found it. I can post this in postgame, but here you go for now.
I haven't re-read this closely, it's a copy and paste, so if something doesn't make sense, ask me.
Originally Posted by
Montmorency
Why couldn't it be a slight tweak to be more engaged with D1 than you may have been in some other games? That's not exactly a radical departure, and if it's one of your best scum games, well that would surely be judged in retrospect.
Start with this general pattern of how I approach the game.
Scum pizza:
Later stages of the game = more investment
Good chance of getting one more mislynch if I try hard = more investment
No realistic chance of being caught by cop, which is the single most frequent reason I ever lose a scum game = more investment
Odds I am forced to be the last wolf standing, because my buddies died = more investment
Odds we win the game or make it a nearly impossible final round to solve if I invest more this phase = more investment
Town is on a path to self-destruction this phase = less investment or less desire to change the situation, just keeping up appearances.
Size of game at game start = drastically less investment as scum, the bigger the game is. No way I want to trade myself for spewing a bunch of townies clear. Better to die and have my team be unknown. You can't help the folks that voted you early, but you can help preventing there being a bunch of additional townies cleared from your own actions.
Endgame = most critical for scum. Even 1 wolf can win the game if partners die early and it's not obvious who the partner is. But you need to have a good endgame regardless or you won by luck, and I don't aim for that.
So, those games will be middle-game/endgame heavy and early game light.
Specific exceptions can occur rarely. Otherwise this pattern works and I use it a lot. People are reading individual posts for scumminess rather than the overall approach I'm taking to the game anyway, and I can typically make my individual posts mimic my town game enough to fly. But the behavior is different and the approach is different, because I'm trying to achieve a much different aim.
I'm never approaching the game as: Be identical to my town game, because (a) I lynch, because I get lynched as town a lot (b) if I don't lynch I get murdered as town a lot, and therefore (c) I don't survive endgame situations as scum by mirroring my approach as town, it sticks out that I'm even alive. I
have to make it look like I'm giving medium investment at most at the beginning. I am also specifically not playing for survival to endgame, but for a partner to win. I'm likely to lynch during play, it's just how I am, but I can set it up so that one or two of my partners have a fantastic endgame and town can't find them, if I can, that's my chosen and preferred method.
Some people play scum in such a way that they want to avoid being lynched as much as possible, I do not. I avoid being lynched
to a point, and the point is when I've traded myself for enough townies (example in futurama, 7 townies is a good trade for 1 scummy pizza) or have made the overall team difficult to solve even if I do die. At that point, it's a good idea for me to be lynched, because that's another free round for my partners to skate through. And people don't know if my buddies bussed, protected, or had no opinion on me, because I try to average out those postures.
I approach it as: Survive day one, get as many mislynches as possible by pushing it myself or letting it happen, set up teammates for a good endgame, confuse people, derail discussion, make people focus on the wrong things, don't make the team obvious. Depending on who I'm playing against, that might mean playing in a way that would look like X and Y are my obvious buddies, but it can't be, because levels.
Town pizza:
First 3 phases of the game = most critical phases for town. Even day 1.
-You can die at any time, and several bad lynches puts town deep in a hole, especially if they did it to themselves and the scums walked away clean. You don't recover from that.
More people posting more substantively = more investment, because more I can analyze.
Size of game at game start = more investment in the game (to a limit, mashes plateau a bit because too much to read)
Sense that town is off to a bad start = more investment. (If I sense that town is doing very well, I worry a lot less. Otherwise I'm trying to right the ship)
If I am not being dogpiled = more investment because I can think clearly and I also think what I say will be considered.
Anytime mid-game to end-game = every round I am trying to completely solve the game as if it was the final round, with progressively better data.
I also almost never make it this far as town, so expect me to never ever phone it in.
Town games will be obvious that I'm town within those first 3 rounds, if you know how to read me at all, which people don't because paranoia plus aversion to pizza walls and mountains of individual posts.
