In post 45, Raskolnikov wrote: In post 42, callforjudgement wrote:If scum are counting the other scum on a wagon and voting accordingly, that implies an intentional effort to manipulate VCA, and it can be hard enough to do reliably even when it isn't being manipulated by the scum.
Manipulated VCs wouldn't just neutralize VCA but like massively screw over anyone doing the VCA compared to if they were just scumhunting traditionally huh? You have no way of telling manipulated vca apart from actual vca short of mislynching the people and losing the game no?
Oh boy that reminds me of this game people were VCAing the entire game up to and including LYLO even though it was mentioned as a big thing early d1. It's like dude, if you start the game off talking about VCA you think people are going to just ignore it?
I know that my scumteam once won a game using an inconsistent bus (the rest of the team deserves credit for coming up with it rather than me, though). Start by hard-bussing (I was one of the bussers) but get someone else on the team to defend the target equally as hard and try to stop it going through. People are now seeing the bus target as likely town, and the bussers as mildly scum (especially because they can't really explain their push, only that the target is really scummy). I kept on trying to push the bus target on subsequent days, knowing that nobody would really go along with me; when I subsequently ended up flipping scum it basically guaranteed that the bus target would coast to endgame.
I'd consider that strategy to pretty much be intentional VCA manipulation (although of course it's manipulating things other than the vote count, it's mostly based around what people deduce from your votes). Unfortunately, it's only really usable in a Large because it requires four scum (and has some risks of its own).
I think there are VCA-manipulation strategies that work even in a smaller game (e.g. having the two scum in a Micro town-read each other all game and work cooperatively using reads that are similar but not identical). The problem, though, is that VCA manipulation means that you're sacrificing options. If you want as much flexibility as scum as possible, you're probably going to have to split reads to some extent so that you can plausibly have at least one member of the scumteam read any given member as town. If you go for a more focused strategy, you'll find that you have to let some "universal townreads" through who will become something of a problem at lylo because everyone then will broadly look town; VCA won't show much in any direction (you can manipulate your votes but you can't manipulate the townies' votes), so then it becomes a competition of who looks most town, with everyone looking somewhat townish. That's a dangerous situation to be in, so VCA manipulation is rare. (As scum, though, I've normally found it worthwhile to let one supertownie through to lylo; this is less costly in power-role-light games because if someone is universally considered town you can just nightkill them. This gives more flexibility to screw around with VCA because you don't need to potentially drive suspicion on everyone.)
