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Messages - SpaceAnemone

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26
@EFHW, you targeted LaLight on D1, and he reported knowing that he'd been targeted by a cylon that day. I feel like this is something we should address, especially since Dee isn't a canon cylon.

I know the cylon detector is potentially broken today, but I still feel like from a game design point of view there's a reasonable chance of a third player sharing the calibration duties, so would it be sensible to propose that you submit yourself for testing anyway? I figure it's a waste not to test anyone at all, even if it might just be defaulting to what I set it to if MiX really is the only other player able to use it.

Oh, you're the other person behind it? So did you pick the same things as me?

Ah, yes, I was originally going to give a longer claim last night, but then I figured we might as well wait for the full round of flavour claims first, and also it was late and I didn't want to post too much while tired in case I regretted it later.

I think I very, very softly revealed it already in that I've agree with almost all Scola's criticisms off you, bar the case about your power not existing N1, because of course my power was different for the first night too. I didn't actually try using it N1 because it was all a bit unclear, so didn't seem to be worthwhile with curfew in effect.

N2 I set it to "human". I'd prefer not to reveal what I set it to last night before someone tries testing today. It's possible that another player will come forward and say that they also have that power, since I think giving it to only two of us is kind of swingy in a game where presumably faust thought we'd be exiling and incapacitating people at a higher rate than this.

27
@EFHW, you targeted LaLight on D1, and he reported knowing that he'd been targeted by a cylon that day. I feel like this is something we should address, especially since Dee isn't a canon cylon.

I know the cylon detector is potentially broken today, but I still feel like from a game design point of view there's a reasonable chance of a third player sharing the calibration duties, so would it be sensible to propose that you submit yourself for testing anyway? I figure it's a waste not to test anyone at all, even if it might just be defaulting to what I set it to if MiX really is the only other player able to use it.

28

I like this, though we should consider whether it's better information if we ask whether there's an even number of cylon-aligned players in a given group (where zero counts as even), rather than just if there's one or more.

I must be missing something. This question seems less useful because we could end up with a "yes" meaning two or none of the group are cylon-aligned.

My thinking is that the best use of a yes-no question is to partition all possible game states into two equiprobable halves, and to use the question to cut the possibility space in half. This follows from entropy (that's just a link to the "Entropy (information theory)" Wikipedia page), and the fact that the best information we can get is when p=0.5 for each of two outcomes.

If we put enough scummy people into a pot, we automatically expect that there should be at least one scum in there. Maybe we balance it so that we expect 1 or 2, then zero would be a surprise, so really we're using the question to distinguish between 1 or 2 scum in the pot, then an "even" response has a very small chance that there are 0 in the pot (and a not-impossible chance there are 4). Similarly, an "odd" response gives us exactly 1 or 3.

If we do as you suggested (modulo the thing about including Dylan!), and pick a small number of townies and then use the question to attempt to IC them, then there's an inherent risk that one of the people we pick isn't actually townie after all, then we just end up with a new at-least-one-scum-in-X constraint amongst a group of people who're playing in a townie way. I feel like that's not really a 50/50 sort of outcome.

What if we pick the most townie 4-ish people for the parity test, though? If it's an even number of scum, we assume zero by default (with a much lower chance of it being two), and if it's odd, then there's probably exactly one scum. Scum then has a strong disincentive to pick off those townie-seeming town members inside the pool, because they don't want to increase the PoE we get on the one possible non-townie one.

29
One last post before sleep: I'm Felix Gaeta.

Are Scola and Dylan now the only people not to have claimed, or at least strongly implied, a particular character?

30
I approach the game from a more snowball approach: if we get 1 scum flip, the game should open up much more than the extra information a more detailed question gives. And I also think having information that we can act on (I don't know if there's a better term for this).

That depends on the scum that flips, and the interactions they've had. I think flipping Jack at this point is no big worry for hypothetical!scum!Jack's scumbuddies, but if ADK flips cylon-aligned then people who've been following and protecting them look quite suspicious.

I think what you're saying is you'd rather have a small amount of definite information that you can condition other hypotheses on, instead of having more information that you can't use without having to consider a wide range of different but possibly-correlated variables (who to trust, who trusts whom, where different bits of data come from, how they interrelate etc). I lean towards the latter, because in a tough situation, having more information might be the difference between willing and losing, even if it means suffering some more uncertainty in the short term.

