Return of the Clowns: identified the entire mafia team about one full Day phase after subbing in, identified the entire town, correctly described how the game was in Zugzwang in final 7 lylo, an extremely rare endgame position in werewolf that even veterans of 10 years might never have seen before, and the scum team conceded after I got my first suspect launched because every other townie agreed with my solve exactly.
Pleonast experimental: identified both scumbags on Day One and correctly sorted the other 3 townies exactly. Described what the scums were doing as a scum plan (delaying) and what clues they were giving away and why it was scummy of them (a mindset of having all the time in the world, and a far too relaxed and not worried mindset, and there were probably 2 scums alive and only 6 players in our realm, and there were other scums and other townies in other realms, so town was basically at LYLO in all three realms from game start, so town had reason to worry). I fixed my tinfoil on one townie merely because she was having a lot of trouble comprehending what I was saying, and inability to read for comprehension is stuff that townies do because they do not know the other player is not mafia and therefore do not know if they are lying or obfuscating, so because they don't already know the other player is being truthful and sincere, that makes it harder for them to follow what someone else believes a lot. I threw out all my suspicion on her because she was giving away telltale signs of genuinely not knowing I was town because she thought I was saying stuff I wasn't saying and wasn't following what I actually said properly.
Colby11 untitled (aka King Bowser game): Correctly generated an uninfiltrated town core of 11 players and launched 1 scumbag on Day 2 and had a second scumbag as my top scum after that name, had the others as null. No cops, no special roles, just vanilla town versus 4 scum. Also, because my towncore was so incredibly good, the wolves tried to discredit me specifically by murdering my top suspect on night one. A different townie thought that this was the move, because the kill was so completely irrational for any other reason. That player had few posts and was not threatening at all, and was widely suspected, and there were no power roles. Therefore, the conspiracy WAS the only explanation for why that kill happened. And one of my other top suspects was executed Day 2 and was indeed scum, and my towncore turned out to be completely correct. I had that many townies because I dragged a townie to death on day one based on a massive case, and townies believed my case was legit, but scums tried to look better than townies and doubted it, and I always expect that they do that because that's werewolf 101, look better than townies, so I essentially cleared most of the giant wagon on my suspect and those clears were ALL correct.
War of Princes: Led town to 5 out of 6 scumbags on 2 different teams and saw the 6th get blasted by opposing mafia, all town powers survived the game, almost all townies survived the game due to my jailkeeping and Ace Marvel being a doctor. No cops. Correctly called out the busser on the wagon that killed the first wolf, because that is the only way a wolf usually survives that game, is to not be considered scum on either faction. One faction knows for sure they are not on their team, and if they bus convincingly, well, that eliminates the other option. But that is literally conspiracy tinfoil pizzaman's first thought, so it was my first guess for who was bussing if there was bussing and I expected bussing.
Fight of the Mafia: Correctly identified almost everyone in the game as town, named the 2 and 2 scums in a list of 5 suspects, because on Day one when most of the town was inactive, the 2 scum teams almost openly colluded to destroy obvious townies because they clearly had a voting majority outright among the active players, so all 4 scummos were actually readably scummy and literally conspiring together in a visible manner that people do not usually suspect from opposing teams of 2.
Haunted by Slep: Correctly ID'ed a scum on Day One based on doing stuff that other wolves have been doing literally every game for the past year (Saying "I agree" in order to blend in with town, and describing actions which would cause you to vote for them as "interesting" instead of scummy, and LITERALLY every scum team in the past year did both of these things), executed them, correctly called out two people for fake claiming guilty results on Day 2, fake claimed cop with a correct innocent peek, died (Just like Season 2 Game 3 with Adaham, this is like my signature move at this point...) and when I died, the real cop arrived the next day with a real guilty cop result. Basically a clone of the Season 2 game, all over again, except the wolf I destroyed, I never thought was townie at all, ever, and got them dead Day One instead of Day 2, and I stopped all the fancy plays by town by not falling for their claims of having guilty results and hard claiming cop "because they forced me to, by playing fancy". And I drew the kill for the cop because no vanilla townie knows enough to correctly call out other townies for having false guilty peeks. Except, I do, because I've been in a dozen games where townies have done that and it is really bad and the townie you falsely accused never reacts like a caught peeked scumbag would, and there are serious visible differences, which you can pick up on if you play with townies who claim false guilty results all the time. That's just experience with bad town play coming in handy.
