimus’s analysis of the 10-player game vs. the 9-player game isn’t quite spot-on: In actuality, it’s even worse than that. Even if one spy were to out himself at the beginning of the game, the other players can’t stop that outed spy from occasionally being the leader. They can choose to always reject his teams, of course, and probably would do so, but that’s not entirely without cost, since there’s a limit to how many teams you can reject.

I agree that I like that he’s doing so much analysis, and that he’s giving it in a viewpoint-neutral manner (i.e., without the assumption that he’s Town). And his metaphysical argument is a valid one, even if possibly premature. But he’s really rubbing me the wrong way with his second argument that’s left as an exercise for the reader. He needs to put up or shut up.

And I think that the arguments against Mahaloth are now strong enough that I wouldn’t approve him for a team, either. Not sure who I think the other spies are, though.

37

Out of curiosity, I looked around online to see discussions about Resistance and game balance. It seems that larger games favoring spies is well known, so much so that the game developers added new game components to restore balance and give the Town side a decent chance to win.
The current game being played really is stacked against Town, apparently.

The added game mechanics inject solid information into the game so that the game isn’t solely reliant on face-to-face reads on whether someone is lying. I think such pieces of information would be critical for a board-based game, especially this board.

38

And, Septimus still hasn’t offered his other reason for thinking there were two spies, and people have stopped pressuring him about it. Alternate hypothesis: He is himself a spy, and is deliberately reasoning from a starting point that he knows is wrong, to convince people of wrong conclusions.

I’m not sure I buy this myself, but people should at least be considering the possibility.

39

I thought he already did. Wasn’t point two the accusation that Mahaloth’s pledge to vote succeed was a signal to the other spy (storyteller or TexCat) that Mahaloth was going to vote succeed and the other should vote fail?

Point one was the meta stuff.

40

Why does septimus think HookerChemical is suspicious?
I get that everyone else in the game thinks HookerChemical is suspicious (for reasons that I do not agree with), but that mainly stems from HookerChemical’s insistence that they need to reject the first team, which was (1) correct and (2) something that septimus agreed with as he also voted to reject.

I also don’t see why there is such a fuss about who is making the team. If everyone is so keen on thinking that JohnnyBravo is Town (something that I disagree with too, but whatever), why not ask JohnnyBravo to propose a team and ask sinjin to submit it. If sinjin is Town, she should do it with no problems. If sinjin is scum, then she will still do it.

Heck they could have EVERYONE propose a team and then try and sift through that! Admittedly too much work though.