If I get lynched in a game as town, it usually occurs before I can locate a scum or clear myself in any way. Some games the town is not in the mood to try to clear me and I'm not in the mood to try hard to clear myself. It's okay to be lynched once in a while, it's just a game.
When it's clear I'm going to be lynched as town I look for the wolves, because the townbloc shattered and no one is taking my opinions of who the townies are under any sort of consideration, so that's a bad investment of what little time I have. If I can find 1 scum and make suspicion go there convincingly, even if it's not enough to save me, it puts the idea into people's brains and gets them to not allow that person to skate through the game without any scrutiny. Since the only way my reads will be taken as genuine is with my head, and people aren't going to remember a big, complicated message, I have to focus it down to a solve or partial solve for scum only. Best guess for top scum, and push that as hard as possible, and hope it's right because town's already in bad shape at that point, and me being wrong and convincing people is not great. Still have to try.
If I'm a scum, depending on the game state, I can mimic this behavior because it's also useful in trying to get suspicion on someone else anyway. And it could be distancing or bussing so it's usually null.
The other aspect of the multi-wagon you have discussed in the past is that it is often bad for scum precisely because they have not been able to avoid that distribution coming about. In that light it is plausible to see the Jowy lynch as involving at least 1 scum after the original 2 votes, a scum sufficiently dissociated from the thrust of the day and some of the specific wagons and their drivers, to come in and seal the deal before some townie shows up and places the exact wrong vote. There are so many scenarios involving this logic that one wouldn't even want to venture into them - well, other than someone like you. Why haven't you mentioned this possibility in its permutations, since it seems like just the sort of thing you would love to game out, if only for future reference.
There are a lot of possibilities I don't mention because I already go into too much detail about my thoughts that I'm confident on. In that situation I had the Jowy wagon as all townie or dp, and dp actually looked better after jowy flipped town. If he was scum that vote should have been more automatic, imo. Plus he had been under the gun d1 and I wanted to give him a day, and I think that was a good decision. I stand by it. Turned out to be the good choice, too. Our day 2 was very productive and it busted the game open.
I feel like... your instincts about me are often backwards, but not always. I'm just odd to you and vice-versa. Which will always make me difficult for you to read, and I cop to you being difficult for me to read.
This meta may help, but it won't help you in a situation where I don't produce as much on day one because that day one was mostly absentee townies and lack of content. There were a lot of engaged townies this time.
I feel like you need a good three days to have a shot at reading me. Before that, I haven't gotten into my groove and my reads are bad, I need data to do good analyses. After that, it's too late if I'm scum.
Evaluate me late on day 3. Lynch me day 3 if I've failed to look townie.
I should be pure by day 3, like dp101. And like him, if I don't get enough space to do my thing, I never find anyone, and never get clear, and I can look scummy to people if I'm even a little off. And I have range, so even town games won't be identical.
It's okay to be wrong, but I'm a d3 read, not a good d1 read.
I mean, if I under-perform to the point I look like the last 3 scum games, mark me down as wolfy as hell and let people know. Or if you otherwise get such a read, let people know. But since I will rand town more often than scum, and you get better read on my slot by day 3's efforts from me, you'd be able to find me townie when I'm town more often just before mid-game.
My d1s as town, even when they're townie, tend to suck. That's why my reads re-evaluate so much. But even based on that little bit, novice dropped all d1 for me and Manasi dropped by n1, and I found some townies. That's a good day 1 for me.
Even if no scums found, more townies found than the mafia can kill per night, is a solve. That's what I can reasonably aim for. And then I re-evaluate the townies that don't belong in my town, like Manasi.
That's my whole process, when I'm serious and my town is serious, in a game this size.
I'd play it about the same as a town power role, I feel my reads are more important than my power, unless I'm the cop or the vig. And even then, I want to have excellent reads, because it really helps those roles perform well.
Re: XCOM Mafia [In Play]
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