Kiro: If we were to take my plan and follow it for the whole game, regardless of the flips we got, then yes, we'd basically be gambling everything on the assumption that the mafia has less than five members. But every time we killed a scum, we'd have another chance to go back and evaluate who's scummiest and who should duel who - and if we got a scumflip out of that fight, then we'd be another kill ahead of scum. There's also the fact that scum would never be able to accumulate more than one kill more than the number of scum deaths. So, if we got three scumflips and there were still enough players left for scum to possibly win, we could re-evaluate our strategy then as well.
If we can get two untested combatants to fight, and get the loser to flip scum, that would be ideal, but your plan to pair everyone up at the start would mean that we'd only be able to guess how many heads scum have claimed by looking at how many scumflips we've gotten after everyone has gotten a chance to fight. And with scum potentially voting as a bloc, they'd probably win more fights than they lost.
As for Pesco vs. Bardiche, I see where Pesco's coming from with his strategy. Can't say I've gotten a strong scummy impression from Bardiche, but early in the day, you can't really expect that sort of thing, and this gambit of Pesco's feels townie to me.
##Vote: Pesco
At the moment, I'm favoring Rou to kill Pesco if Bardiche flips town, if only for the dramatic value.
Though, it just now occured to me that if two untested people go into battle with each other, and a townie dies, then it might be smarter to have the towniest players go through and kill each other until a scum pops up. This would hopefully result in a lot of townies being removed from the game before we hit the next scum. And after that next scum death, the two scummiest players could be picked to fight each other in hopes of killing a scum before he claims a head.
