So it’s now safe to reveal that Josh and Brendan were indeed the only Androids in the entire Dynasty, and that nobody else had been converted by a Scan or by anybody idling, because neither of the two Androids idled.

The entirety of the Subroutines processed during the game were:

Sunday 25th January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE S33R BUCKY (Bucky)
Monday 26th January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS Brendan (Brendan)
Tuesday 27th January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS JOSH (Josh)
Wednesday 28th January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C BRENDAN (Skju)
Friday 30th January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C SPHINX (Darknight)
Saturday 31st January: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C Skju (Bucky)
Monday 2nd February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C JOSH (Darknight)
Tuesday 3rd February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C Bucky (Bucky)
Thursday 5th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS SYLPHRENA (Sylphrena)
Friday 6th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C ayesdeeef (Bucky)
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK AYESDEEEF (Josh) *REMOVED*
Saturday 7th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE S33R DARKNIGHT (Darknight)
Sunday 8th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C Skju (Skju)
Monday 9th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C SYLPHRENA (Sylphrena)
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK ayesdeeef (Brendan) *REMOVED*
Tuesday 10th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C DARKNIGHT (Darknight)
Wednesday 11th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS Bucky (Bucky)
Thursday 12th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE ASUM PUT (Put)
Friday 13th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C AYESDEEEF (Ayesdeeef)
Saturday 14th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C Darknight (Bucky)
Sunday 15th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C DARKNIGHT (Darknight)
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK _FOX_ (Sylphrena) *REMOVED*
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK ayesdeeef (Brendan) *REMOVED*
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK AYESDEEEF (Josh) *REMOVED*
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK BRENDAN (ais523) *REMOVED*
Monday 16th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE ASUM _FOX_ (Fox)
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK Darknight (Brendan) *REMOVED*
EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK DARKNIGHT (Josh) *REMOVED*
Tuesday 17th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE M4RK Sylphrena (ais523)
Wednesday 18th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS ais523 (ais523)
Thursday 19th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS SYLPHRENA (Sylphrena)
Friday 20th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C Sylphrena (ais523)
Saturday 21st February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C ais523 (ais523)
Sunday 22nd February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE L0GS Brendan (Brendan)
Monday 23rd February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C JOSH (Josh)
Tuesday 24th February: EXECUTE SUBROUTINE MD1C _Fox_ (Fox)

And yes, good ending, well played. To be honest I thought a Human victory had become unavoidable once the Mark-the-disabled loophole made Humans safe from airlocks, and Ais seemed to have a good nose for who the Androids were. I was expecting the Android Trials to end with disabled Androids shrugging and idling themselves to autoconvert others who could then be collaborated with.

Was surprised not to see more “we’ll let you have X, if we can have Y” proposal negotiation, but perhaps it would have been forced to head that way if the game had hit a true stalemate where there was no longer any way to Disable a player. But timing aside, Sabotage-vs-Majority seemed like a decent mechanism for Werewolf Nomic, and the proposals seemed to fit three clear acts (pre-Scan setup, wary progress, paranoid endgame) which seemed to have roughly the right proportions.

Ais523 mentioned Brendan having “arbitrarily decided” to kingmake in DoV comments. But from the final GNDT entry of the game - “1 = Josh, 2 = Brendan.  DICE2:1” - it looks like a standard coin-toss co-op victory where Josh would have passed the mantle to Brendan if he’d rolled a 2.

I was certainly doing a lot of alliance negotiation. The main one was with ayesdeeef, which lasted pretty much all dynasty.

My basic plan throughout most of the dynasty was to get Trialled down to 0 Clearance, and then use various methods to get down to -1 and beat everyone else (e.g. timing, where I’d cast the defining vote on the Trial just before a Mission featuring me failed). When Kevan’s Emotion-based tiebreak passed, I decided to use that instead.

In order for all this to work, I needed to try to remove other people’s ability to manipulate Emotions and Clearances as much as possible. Thus, I actively tried to shut down the Energy system to block MD1Cs, and to Exhaust other people via various means (mostly by being unable for Missions, forcing Brendan to send other people on them). Shutting down the Stim Dealer was lucky; someone intentionally engineered that, but it wasn’t me.

Then, I was planning to sit at 0 Clearance and hope the Humans won, supporting them any way I could. In particular, I was trying to manipulate things so that I could detect the Androids via voting patterns. It worked, too: I’d been pretty confident that the non-Disabled Androids were Josh and Brendan for over a week, now, I think.

I’m still annoyed that I didn’t manage that timing scam to outright disable all the Android powers, which would probably have arranged a Human victory (because that phaser shot on Sylphrena wouldn’t have worked). Sadly, though, Bucky and _Fox_ decided to help out the Androids for some reason. I’d been manipulating the queue specifically so that proposal would get its FOR votes and hit the head of the queue faster than it would look, and while Kevan was asleep. Oh well; I guess this just proves that any plan that requires 6+ people will fail even if it’s in the interests of all those people.