So now I am writing articles on how to be a good townie, mainly because all those wacko conspiracy theories keep coming true over and over again.
Yeah, if your pack mate busses you hard, it is just my personality type and my experiences that have taught me to expect that and prioritize it as the most likely outcome.
When I first went to Two Plus Two and discovered the meta there was wolf teams actually hardcore defending each other and not bussing, I was a bit thrown off by that change for a while.
Then I learned how to read the signs because all of that is super duper visible behavior and the wolves should have murdered within the group of people who keep getting others executed and keep town reading each other, because if the wolves were outside of those names, they would have ample evidence to conclude they do not win that game unless they begin killing within the group of townies that all town reads each other no matter how wrong they are.
That is just logically where the wolves are always if they keep at it all game. That's not even a difficult brain teaser. It's literally suicidal for the wolves not to shoot the townies that refuse to see each other as scum even if they keep missing.
It's also kind of not very usual for townies to maintain a belief that another townie is town when they miss all game long and guess your alignment right, because that is classic pocketing behavior. The wolf town reads a townie, and votes with them on all their wrong suspects.
So when the townie never suspects being pocketed, that's not a townie anymore. When the bloc is never killed, the bloc is never all townies anymore, and is usually the entire wolf pack or most of them, and one is just hanging out elsewhere doing other disconnected things.
Thanks to two plus two meta, I now quickly identify wolf packs defending each other and trying to win the game without losing a single member, too. So when they bus, I smell that, and when they don't bus, I smell that, and when they try to get distance from each other without killing, that's really weird because townies want their suspects dead today, not some vague day in the future, so all of that gets your wolf pack dead now.
The only stuff that has been effective against me in the past 5 years is where the wolves don't defend each other, don't bus each other, don't distance from each other, and don't acknowledge each other's existence, and town has a lot of people they don't interact with or have an opinion on, so I can't read the differences in behavior between the townies and the scums. It looks identical.
But that's what the wolf team did in Return of the Clowns, and once I got my townies to have opinions on every player, the wolf team tried distancing and bussing, and when I called that out as the likely plan to win the game, they all piled on me after cross suspecting each other, and that's when I called Zugzwang because they had all accused me of being scum with everyone else accusing me of being scum and the suspicions went in a complete circle, and none of them could name a team of 3 scums that had my name and did not include 1 or 2 of my accusers, and I couldn't even get executed that game unless I was deliberately being bussed by my wolf pack at LYLO, and why would that happen if any of the three of them were townies and I could get 4 votes on any of them easily?
their own cross suspicion made their accusation logically impossible, and because it was LYLO, they would need to self preserve and vote for literally anyone they can get executed other than their own body, if they were up for the execution that day. It would be their villagery duty, and each of the 3 of them refused to execute the other 2, which a villager should never do when they are about to be executed instead.
Thus, it was Zugzwang, they had no wrong executions left because they all cross suspected each other and all suspected me and they needed the rest of the town to vote with them to win so they couldn't accuse the townies outside of my body either. The situation was so bad that I was the only wrong execution that was possible anymore, and that meant they could not afford to murder me at night even if I guessed right every single day, because they always lose the game once I flip town at night, due to the unique nature of their supposed suspicions all overlapping with one another on each other and on me, and because I am town, at LYLO, if 3 people were voting for me out of 7, and the game did not end, at least 3 people on the opposing wagon are known townies. So literally every other wrong execution is impossible after I die, the game is locked, scums always lose.
It is a unique situation that I had seen happen once before with a team of 5 that had defended each other all game and led town to ruin, but town got wise and executed one of them at final 11, and that meant that the opposing wagon was either on a scumbag and it did not matter who died that day, or, the opposing wagon was on a townie, and that meant that it had cleared almost everyone on the wagon that hit a wolf instead, because the wolf team could have just won the game otherwise, by moving a single vote and changing the outcome of the round.
So all 5 wolves died back to back to back to back to back because they were forever forced to cross suspect each other after that and there were no wrong executions left.
