How to play a Large Game

[Alyssa The Lamb]

A cohesive town can correctly PoE the scum by analyzing posts and votes and formulating accurate theories on motivations behind decision points, or surviving long enough for investigative results confirming the alignment of scum, side-stepping the dangers of false-positives in more creative and tricky setups. The influence of WIFOM can be curtailed when this happens.

Bandwagon leaders who successfully lynch scum often become overconfident, and supported by a large flock of sheep, proceed to lead mislynches, which trigger a wave of momentum to wash over the game in the opposite direction.

These two points by themselves are absolutely huge and the biggest reason why I say that scum lynches d1 are inherently anti-town in large games. It's very rare for a town to be able to ride that momentum unless they are able to turn that one lynch into a decisive advantage in of itself, which generally means the setup is either broken, town has a massive PR advantage after that one scum lynch, or town in general has the entire scumteam pegged. What generally happens is that town ends up not flipping another scum for multiple days and ending up losing that numbers advantage really easily since it's relatively simple for scum to readjust to losing that extra member compared to town leveraging that advantage to build a decisive one.

Information is king for town in larger and longer games, you get a lot of benefit from resolving problem slots and simplifying the game early so that the endgame is easier (especially since the scumteam have more of an opportunity to handpick which town players to endgame). The scumteam generally have to create so much chaos or manipulate town towards lynches that don't actually benefit them in the long run to stand a reasonable chance towards the endgame, because town also has more opportunities to accurately build situations where the scumteam have to either go out of their way to rescue the game or simply be caught out, and the price of being wrong is not inherently as problematic.

The problem most towns hit is that they just blindly lynch their biggest scumreads, so they don't actually have enough to work with when each lynch truly matters and the only scum remaining are those that either built themselves up to be viewed as town enough to be out of the spotlight or those that manipulated those low information lynches in the first place. This strategy will allow you to get wins in smaller games and will net you scum lynches in larger games, but it's a strategy that doesn't win you the game of attrition.