Balance

[zorbees]

There has been a lot of talk in the past couple topics about keeping the game balanced. What I would like to know is, what are the best ways to go about trying to measure balance before a game has started?

One way I could think of is trying to emulate the way the game would play out by yourself/with cohosts/etc, but this would be very difficult for big mafias and even for basic mafias, you don't know how people are going to play their roles and interact with others. I mean, a mafia can play out so many different ways just based on the random targets of killers and inspectors early.

Do you just sort of "guess" and hope it is balanced? Is it possible to make some sort of mathematical formula assigning "power values" to each role, adding them together to get the total power of each faction, and try to make each faction's power level equal as close to each other as possible?

I suppose a start to answering my question would be to address #fluodome mafia. How did each iteration become defined as they are now? For example, how did Inspector/Bodyguard/Hooker/Twin/Twin/Rogue/Wolf/Russian/Russian/Russian Silencer/Sheriff/Villager (I think that is what a 12-man Russian game looks like) come to be? Was it always formatted that way, or were there previous, unbalanced versions that were ruled unbalanced and thus changed? Though, #fluodome mafia can have extensive playtesting, whereas forum mafias only get one shot and have to figure out the balance before it hits the stage, so to speak.

Forgive me for rambling on, I'm just trying to input as much thought as I can because it is an important issue to me, especially because I (and some others that I've talked to) considered my first two forum mafia games (Carnage and DotA) unbalanced.

Perhaps once people start using better neutral characters and once two mafia / one village starts to fade, things will be more balanced, but who knows. Perhaps I am making too big a deal of this and am just frustrated over personal experiences. I would just like some input from the more experienced and understanding players and viewers because I don't/shouldn't have as much knowledge on the subject as others.

 

[Mekkah]

There has been a lot of talk in the past couple topics about keeping the game balanced. What I would like to know is, what are the best ways to go about trying to measure balance before a game has started?

When the next Smog is up I think a lot of your questions will be answered! Since I'm not going to type the same thing twice, I'll try answering the rest...

Do you just sort of "guess" and hope it is balanced? Is it possible to make some sort of mathematical formula assigning "power values" to each role, adding them together to get the total power of each faction, and try to make each faction's power level equal as close to each other as possible?

As you probably guessed, arbitrary mathematical numbers don't work. A role is only as useful as the player deciding its targets as well as how much random.org or whatever loves it.

I suppose a start to answering my question would be to address #fluodome mafia. How did each iteration become defined as they are now? For example, how did Inspector/Bodyguard/Hooker/Twin/Twin/Rogue/Wolf/Russian/Russian/Russian Silencer/Sheriff/Villager (I think that is what a 12-man Russian game looks like) come to be? Was it always formatted that way, or were there previous, unbalanced versions that were ruled unbalanced and thus changed? Though, #fluodome mafia can have extensive playtesting, whereas forum mafias only get one shot and have to figure out the balance before it hits the stage, so to speak.

Spoilers: #fluodome mafia is not balanced. The team-wide hooker is extremely broken and the martyr arguably so. You can be as clever of a mafian as you want, but if the village knows how it's done, their chances are close to 0% barring a n1 bodyguard death and n2 hooker kill. Well, I guess there's the million games that end in "who does one guy let win" (the answer is usually a female player).

I don't really recall what games were like way back, but some of these roles haven't always been there. Inspector and bodyguard are of course ancient. Twin, rogue, silencer (used to be a villy role) and martyr were added later, and hooker somewhere inbetween. The roles were just added as they were invented.

Perhaps once people start using better neutral characters and once two mafia / one village starts to fade, things will be more balanced, but who knows. Perhaps I am making too big a deal of this and am just frustrated over personal experiences. I would just like some input from the more experienced and understanding players and viewers because I don't/shouldn't have as much knowledge on the subject as others.

You're not alone! We've rarely had really balanced games, design-wise or play-wise.

 

[FinnRagetti]

The balancing issue, starts out in terms on numbers, making sure that all of the mafias have about equal numbers to the villagers. So in a hypothetical 25 player game, I would probably have say 12 villagers, 10 mafias, and 3 neutrals (one of which is a wolf). Assuming two kills per night, the game plays out well enough for each side to make kills evenly.

Of course, it is not at all about numbers, as Mekkah has previously stated. In my opinion, you have to be balance in terms of power roles or ways of cleaning (in terms of villagers) Ex: In Bad Character Mafia, there were 3 vanillagers with identical roles, Twin Bodyguard, and Inspects who knew each other. That helped the village tremendously in terms of cleaning players.

Again to reiterate the point: Balanced games are impossible to make, because even if you set it up to be, the human factor kicks in and can tip the scales. Ex: A miller/faulty inspect cleans a mafia, allowing them access to intel.