Hmm, I should have given more thorough advice for vigilantes in the strategy thread.
I forgot how many things can go wrong with vig-kills, that I sort of had in the back of my mind but which might not be immediately obvious for vigilantes. Next time I should make a big thread specifically about vigilantes.
Things to include:
- Remember that whenever you make a vigilante kill, you're taking a mafia-like action to try to solve a town problem. There may be consequences for this. A main example is that you might trigger priests, causing them to lose their powers, or secret admirers, causing them to die. These effects are a lot more likely to hit town than mafia. It's also the case that you will have just done something that is not distinguishable from what mafia do; unless your target was generally agreed to be a suspicious person on the lynch block, you may very well end up on the top of the lynch block yourself. (If this weren't the case, then mafia could claim vig-kills all the time and get away with it.)
- Still, unless you have a very solid plan to convincingly fake-claim as serial killer / mafia, you should claim your vigilante kills, by proxying out ("this was a vigilante kill") This prevents town from using up resources on investigations or spirit searches.
- Remember that if you make a vigilante kill on a person, rather than proposing them for a lynch, you lose out on potential information about the person's sketchiness. The main example of this is that if a town child would be lynched, they probably won't be (e.g. I had revealed to Dgrazian and he had gotten a town result). A more minor example is last game, where I was confident that Pravi was using their splitter power to give me investigations, which was private info that made me trust them a lot more.
- Due to these concerns, it may be optimal for you to never use your vigilante power before you die. That's okay. The best times to make vigilante kills are:
a. If it's the endgame and town is likely to lose soon. Making a vig-kill is a high-variance play, which is best done when you're losing. In this case, try to make your kill earlier in the day, so mafia don't win race conditions by e.g. killing you first.
b. If you're about to be lynched. In this case, you should publicly go to your kill target (e.g. take some players with you), and give them some time to make their defense before you kill them. E.g. they can claim if they're a child who revealed to people, and they can give out relevant information to town that they want to get out before they die. While you're doing this conversation, your witnesses can post on forums and ask if anyone has important info that would cause issues for this kill (e.g. "I'm secret admiring them").
c. If town has multiple people they want to lynch in a night (e.g. two people beefing and both calling the other mafia). Often this can be better resolved by tasing/roleblocking the person the next day, but sometimes not. Also, in the example of people in a beef, having one killed earlier can sometimes resolve the conflict (if you are honey jarred or your target gets shoveled).
- If it is not extremely time-sensitive (e.g. the endgame), you should try to get yourself honey-jarred first, probably by messaging a player who started with the honey jar and saying, "I'm a vigilante; can you honey jar me?" You might as well make this person your proxy too, to limit how many people know your identity. Often despite your best efforts, mafia will identify you (e.g. they'll use some of their own pair investigations on the kill). But the downside of the honey jar doesn't even matter, because you'd be trappable as vigilante anyway.
This is what I get for being lazy and not making a post like this earlier.