Since I had seen it happen once before, I identified it when it happened again a decade later, with 3 wolves.
I figure, my experiences might be worth reading. If anyone cares. (Nobody cares)
When there is an actual wolf plan, an actual conspiring together of two or more wolves, I am a bloodhound.
If the wolves are disconnected and not enacting any wolfy plan, when it is just a solo scum (serial killer) situation, or when the wolves are inactive, I am blind as a bat. I am looking for the wolf plan and since there is no wolf plan, I am inventing wolf plans and assigning it to townies behaving normally. So I look like a moron.
It is just that in literally any other situation, I can tell you what the wolves are doing and why, because I have seen the wolf team do those things a hundred times each by now. Bussing, distancing, or defending, I have seen it too many times, I know what it looks like, I vote for it. As soon as the wolf team does anything together that vanilla townies don't do in that way, I am on it.
And because my weakness, not being able to see wolves behaving in a very disconnected fashion, kept losing me games from 2017 to 2019, I began compensating for that by asking every townie to have a "larger footprint" meaning, have an opinion and vocalize that opinion and give reasons for those opinions on every player that you can, and by day 2 or day 3, no townie should have any more nulls. Every townie should have an opinion and lean, wolf or not wolf, on every player.
That utterly eliminates the deliberate strategy of wolves to be disconnected, and the weakness (you are not town reading your fellow wolves) is something I picked up on exploiting. You put 2 votes on any wolf and that wolf often dies, because the wolf team is trying to act in a disconnected manner. Not bussing, not defending. Then they aren't getting villagery credit for bussing, and they are not stopping the deaths of a fellow wolf.
So now, I have a counter to disconnected wolves, too. And there are only those 4 moves, bussing, defending, distancing, or being disconnected. There are literally no other strategies, except mixing and matching.
Since it is merely a matter of experience in identifying those strategies as they are being played out, I have been using my game archive as the examples of each wolf strategy being played out, and what the visible indicators were.
Ultimately you need to be able to tell it is a wolf voting a wolf, a wolf "suspecting" a wolf, a wolf defending a wolf, and not a townie doing it. That's where the experience comes in, and you need to know where to look for clues on why it is being done dishonestly or with an agenda. And there are always visible clues.
Since those are the only strategies and once the wolf team is not behaving disconnectedly, all their moves are always visible, and there are ways of visibly identifying that behavior as not being townie behavior instead, I am now at the point where I am just showing others how I did it, so they can replicate my methods. Once it is peer reviewed and play tested, it stops being my wacko beliefs that by pure fluke and coincidence keep coming true, and becomes more like a scientific approach to how to play.
I know for a fact I am not lucky. I can get 11 out of 13 alignments correctly, get the remaining two backward, and town loses that game a LOT. That was my entire experience of the game from 2017 to 2019 and even into 2020. It never seems to pan out for me that town can catch a lucky break and fix my few mistakes in time. So it's not "luck" on my side that is getting me this far in games.
And if it isn't luck that means I am doing something right that is replicable. Therefore, I show everyone my methods, write the guide, break it up into readable chapters, and then they go replicate it.
Given how well basically every town I have played with has been doing for the past year, and how well those players have been doing in games afterward even when I am not in those games, I have to think I am on to something here. History will be the judge. Peer review will do its thing and my peers will judge my methods as valid or invalid by scientific test.
I am prepared to look like a moron or a crazy person if they can't replicate my methods and have success. That, I have never had a problem with.
If you want to win, and town has not already solved the game, then you have to take the initiative and propose a solution to the game that no one else has come up with yet, so there is even a chance one of the proposed solutions is correct.
Otherwise, town just sort of follows the wrong theory that has been proposed and starts imploding and blaming each other when it didn't work. A better approach is to have multiple competing solutions and trying to find the one that fits the evidence the best. The correct theory is the one that will have the most accurate predictions, so it is good for there to be several competing theories being discussed, because then one of the theories is more likely to contain accurate predictions, and that puts pressure on the wolf team even if town does not make that particular guess that day. And the wolf team often has to kill the player with the accurate prediction or deal with them hammering their prediction in your face at LYLO and generally being an annoying buzzing noise that entire day that is very loud and never shuts up.