If there's 3 scum in the "odd scum" group, I think they just win: we exile in that group, they redirect the exile to the scummiest of them, they flip scum, the other 2 are basically shielded for a while, and then they can exile town until it's too late.

This is only true if we take Dylan's information absolutely at face value. The only reason I can think of for you to trust it implicitly is that you're scum and you know that Dylan is townie, but given that we have a pretty good idea that there is at least one 3p player out there, I don't think even cylon-aligned!you should be trusting not-cylon-aligned players enough to let them totally dictate your behaviour, so I don't really know what's going on there.. it presumably can't actually be the scum-tell it looks like!

Anyway, no, if we get and odd result and there are three on-wagon, I would suggest that continue to play a normal Mafia game, exiling people we have scummy evidence on, or people who fit other suspicions (like your one-cylon-aligned-player-on-the-Jack-wagon thing) etc because we can't let one not-necessarily-trustworthy person dictate our votes.

If there is an odd-number answer and it turns out that there were three scum in the pool, it's possible they can't really afford to nk from inside the pool for fear of making it smaller, which is one reason I'm leaning towards the idea that it should be biggish. If town finds someone in the pool too scummy, we assume it's possible we're in the three-scum state, by which time scum may be some very big scummy fish in a very tiny pond that makes them super-easy for us to pick off. That puts a constraint on scum to have to try to be super-townie, possibly playing and voting against their own interests because the cost of not staying hidden is so high for them all of a sudden, which is something I think town can benefit from.

31
I like this, though we should consider whether it's better information if we ask whether there's an even number of cylon-aligned players in a given group (where zero counts as even), rather than just if there's one or more. If we make the group contain the top three or four universally-agreed (ish) scumreads, that might be quite useful information as the game gets smaller. PoE for town in that group would also be useful, which is why I'm erring on thinking the group might be better off being a little more than just the top one or two scumreads. Does anyone else have thoughts on that?

Even seems counterproductive for using information to guide our actions: If we learn a "yes" on even, do we exile in that group? Chances are there's no scum, but there could be two...it just makes things complicated. And given my result, I think if we crossreference 2 groups of people that can have scum, we get a pretty good pool to exile in.

I think key is to use our information-gathering as wisely as possible while not trusting any one result, since most of us don't know whether your result or Dylan's can be trusted unless we see a town flip from you. Also, while the parity idea may not work ideally for a single day, I think it's better information for later in the game than the "at least one in X" information, especially if the group we're proposing to select includes scumreads several scumreads, and we have an okay prior belief that the number of cylon-aligned players overall is probably 2-3.

For instance, say we suggest the 5 scummiest people out of the 11 currently alive for the "is there an even number in X" question, and we get a no, it's most likely that there are 2 scum to find there, rather than zero or four. Similarly, if we get an odd number, we think there's probably just one, but with an option to revise the estimate later on, by which time if there really were three scum there, they've had to play a super-tight game full of extra constraints to try to stay hidden in a shrinking barrel of possibilities and not get exiled for fear of outing the existence of the last one.

One possible interesting idea would be to do something deliberate with the overlap between the tested set and the set from the Jack wagon. I'm not quite sure what, but the obvious options are either have them all in, all out, or split the group cleanly in two. I feel like there's an information-theory entropy question somewhere here. Anyone else feeling like that? I can't remember whether there are any other maths/information types around in this game, though the usual suspects of Calamitas, faust and gkrieg are sadly absent from the player side of the list!

32
While it does seem early for massclaiming, the game needs jump-starting so I am in favor.

Claim then! What are you waiting for?

Usually we set an order. But I'm fine with claiming. I'm Dee and I set up the QT's between LL and scola and Space and Swowl. I also have the two-shot option to make a player unable to post in their QT's for a night and a day.

...Who? Can you give me a full name?

There's been 3 night, why have you setup only 2 QTs?

Dee = Anastasia Dualla.

I'm Saul Tigh.

You're also a player who's put very little content into the game, so if we're going for all-out power claiming, I think you should be high in the priority list, unless you want to volunteer some more now?

I recall that previously I've argued for claiming systems where we do things in two phase (e.g. a round of names and then a round of powers), but can anyone else recall why that's sometimes a good thing to do? I honestly can't remember right now, but I'm pretty sure I've thought previously that it's a better way of unfolding the information into the thread :-/

33
Ok, a little bit more detail about my power. I can basically come up with a yes no question in my QT and then get a truthful answer. So what if we did something like any of the set {x y z} (cylon-aligned/not human-aligned)? (parenthetical options for if you want to filter out 3rd party or include them in the results)

I could probably ask something setup related too if there was a more helpful bit of info we could come up with, but I feel like using it as a weird cop might be most directly helpful right now. That would at least give us some results to work with right now since no one else has rushed forwards with anything yet.

