Fun fact: I isoed myself and looked at my progression on Mac.
Basically, the whole time, I said the same thing: "Mac's role looks town. His play does not." Which is what bork wanted, more or less.
I actually quite like the progression I made, since I progressively managed to put the puzzle pieces together. A lot of what I did was circular, but Mac was always in my choices pretty much, in that I was reasoning things through, and be it claim or play, other players were always coming ahead of Mac overall. And it really says something that the half-way point in my iso is on Wednesday, when I began the Mac case. (Which was more analysis than case-making. It was more to convince myself than to convince others.
)
This game shows a fine example of why I am a fairly-strong late-game player, in spite of my utter lack of confidence: I might not get to this stage often, and I might never stop angsting over my every decision, but from a purely-objective viewpoint, there is a clear progression in my thoughts, my analysis slowly comes together, and it begins to put the puzzle pieces of the game together bit by small bit. Individual sections might seem stupid, in that they diverge from good play into bad play, but those individual sections mostly remain individual, in that they're soon put back into place. It's sort-of like a mental counter-argument, a devil's advocate, like I'm saying, "This is possible...but I don't think it's true", just on a more broad scale.
(It should be noted that I do these same things in the early-game, too...but they are done with me filling in the blanks a LOT more with wild guesses that I assume are factual just because I have nothing better to go off of. The results show: sometimes, I am really, REALLY right on things. Other times, really, REALLY wrong. And it takes a LOT of work. LOT. To mentally reset when I've had wrongness revealed to me. Which is one of the main reasons I get that doubt about my abilities, and don't like to live late in the game.)
It's not something I get to do very often. (Mainly because I'm averaging dead-before-N2 in games.
) And while highly-stressful, the relief afterwords is well worth it. It's not as fast as others would prefer, but...I can get it right. If not exactly, then close enough. (This was the same thing causing me to strongly prefer replacing into games in 2011. Like Underground Mafia, or Fire & Ice mafia, and similar; those types of game kept me on the site because I did similar to this game.)
