Just a tip

[Alisae]

I wrote this while I'm stoned and its a grumbled mess of garbage

I have found that removing yourself from the game, just sitting back and letting things play out, is the best course of strategy when it comes to reading players as well as the gamestate. If you can identify what you think scum are going to want to actually do, then your job is easy: Just look for the players and their actions during the course of the current day phase and just try to think if their actions align with what scum actually want to do during the day phase.

To win as scum, you have to cross the finish line. Crossing the finish line is very hard for me, either because I'm bad or I just get bad RNG. I have no idea and tbh I don't exactly care anymore?

Anyhow, you have to cross the finish line to win as scum, so as town we can try to identify how each player would cross the finish line as scum. This gets easier and easier the longer the game gets. Scum players also get lazy as keeping up the charade, so if you approach each day phase with an open mind and throwing everything you know from the previous day phase out the window, you might find notice something you might have not have noticed previously.

Either way, to me townhunting is a lot easier than scumhunting. Progressively throughout the game, townies will naturally be town. Only Town has the desire to be right. If you can identify these moments and identify moments that can only come from town, then it's easy to just get a bunch of townreads and eventually sus out who scum are because you identified who town are.

Fair warning though,
The truth is, once you play against scumplayers like Pooky and LLD, who basically make the game of Mafia seem like nothing makes sense and make it seem like not even robots can perfect this game, you'll realize that this shit is really fucking arbitrary. You think you know what's going on, but then suddenly you don't.

Luckily for the average player, most scumplayers aren't Pooky or LLD, and seeing a talent like those nowadays that is excited to play the alignment is rare. Most people don't even like the alignment.

As long as you're a villager and you try to chase after the robots, you'll be fine.

At the end of the day.
Villagers want to be right on scum.
Scum want to kill villagers.

I implore an individual to try to just, remove yourself from the game. Let the other players in the game just do their thing. Take a backseat for a couple days, observe as much as possible, and think a game through this lens. You'll find as you get more and more information the longer and longer the mafia game goes on, and as you understand more and more of what is actually happening inside the mafia game, who likes/dislikes who, how many votes you need to kill a player, and as you try to figure out who are the players who want to be right one by one, you'll have good reads.

Oh
also you should probably trust players more. If you let players just do their thing, you'll be able to read them better than you would have if you just put them on blast because you don't want to sort any other slots or do something else. If that player is doing something that is actually scum indictive (keep an eye out for tricks), you should be able to do it. Or you realize that the player does just want to be right at the end of the day and that they're a villager.

Who knows.