I like this, though we should consider whether it's better information if we ask whether there's an even number of cylon-aligned players in a given group (where zero counts as even), rather than just if there's one or more. If we make the group contain the top three or four universally-agreed (ish) scumreads, that might be quite useful information as the game gets smaller. PoE for town in that group would also be useful, which is why I'm erring on thinking the group might be better off being a little more than just the top one or two scumreads. Does anyone else have thoughts on that?

34
And if you're going to make up a false claim, Dee is a relatively minor enough character and I think all the other military characters have claimed. So it's "safe".

She's at least major enough to be a playable character in the board game, while Billy, whom we've seen as a flipped character in this game, isn't a playable character, at least in any of the expansions I've played.

35
Okay, two unvotes might not have been necessary. Sorry. Will probably reinstate my vote once I've posted some other thoughts.

36
I'm Cally. One of my least favorite characters!

Your powers don't really seem related to your character. That and you ignored by why shouldn't I vote for you question.

Vote: Robz

Was that X-1?

I don't think we should allow a hammer before thefull set of claiming -- it would be too easy to scum to hammer and have an extra night phase to work on their fakeclaims.

Unvote

PPE 1

37
I don't agree with mass-claiming yet, for two main reasons:

1. We're definitely not as far through this game as we would expect to be in terms of the number of nights and the number of posts. We're maybe in a D3 sort of scenario, and sure, that's when in a normal game we might start to consider claims, but with all the extra mechanics, I think this game already has lots of info that we can work our way through (e.g. the discussion that we started around Dylan's claimed power) before we have to resort to that.

2. The push for claims is being let by a small subset of the game, one of whom is claimed non-town, so I think it at least needs more discussion before people go ahead and claim.

I'm fine scum-reading Robz a bit more for just going along with it. He's either utterly disengaged town, or he's scum and this is a scum-driven ploy to move us away from a scenario where we have more discussion around using Dylan's supposed power on Robz instead of on ADK. I'm also not sure what to make of the fact that Robz is claiming powers without claiming a character name, when my understanding of full-claiming was definitely that the role name would be entirely relevant to claim.

38
I was being dramatic. I don't see how my own conclusions of who Gaius Baltar is are relevant to the game (although I'd love to talk about it if I ever end up watching the show).

Okay, so I think all EFHW was looking for in her question was the response that you were being dramatic, and that there's no game-mechanic relating to you being some kind of Chosen One. It's quite an odd reading of Baltar, so I think it's entirely reasonable for someone to ask what your statement meant.

As for what your reading of your character tells us, I think there's probably something there, if I knew how to interpret it according to which parts of a complex character you seem to have latched on to. My difficulty right now is just that I don't know whether your focus on the "God's chosen one" stuff means you honestly think that because you're town!Baltar then you assume he must be good at the core and so take the most forgiving reading possible on him, or whether you've drawn scum!Baltar (or 3p!Baltar), and have read all the background and carefully filed anything you thought you could use to make it sound like you're a good guy after all.

For anyone else who doesn't know the show, Baltar sided with the cylons against humans several times for his own interests. If I'd made a list ahead of time of characters most likely to be human but working on the side of the cylons, Baltar would be at the top. (Though as I said before, Baltar makes plenty of sense as a 3p, since he doesn't really have any loyalties beyond himself).

39
I'm gaius baltar, and you have killed the person that God was personally controlling to make humans win. we are going to lose very horribly.

ADK's win condition is a secret.

Any questions?
What did  you mean here? How is God controlling you?

Flavor, you can read in the wiki Gaius Baltar's whole character arc, it's spoilers and not very relevant I think. It's about Baltar thinking God is somehow affecting him through Head Six or something (and Head Six is a voice he hears that resembles a cylon he got intimate with that was kinda the whole reason the attack on the colonies worked). I know more but it's spoilers, really just read it.

Your answer is vague, and probably missing the point. Do you mean that your character info in the game explicitly talks about being controlled by a deity, or are you just going off what you've read about BSG and assuming that the character of Baltar was controlled by god, and then just being dramatic about your exile?

In terms of the show, I think Baltar's status is deliberately never made clear: maybe he believes that his visions of one of the cylon model sixes are god-sent, but maybe he's just so focused on his own self-preservation that he'll say or do anything to put himself first.

