How to win as Mafia: Calculated Inaction

[GreyICE]

All player guides immediately become outdated the minute they are posted. Town meta naturally will adjust to all possible scum advice.

Nine times out of ten, town meta is to plant pants firmly on head and insist that they're right in the face of all sense or reason.

2. Do not call the strongest members of the town scum, rather pick on weaker but more neutral figures. If you pick on people that are too easy, you will eventually run out of valid scumreads, and if you only pick on the strongest members of the town, it will likely turn on you. Attack the people that can't defend themselves. Newbies are a good choice.

http://www.mafiascum.net/forum/viewtopi ... =5&t=17458

Please explain that one to Fonz for me, he seems to think that I'm going to auto lynch him if he ever says someone who might not have played the game too often is scum.

Defend the strongest players of the town. Pick one in particular to defend excessively. If you die, this will tie you to them and allow your team to lynch them quickly. As a note, generally, if you build a meta for defending people you will do well in all your games.

White Knight!

If you notice someone acting scummy, and no one else has yet picked up on it, take the opportunity. If you lynch an unexpected person the next day reverts to earlier lynch prospects much of the time. Essentially the town loses a day.

Oh lawd. I swear towns have this rule "If one day 1 wagon flips town, LYNCH THE OTHER ONE!" Yeah, because you jokers got something right day 1? LOLNO

Kill the stronger members of the town at night. Nobody analyses night kills anymore, and if they do just bury them under a mountain of WIFOM logic. It actually works.

Holy hell its true. You could go far lynching the strong scum reads of every night kill.

[GreyICE]

I want add a corollary to one of these:

Defend the strongest players of the town. Pick one in particular to defend excessively. If you die, this will tie you to them and allow your team to lynch them quickly. As a note, generally, if you build a meta for defending people you will do well in all your games.

Besides linking them to you, this will also get them on your side.

This also works for VI players. If you defend one, dismissing their play as stupid but town, even if you're insulting, you can get that player on your side later. Keep 'em around for LYLO if possible, then you can coerce them into voting the other guy for your win.

Or best, defend them exactly enough until they've dug a pit so deep that sunlight is a distant pinprick of light. Then let one of your partners lynch them over your protests. Have your partner suggest strongly that you're scumbuddies with the VI.

Sure, you or the lynch leader will probably get lynched at some point, but if you do it right, you can get a HUGE amount of town credit by defending the VI-townie then leading a lynch on your scumbuddy who was pushing the VI.

[GreyICE]

Actually the proper way to play town is to play in ways that makes the mafia obvious, which means pretty much not like this at all.

[GreyICE]

no one analyses night kills any more

"Any more"?

Once upon a time, when the animals of the GreyLabyrinth played with the DragonPhoenix and everyone was happy, the town would look into why murders happened and then they caught the murderers. Now with the mith ruling over the mafiascum with an iron fist, and the people slaving in the threads, the murders are no longer investigated. Now the criminals win and the innocent animals die.

I actually agree with this.

I can think of more games where it was painfully obvious EXACTLY why a certain person died, and the town just futzed along.

[GreyICE]

Actually the proper way to play town is to play in ways that makes the mafia obvious, which means pretty much not like this at all.

I can see why people think you're arrogant. You're also wrong. The point of playing mafia in this way is to blend in with the town. Town is remarkably harder, and if you want to have any impact on the game at all, you won't try to stick out as town either. Patrick will tell you all about the problem of always being seen as town. The town motivation to protect themselves from lynch and from nightkills is no different than the mafia motivation to protect themselves from lynch and from accusations of dodging nightkills. The only differences are that the town is trying to find out the alignment of other players. They are still trying to protect people of their own alignment, and still trying to lynch people of other alignments. There is a reason why the correct term for alignments is the informed minority and the uninformed majority. Because that is all that distinguishes them from one another. Information and size.

I'm planning to post a similar guide on how to play town. Expect many points to be to look out for exactly what this guide tells you to do.

The only flaw to being obvtown whenever you're town is that people might think you're scummy if they don't think you're obvtown immediately.

Which is entirely a meta problem and I'm not going to play any game of mafia worse in order to maybe get a scum win somewhere.

Act up a little. Question some assumptions in the thread. Make some waves. Don't do what's expected. That's good town play.

If the mafia is the informed minority, they have more information to fuel their predictions. Act unpredictably.

[GreyICE]

Meh I owe an IC in some newbie game this, because his explanation was 10x mine (might be Zito) but basically, townies are going to die. This was specifically in the context of no lynch, btw. "Preserving" townies is an illusion. If you're town, you'll probably eventually die.

So getting killed by the mafia, especially as VT, isn't bad. Me? I've experimented with playing "off" to protect power roles. So far it just makes me less effective for the town than if I was a VT, and once I was killed N1 anyway. If I'm obvtown I die. If 9 other townies are just as obvtown, we'll never mislynch, so I win anyway.

[GreyICE]

Sure. But I doubt if you'll ever experience that in practice. I've been obvtown as scum.

Truth. But there's no inherent value in not being the NK.

[GreyICE]

Being alive means you can gain more information to make better decisions. Other people won't do that as reliable as you will.

Looking back at the history of decisions I've made, I can only wish that I had your confidence.

I won't say I haven't run gambits with my survival (I spent an entire day tunneling someone and declaring him the 'lynch tomorrow 100%' with the perfect intention of declaring him likely town if I survived the night - no one, as the last remaining scumteam member, decides NOT to shoot the guy who lead a day 1 scum lynch and is tunneling on them like all hells) but if a player is more valuable because their reads and play are better, than the only way to survive is... cripple their reads and their play. Which removes the entire reason they're better in the first place.

Plus, if you play at 70% to avoid the NK, eventually it becomes easy to justify mistakes. "Oh, that's part of the 'dodge the night kill.'" etc. You get worse.

If scum have to pick between the obv-town but only semi-right player or the accurate player then that can only be good for the town as far as I can see.

Also this.

[GreyICE]

Results? You are telling me HE DIDN'T CLAIM WITH MULTIPLE GUILTIES?

To be fair there were like more scum than town day 1, so it wasn't hard to hit scum by flipping coins.

Plus all the scum claimed in the thread to lynch each other.

[GreyICE]

Yeah. Honestly, it's fucking true. Say nothing. Do nothing. Half the time the town will let you live until endgame.

[GreyICE]

Yeah. Honestly, it's fucking true. Say nothing. Do nothing. Half the time the town will let you live until endgame.

I say alot... and it gets me under heat...

Exactly. Seriously, here's a guide to not getting lynched:

Don't question people. Trying to push people to confirm their alignment is scummy.
Don't change your mind. Deciding someone is town after you were voting for them is scummy.
Don't draw conclusions. Sticking to your guns and never altering your thoughts is a town tell.
Don't post frequently. Lurking is a town tell.
Don't change your vote. Trying to lynch people is a scum tell.

[GreyICE]

I'd tend to agree to some degree. Broadly speaking, however, vigilantes should shoot someone whose not posting much.