first of all, i don't
ok, now onto the projects themselves. i think, since the development projects are the most useful and most discussed, we should start with that. i agree we should be selecting one of these projects as part of our two choices. i think printing press would be a really bad choice; i don't think we need the information that much, and it locks us out of choosing the most powerful development projects today. assassination just doesn't seem great right now, but it's not like anyone wants to do that iirc. i think board of elections is also likely bad; while i don't know this, the projects seem to be based on 'give consensus townreads more voting power' and while the projects unlocked by the board of elections will be more powerful, i imagine they'll be the same type of thing, and this seems less useful than the other projects. this seems controversial, but i think trading outpost is also bad. it might be useful later, but doing it right now seems inefficient. funds we don't use just get given to the insurgents, who will have powers for themselves, and i think we're likely going to struggle to just spend the 60k we have.
so to me, the choice is between bureau of investigations and guildhall. i don't think anyone's brought up guildhall, but i think it's potentially pretty powerful - i think this is where doc and jk actions would go, for example. however, bureau of investigations is likely to give us concrete information. without exact knowledge of what will be unlocked, i don't really know which is the best choice, so i'm happy to go with the consensus on bureau of investigations being better.
apart from development, we get one other projects. honestly, i don't love any of the choices we have. the cost probably doesn't matter, except for blocking us from census, since i imagine the insurgents will get their money regardless of what we do. the choices that seem obviously useless are; mayor election, raffle, autopsy, election security, injuction, inquiry, census. not all of these will be useless for the entire game, but i don't think they merit discussion today.
intelligentia is a potential choice. i think it's intuitive there are just 3 scum; 2 scum seems just... boring, and i don't think we have enough power to justify 4 scum, since this is mostly mountainous and all of the public powers are pretty bad. however, it's possible scum have some sort of creative and/or weird structure - like multiball or a strange factional ability instead of the kill - and the existence of this ability indicates it might not actually be 3 scum to me.
sacrifice just seems weird. like, we get a vig shot, they flip, it's free, and we get something tomorrow. even though it's loyal, i think there is a catch here - loyal vig is still a much better role than mayor or whatever, which costs 10k. honestly i'm inclined to think it's bait and there's a catch to it on the insurgent side, because otherwise i think it would have come up in review. if we have someone we want to vig, fine? but i'm not too enthusiastic about it.
the jury creates a hood, which i guess is nice! i don't think the vote is very good. i also don't think hoods are that powerful, and can often lead to pocketing, so i'd prefer to avoid this, but i understand why someone would vote for this i guess.
neighbourhood watch... i mean, it's fine? like, there's not much reason why we specifically would want to use it now, since it only goes into effect on d2. but not having daytalk is indeed a small nerf for the mafia, regardless of when we use it, and tomorrow we probably want to use something investigative and a development ability, so i don't see much harm in doing this.
finally, marriage. this might be the best method of killing in a vacuum; make scummy people marry, and if you want to lim one you get to lim the other. however, if you decide you don't want to eliminate these people after all, and they are both town, you're allowing scum to make a double kill when it's elo time and that doesn't seem like a very good choice to make. so while i could get the appeal of this, i don't think it's a good choice for d1.
basically, i think we want {bureau of elections or guildhall} and then {neighbourhood watch or intelligentia}
HURT: Bureau of Elections