40
Hi!

I am completely swamped at work, so this is based on skimming...

So, Mix says he has a result that one of these folks is cylon-aligned?
Jack Rudd (6): MiX, WestCoastDidds, A Drowned Kernel, scolapasta, EFHW, SpaceAnemone

So, for me its one of the last three. Space seems the least likely.

MiX, why scola over EFHW?

Besides me, I think ADK is the least likely to be cylon-aligned, being a claimed 3rd party both by their own admission and by MiX's claim. And I think I'd pointed out a while ago in-thread that MiX's choice of language gave away that he knew something about third-party alignment, so that much tracks. Though I still think it's worth considering that MiX himself is the 3p, at least a little bit. It makes so much sense with the character of Baltar and the jury of peers mechanic to help him survive an exile attempt. If MiX is 3p, would he give us the "at least one cylon-aligned person on-wagon" info, though?

Personally, I'm not voting for Scola. I know he's suspicious of me for appearing to white-knighting him or whatever, but honestly he just says stuff I agree with most of the time, and I have to assume that a scum player wouldn't say the same things so naturally. Meanwhile, I have much less to agree with from either you (Didds) or EFHW. [I started writing this post a few hours ago, before making the post where I just agreed with EFHW...]

It's also worth noting that "at least one on-wagon cylon-aligned player" could mean "exactly one on-wagon cylon-aligned player", and there were six people on-wagon and six off-wagon. If we expect there to be three cylon-aligned players (I don't know if this is accurate; the balance probably depends what other alignments and switching mechanics faust built into the game), then there could easily still be a stronger chance of hitting a cylon-aligned player if we look off-wagon than if we look on it.

41
This is a little bit random, but I’m going to kind of claim one of my powers because it could be helpful. I could ascertain whether or not ADK’s wincon is compatible with town’s. It’s a one shot power, and it’s not limited to just that question, but the answer can’t be tampered with, so I would know it’s truthful. If he can win with town, we should definitely try to find scum today instead of that, but if he’s 3rd party that straight up can’t win with town, it’s probably not a bad idea to eliminate him earlier rather than later.

I’ll wait for opinions before actually taking an action. Also, my understanding is that I can use it  any time during the game as opposed to at night, so if I’m not mistaken we can know that before EOD.

If your power can really be used for that, then I'm in favor of it being used for it

Hmm.. I'm not so sure that's optimal if the shot really can just take any player and say whether their wincon is compatible with town's.

We already have a lot of information on ADK's interactions. If ADK flips as something that isn't compatible with our town wincon, then we can be very suspicious of the players who've exhibited strong levels of trust in ADK, like MiX and Didds. In terms of webs of trust and who's scum conditional on our reads of other people, I think ADK already has a lot of evidence, and as people who've interacted with ADK flip, we'll naturally build up a better picture of how much to trust them.

Compare that to someone like Jack or Robz, about whom we know absolutely nothing, have no reads, and no interactions to speak of. Surely it's better to use a shot on Robz, because that way we keep our vague partial info on ADK, get full alignment reassurance on Robz, and end up with more information than if we only used the shot to top up that partial info on ADK.

Also, on the off-chance this is a scum!Dylan plan to cement some trust in scum!ADK, I think it's advantageous for town not to go along with the plan unchallenged.

PPE 1: EFHW, yes, I agree with that too, though I also think that in general it's better if we're hunting cylon-aligned players than third parties, especially now the third party has been outed.

42
Huh, Robz's re-appearance hasn't exactly sparked confidence that he's townie about about to provide a whole lot of useful takes.

In fact, third-party-voting instead of scum-hunting seems vaguely scummy, as does an undercontributing Robz.

Vote: Robz

We could also consider whether Robz might be a good nominee for the cylon detector today, by way of prompting him to engage a bit more.. unless anyone else has suggestions?

43
I'm rejecting all the conspiracy theories. They are too speculative to be helpful. And WCD voting precipitously seems NAI to me. It's interesting to hear that there was scum on the Jack wagon. I was planning to vote someone from the MiX wagon.

What do you think of the cases where information doesn't add up, though? Do they make you at least a bit suspicious of the people making those claims?

Which claims don't add up?

Swowl flipped as a character who's a cylon in BSG, and had openly said he believed himself to be a Cylon. Then LL says he can detect cylon targets, but the two claims about what precisely targeted LL don't match up. That, plus LL's power wasn't originally described as having evolved from N1 onwards, but the claim was later partially retconned so that on D1 he only knew he'd been targeted by a cylon, but later on he got to know the action type.

