In post 10, LlamaFluff wrote:Because vigs are anti-town... if it brings and leaves the game at odd players then its an okay shot. In any other situation you are probably costing the town a lynch unless you will 100% get two shots off, and even then you are removing a lynch for two vigs which strips town of quite a bit of information.
I think last time it was looked at vigs and no EV for town in balanced 13P setups, so they are not pro-town in any way. It basically is going to increase the chance of scum crushing win by a lot, and town crushing win by a little. A shot with no claim, no further interactions and no discussion is not going to be too accurate, and stats back that one up big time. The only way you can argue that a vig is good is that it decreases the lynch pool, but even then half the time the lynch pool shifts so continuously during the game that its even hard to really say thats a good thing.
Best thing a vig can do is get the game to odd numbers, anything else has huge chances of damaging town for low reward. Even if you want to say scum make up 2/3 of the game at that point, chances are twice as good you hurt town than help town... so how is that a smart move to ever make?
Vigs aren't inherently anti-town, but they can be anti-town if used poorly. In general, I think full Vigilantes should always shoot N1 if the game starts in evens, and the majority of the time in 13P+ games. There's enough chance you'll get a second shot off, or that other killings roles/protection roles succeed to render the evens/odds dynamic less important. Once the game is smaller, evens/odds becomes more important, but I think trading two vig shots for one lynch is a positive move most of the time. Towns really aren't that accurate with lynches, so I'd rather five shots at scum than four even if they're slightly less informed.
Odd/Even Night and 1-Shot Vigs should almost always adhere to the evens/odd rule though, unless the game is large, because their chances of getting two shots off are either 0% or slim.
I think overall your vig-strategy is a little bit too conservative.
With the Vig stats in 13P normals, a fair proportion of vigs in these games have been 1-Shot or Odd/Even Night, so it's likely a decent chunk of vig shots were used in an anti-town way. The fact that 13P Vig/No Vig setups had the same winrate probably means that full Vigs/2-Shot Vigs have a decent amount of upside to them if they can offset the games where players use the other Vigs poorly.