So in terms of improving reads: the majority of mafia players have around =rand reads. Good reads are not a necessary part of a good town game, and reads are only a large part of a town game, not all of it. That said, my tip to improve them:
Every night after the lynch, copy the list of players into a doc and make a reads ladder from town to scum. Even if you have no solid reads, 15 different tiers from least to most likely scum. Then, go back after a while and you can see when in the game your reads are the best, where you can improve on, what you did right and wrong, etc. Super useful for self evaluation. For example, if you’re wrong on who the scum are (bottom 2/3/etc) but if your top ~5 reads are consistently town, then you know your town reads are above rand and reliable. There’s useful stuff you can get and it helps you know what to focus on.
Nah man its not that, you just get into this pattern of losing your perspective sometime and need to realize that people dont know what you are so we are just going off of what we see and when we ask questions we want answers and when you just go super random spazzy that doesnt always seem town to people who arent familiar with your meta
I think the best thing for players to become better at townplay is: showing development of thought
9 times out of 10 if I can see where your thought came from, even if I dont agree with it, I am more likely to think that thought came from a town mindset of actually trying to figure out the game
I think the lesson here is even more general - it’s to try to do things within your town framework that other people in the game think is townie to help them out. A lot of people seem to think that’s a scum thing to do (town should act naturally!) but I think it’s something both alignments should be doing.
Agreed. A majority of the players in each game are town - if (as town at least) you take every interaction at a base value of let me answer this as if the person asking me it is town - the town functions better overall
I generally find listening to the reads of players that got killed is helpful - if they’re dead and I’m still alive, there’s probably a reason for that
Town Play Improvement from a Video Mafia Player perspective
The order doesn’t matter
1 - Do not be self defeatist Players will get in their own way entirely too much and just give up or go into tirades. If you give up, you know a potential wolf is not being removed from the game. If you go into a tirade then people stop listening to you because you aren’t projecting town. I don’t have the mindset a flip system ‘seems’ to installs in players because 97 percent of the games I have played we don’t know alignments unless confirmed via power roles actions or the mathematics of the game confirms wolf numbers.
2 - Strive for improvement If you are dying to miss lynches all the time do not just blame the other players for it but look at the structure of how you are playing and make the bits you can improve better. If your reads are constantly wrong look at what you are reading players on and see what you can do better. improvement requires you to be honest with yourself not go all these other players are awful even though I agree they could be awful,
3 - Don’t be lazy Sometimes you don’t have time to put your full effort into a game because of the rest of your life is busy but commit to making an effort. If you have the time read the thread in some part and don’t depend on the other players to do all the work.
4 - Have fun but don’t ruin the fun for everyone else Peoples personality is a huge part of how they play the game but if all the things you are doing in fun is making people refuse to want to play with you then reconsider what you are doing. If you make the game enjoyable then you are less likely to die in the day you are more likely to get people to side with you and you are more likely to die in the night.
5 - Play to your win condition I get it. I know the feeling when you are stuck in this rut of all the games blurring together. Then you add a twist to make the game more interesting to see if you can do this or that as a handicap. It can be helpful to improve your abilities as a player and bring back the fun you get that may be missing but it’s easy to get lost in that allure. Losing a game is not fun. Losing a game because you throw away your win condition/s to play on hard mode makes every other player efforts a waste of that effort.
For real I actually suck at reading lhf/people who have very poor understanding of the game. If anyone has any tips with how you approach that I’d be delighted to hear because I’m wrong all the time.