I think it's plausible that LL has been lying, or at least only partially reporting something about his role that suits some personal agenda. Otherwise we have a human-species cylon character, and simultaneously we have rather too many unexplained NK actions on the night that LL claims he was targeted by a cylon and then also Awaclus was incapacitated.

44
Bolded and upsized something with which I strongly disagree.

The way I'm reading things with WCD, she was persuaded by the Swowl-ADK axis in the viper pilot QT, and then came into the thread thinking that she could pass her pre-decided vote off as un-suspicious by giving those excuses, when in fact it looked super-dodgy. At least, the fact that the viper pilot QT story is backed by other players makes me believe that over the first bits of twisted truths WCD gave the thread after her vote.

45
I'm rejecting all the conspiracy theories. They are too speculative to be helpful. And WCD voting precipitously seems NAI to me. It's interesting to hear that there was scum on the Jack wagon. I was planning to vote someone from the MiX wagon.

What do you think of the cases where information doesn't add up, though? Do they make you at least a bit suspicious of the people making those claims?

I think having at least one cylon-aligned player on Jack still leaves room for at least one cylon-aligned player elsewhere. In a game this size, I think three cylon-aligned players is more or less what I'd assume.

As for the MiX wagon, I'd like to hear back from LL on what he means by #1322, which seems to imply that he assumes he didn't detect Swowl's actions in spite of the fact that Swowl may well have been a human-aligned cylon, because something doesn't quite add up there. I'm also likely to start feeling a Robz vote pretty soon, because scum-him could absolutely try to lurk this long using his "lacklustre town" meta as an excuse, but we also know he can do much better so I'd like to see some real content. Were you intending to vote for one of them?

46

Also, mysteriously absent is you're saying anything about this supposed QT you had with ADK (even a denial, or a denial of its influence in your decision).


Is this important for folks to know? How would it help us?

As the human-aligned juror who didn't get the memo about pre-court talks, I'd quite like to understand why! Like, if you two really had a QT, then I think it's very important for town to understand the reasoning that led both of you to vote the way you did, especially because ADK isn't human-aligned.

That said, if you didn't have a QT with ADK, I'd still like to understand why you sheeped their response so quickly, because it definitely seems anti-town not to have a discussion with actual townspeople involved. Merely saying that the majority of town wasn't voting for MiX really doesn't seem like enough of a reason not to exile to me, especially with so many unanswered questions around.

47
I'm starting to think he could be a Survivor.

Yeah, I've been considering that too (complete with the speculation about the jury-of-peers thing being part of the role), but I feel like him outright saying that he wants to be alive at the end is too close to his actual role to be a fake-claim that would stand any chance of throwing us off his tracks, if that's what we think it might be. I  do agree that MiX has been kind of broadcasting 3rd party vibes for quite a while, though.

@MiX, how early in this game did you learn that ADK was third-party?

@ADK, are you going to openly confirm your status, or do you claim that MiX is lying?

48
Also, some of the stuff Swowl and I talked about still contradicted what LL had claimed, if LL is assuming that Swowl was the person whose targeting he'd detected on N2, so that's another thing to puzzle out now we've seen Swowl's flip.

goodness, Swowl was human, I didn't detect a "blocking" action because I only detect Cylon's actions.

Swowl was human-aligned (flipped green), but the character he was playing was most likely a cylon in terms of species. Swowl said in-thread that he'd begun to suspect he was a cylon, and he said a little more in the QT I had with him.

Also, Boomer is definitely a cylon in the series, in that she's one of the two model 8 cylons who're part of the main story arc. (The other is Athena, who's the cylon that gets involved with Helo).

So, if I understand this correctly, either you only detect cylon-aligned people's actions (which isn't what you've said up till now, but would explain why you seem to be implying that Swowl being human-aligned makes a difference), or you really do detect all Cylon-species actions (including actions taken by human-aligned cylons), but then still have some unexplained actions around Swowl's targeting.

49
Also, some of the stuff Swowl and I talked about still contradicted what LL had claimed, if LL is assuming that Swowl was the person whose targeting he'd detected on N2, so that's another thing to puzzle out now we've seen Swowl's flip.

50
I think the next thing I'd like to see this game day is ADK responding in detail to what MiX claimed, and also giving their side of the story about ADK's link to Swowl.

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