One other thing I considered was manipulating a Clearance tie between Josh and Brendan. That would only work, though, if Brendan was actually trying to win, rather than helping Josh win.

I think my main mistake was assuming that Brendan and Bucky were working together. Bucky suggested that this was happening at least twice (once publicly, once privately), and also gave me the feeling that Bucky knew Brendan was an Android. Presumably, whatever agreement they were trying to negotiate didn’t happen, though.

Also, every Human should really have put an anti-retroactive-Sabotage clause into all their proposals. In retrospect, I should have announced that larger and more prominently when I realised. Retroactive Sabotaging was just too powerful (the regular Sabotage mechanic was fine IMO).

<Kevan> I was expecting the Android Trials to end with disabled Androids shrugging and idling themselves to autoconvert others who could then be collaborated with.

I thought of this, but didn’t mention it at the time because I couldn’t see any way it would benefit me. (Also, the Android who idles doesn’t get any benefit, and I think the mechanic could hit a Disabled player?)

Retroactive Sabotage was mainly there to cover cases where an Android had Sabotaged a proposal while the Computer was offline, and the proposal had already enacted before the Computer could react. It also meant that Androids didn’t have to check the blog every twelve hours to catch quick proposals that were bad for them. I agree there were some unintentionally tricksy side effects, though.

I was impressed at how the Crew seemed to be blindly attending every post-Trust Mission until Trust (which sounded like something that you’d want to increase, when it wasn’t) was reskinned as Clearance and given an explicit theme explanation of what was happening. Would be interested to know how much that was deliberate in Brendan’s original Trust proposal.

“Presumably, whatever agreement they were trying to negotiate didn’t happen, though” - The plan was to use _Fox_’s stim ability with Euphoria clearance loss to put me ahead of Sylphrena, then have the androids disable themselves.  It fell apart due to _Fox_ not being an Android despite their behavior and Brendan’s claim to the contrary.

We considered Trialing _Fox_ early but I think decided that he was more useful alive than dead.

ais - re. when the game was lost for the humans - remember that we still had a phaser in the bank at the time when we went down to 5. In fact, that was when we used it. When there were 4 humans and 2 Androids we were too vulnerable to use it, but at 3-2 we could pretty much weather any situation by knocking out one human, then using drugs to manipulate happy / unhappy until we had the right combination of circumstances to force the outcome we needed. Without Sylphrena’s vote, we would have taken you out instead - I think without you, Sylphrena and _Fox_ would have been very unlikely to maintain an alliance - but with his vote in place, it needed to be him who went first.

Re. the repealing Android powers - yes, that would have worked, and yes, both Brendan and I were remiss in not sabotaging it sooner. I think it just slipped the net.

ayesdeeef - we 100% would have sabotaged Alternate Ending. It gave us a timer in which we had to achieve Victory, or a Human got a victory for free - it would have been a no brainer. No upside for us, only downside.

Oh, and I shot Bucky. I basically panicked because I thought I was dead, and didn’t want the phaser round to go to waste (as firing the phaser wasn’t Cerebral). At that time, Bucky looked the most dangerous. In retrospect I wish I’d saved it, but the uselessness of it as a gesture turned out to be rhetorically useful.

If there’s one area where I think the Humans were really unfortunate, it’s lightly-active players. If Command Quorum had been lighter by 1 throughout, Brendan and I would both have been in trouble, and there were times when players in the process of idling through inactivity essentially made it impossible to successfully pass a Trial without Brendan or I participating.

<Josh> I think without you, Sylphrena and _Fox_ would have been very unlikely to maintain an alliance

I was worried about that happening. However, I already had a tentative alliance with Sylphrena at that point, and would have tried to make one with _Fox_ too.

As for what happened with Bucky, that was my leading theory (that he was shot by Josh because Josh thought he was about to be disabled), although I didn’t have confirmation. My endgame plan was to force through a Trial on Brendan before he could react and disable his phaser shot that way (or at least make it so that his Disablement became inevitable). The problem is that it would require me + ayesdeeef + Sylphrena to all be online simultaneously just after Put got Disabled, and I had to go offline because I really needed to go to bed. By the time I woke up, Josh had placed a Trial on me and made the whole thing impossible. We had enough shifts-to-Unhappy available among the Humans (me + ayesdeeef + Darknight) that we could have weathered your Emotion manipulation.

But yes, inactivity among the humans really hurt. I think that’s the reason why the proposal to disable Put passed so easily.

The last 4 Trials went Josh and Brendan’s way. What happened? Apathy, sure, but also unexpected dissonance, almost like a lot of Humans didn’t “get” what was going on.

Mostly because there were only two of Josh and Brendan, meaning they could coordinate more easily.

Team Human needed something like 5 Humans all coordinating together. I’d pretty much only got to the point where they admitted they should help, and by then, it was too late to negotiate a time for everyone to be online at once.