Never played mafiascum, is it active? Does it have a lot of players?
Never played Mafia myself but I was one of the strongest players a few seasons back in Town of Salem. The best skill is the ability to quickly assess which are the players that can be easily manipulated. That is the most OP skill but it is conditional with playing with people of variable level, if you play with skilled people only, then strategic killing/hanging becomes vital and you can easily smell the fakes as Town ’cos their actions are poorly aligned with their words.
As a Mafia the most useful tactic is to waste time or push really hard for some random Townie, since Town usually has a small margin of 1⁄2 days so an early advantage can snowball very easily.
Skilled players catching on to you is irrelevant. That was exactly my problem after I got a bit of experience: I could easily catch evil but no one would believe me. On the other hand if you can “capture” an enemy player you can pretty much brute force the result regardless of other people’s actions (unless there are other good manipulators). Also consider that you’ll often have to pocket an allied player just to get them to play “correctly”, it’s not something you necessarily have to do to an enemy.
Assessing players becomes relatively easy after some practice, they basically fall into a handful of categories:
Blanks are troll/AFKers, nothing you can do about them
Noobs either will do nothing or play randomly, ignore them early in the game if you’re evil (and don’t kill them), if you’re Town tell them what to do ONCE then ignore them if they won’t follow you (if they ignore you the first time you will never convince them anyway)
Logicals are good at understanding what’s going on, if they are on your team they will easily cooperate, if you’re an enemy they will believe any lie you tell them as long as the lie is compatible with the info they have (and they will act accordingly).
Socials are good at controlling the stage, they are “loud” and successfully demand attention/action, though they are usually bad at deduction. If they are aligned with you talk to them in whispers only and let them control the public (they are usually “arrogant” and won’t share control of the public stage); if they aren’t on your team it gets diffcult: try pointing a finger at someone and see if they take the bait, bussing can also work in these cases
Quiets are people that lie low, basically pretending to be Blanks/Noobs. They are the most difficult to control, some of them are really really good. When picking someone to control these should be your last choice.