Mafia is fundamentally about an informed minority vs an uninformed majority. Multiball (multiple mafia teams) can still adhere to this, but it becomes a bit of an issue when it deviates from this general principle.Granger wrote:
The idea was to have the cults to fight for influence within the town to use their lynch ability to kill the other clan but i can see how thats a problem, what would you suggest? Alllowing the night kills? That would mean 3 if not more deaths (due the executioners) per game cycle. I feel like thats too much.
The Oracles kill the killer thing aids that, i want to discourage the cults to use the executioners without carefull planning ahead and instead focus on tricking town into killing the enemy.
The reason is because town has to get rid of every anti-town faction in order to win the game. In this sense, it should be positive for the town every time they manage to eliminate one (or one gets eliminated in general). Naturally there are a few small exceptions in some cases in regular games, but those situations can be naturally deduced and become known information for the town.
The problem with this set-up is that town could end up lynching one group into extinction with incredible accuracy, but then they just end up losing anyway because the other mafia team managed to dwindle down the town by killing and recruiting them at night. It's one case where the town played perfectly, but in such a way that they handed themselves a loss.
Cults are fundamentally imbalanced in general as well. The amount of mafia/anti-town in a game can be roughly measured and known to be pretty close to accurate from the start with it becoming clearer over time, but the cult has a very disastrous effect. Instead of the information of anti-town being more easy to tell over time, it becomes increasingly impossible to have any idea whatsoever. You could get to LyLo and have absolutely no way of knowing as such. This is the fundamental reason why cults are considered bastard modding, and this isn't even considering the set-up specific issues with cults.
So overall, balancing this set-up isn't as simple as you'd think. There's a fundamental issue with the set-up itself, and there is so much possibility for the winner to be decided over pure luck instead of skill that I'm not sure it can be balanced.