That's the game! With the Mafia at parity with the Town...
IT'S A MAFIA VICTORY!
So, I screwed up when I made this game. Maybe not as bad as I thought I had given that it got down to the final three, but still, it was too scumsided. Three vanillas was simply too many in a game where the mafia had the roles that they had. Ninja and the Manipulative JOAT are very good mafia roles, and Gladiator is confirmable and heavily town-leaning.
That being said, I certainly don't think the town was hopeless this game. Moozer's role was potentially very good for the town. Best case scenario, it stops the NK and confirms him, as well as basically confirming whoever was turned into a doctor. The fact that the role is similar in concept to Owen's role from the last game is actually just a coincidence -- I had it in mind even before Austin's game started. Though, perhaps it's not a total coincidence since it was inspired by JoeBob's role in Austin's UPick Mafia.
Moozer, I know you're still relatively new at this, so I'm not going to go too hard on you. But I am going to go a little hard on you, because you're not THAT new anymore. You need to make sure you adequately understand your role right when the game begins. You had the town's best role, and you completely wasted it by not using it and then doing hardly anything to defend yourself. Austin had been highly sussed since DP1 and if you hadn't made yourself a prime lynch target, there's a good chance he would have been killed instead, and if Wylted had been protected with your help, he could have even caught Cerulean red-handed. But you didn't ask questions, you didn't use your role, and the whole town paid the price for your mistake.
Also, you shouldn't have honestly said that you were going to give the Doc to Luna. He was already an obvious choice for the NK, and that just made it a no-brainer. Lying about giving it to Luna but actually giving it to Bullish would have been a good move. Being completely honest was not.
Luna, you made a couple mistakes that could have gotten you highly sussed, though it didn’t turn out that way. First, you called yourself a Vanilla Cop, but described yourself as a Neapolitan, which is a different role and what you actually were. Second, you should have scumread Owen HARD immediately. Miller doesn't make any sense unless there's an alignment Cop or something similar. Why would I include a regular Cop in a game with a Neapolitan? It makes no sense. That being said, everyone seemed to believe your claim, and you were able to confirm WF, as well as Banana to a lesser extent. That was part of why I designed the setup as I did -- the mafia had a lot of power, but so did the town potentially. It all came down to how well everyone used their roles. My mistake was in not giving the town enough power. I think my biggest design flaw here was including the Ninja in a game where the only investigatives were a Watcher and an Odd-Night Neapolitan Cop. Austin should have been restricted to odd or even nights, maybe even made a 1x.
Also, I included Bullish's role as a direct counter to Cerulean's. I wish there had been more discussion about how their roles interacted.
This might be a bit controversial, but I'm giving Town MVP to Wylted. Sacrificing himself to prevent the town from mislynching him at MYLO/LYLO is the type of selfless move that the town needed for a shot at winning. Whiteflame is a close second. His analysis was logical and overall very good. His mistakes were just scumreading Moozer (who, although town, was objectively scummy) and assuming the game was reasonably balanced in the first place (definitely can't blame him for that). Also, he was the only one who was really engaging in theme split analysis, though he missed the mark.
The theme split was that the Mafia movies were all pre-Code movies. After Owen's flip, this split was solvable, though Cerulean could not have been caught that way as he had fakeclaimed well.
Speaking of, Cerulean is easily the Mafia MVP. He was widely townread early on and did good research to try and figure out other players' characters. All in all, an excellent Mafia player.
Anyway, I have a bit more to say, but I'll leave it here for now. I hope everyone had some fun despite how lopsided the balance was. If I ever create another Mafia game, I'll definitely have an experienced mod or two give me feedback before starting it.