Among Us Imposter Tips And Tricks

For many, getting to be the Impostor role is the best part of playing, but it also puts a lot of stress on you to perform if you finally get it. There’s a lot to be done wrong, and landmines you can unknowingly step into that a well-functioning Crew will catch you on. Our assumption here will be that you are regularly playing with the same group, making it even harder to successfully deceive the opposition. If you are just playing with random people, there will still be advice in here that will stack the odds in your favour. Here are our advanced tips to stay ahead of the charade.

General concepts

There are ideas that apply in any situation which you should follow in the execution of your strategy.

- The longer a body remains unfound, the better it is for you
- Always run a story with tasks as key points in your mind to rattle off when asked what you did that night
- An unstacked Crew is easier to win against
- One kill between each vote is a solid rule of thumb
- Be aware when the crew have to do tasks in safe kill areas (such as Electrical on The Skeld)
- Inject as much false information as you can safely get away with

Most of your strategical actions should plan around these ideas, and should help facilitate some of those goals. Of course, strategy changes a lot based on what kind of settings you play with, but these ideas remain constant in every game state.

Quick & self-explanatory tips

- When you’re faking a task, only move when the progress bar goes up
- Always play the common task (Wires, Scan Boarding Pass, Insert Keys, Swipe Card) as if you have it
- Cut off your fellow impostor if it’s clear he can’t be helped during the vote
 

• Read more: The Nine Personality Types Of ''Among Us'' Players
   

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Among Us Imposter Tips - Using Sabotages effectively

Sabotages are the engine of making safe kills happen. Whether you are trying to create action, or you’re trying to get the Crew away from a body you just dropped. Imagine the map in your mind and think how people are likely to rotate based on the Sabotage you just activated - and use it to your advantage. If you just got a kill in reactor on The Skeld, using O2 as a sabotage is great, because it will funnel Crew to the deactivation interfaces and away from your body, increasing the time it will take for them to find the body. 

A solid rule of thumb has become to use lights early in the game, when a lot of Crew is alive, while trying to get into position to trigger the sabotage win condition when using O2 or Reactor. 

Triggering lights allows you to get away with kills easily. One of my favourite strategies, when card swipe is the common task on The Skeld, is to trigger lights early in the game while I wait in Cafeteria. When Crew waddle towards electrical, I try to safely pick off the tail end of the line that they are running while nobody is in vision to see the kill. Now everyone in this line could potentially be the killer, as everyone was in the area, and a definitive line that they walked in can’t be identified.

Ideally, you make it to one of the interfaces and at least show presence so people notice you. Using vents can help you get there faster if you can safely use them without giving information away. If you can’t make it there, hitting the button soon after the sabotage is solved can be a useful strategy, but when overused becomes suspect too.

In the case that you can’t find a kill because Crew is too bunched up, using either O2 or Reactor will help at least divide the fronts, and you might be able to pick someone off in rotation.

Doors are a powerful tool to get your kill cooldown back up without the Crew advancing in their tasks, giving you additional time to win. When you are playing with two Impostors, this strategy can be really powerful as certain Sabotages can be used at the same time with some doors. Especially when you have been voted out as an Impostor, flying around as a Ghost and cutting people off before getting tasks can often help your teammate to score much-needed kills.

When the crew has been dwindled down to only three players with you being the only Impostor alive, using O2 or Reactor is a great way to finish out the round. Look for where the majority of Crew hangs out and use the Sabotage that’s exactly on the other side of the map. This is especially important for O2 as a Crewmember in the area can solve both consoles by themselves in time if they are too close at the start of the Sabotage, voiding your strategy. Given that the split of players will have to be two going to each console respectively for them to solve the task, you can finish off the one that has to go with you. 

The Power of Vents

Especially on MIRA HQ and Polus, but also on The Skeld, the ventilation system remains a powerful tool to create safe kills. Sitting in vents, you see a Crew member leave Electrical while another remains. You pop out and get the kill and swiftly jump back in. As the next Crew member walks in, likely having seen the first guy that left, he calls for a vote on the highly suspect Crew. You just got two kills.

Other ways to use vents are to mask where you potentially could have been, showing your presence in well-timed and plausible locations to Crew, while using the time they can’t account for to make kills happen.

Be aware that during your time in vents, your kill cooldown doesn’t go down. You don’t want to sit in them all game.

Take the gamble at low player count

Sometimes the state of information in a round is so high for the Crew, that you have to make desperate plays in order to remain in the game. This might involve killing a Crew member while another watches. Usually, in the groups we observed, the first person to impassionately spit and scream out a name is given the trust. How could you not scream? You just saw a murder. Crew will usually make it a 50/50, meaning that you both will be voted out but another day to at least get another kill is a great tradeoff in some situations that allows your Impostor teammate to clutch out the round. This is also a great strategy if you’ve been called out as suspect several rounds in a row. 

Self-reports and displacing bodies

Given that your settings are likely set up in a way that gives Impostors longer vision than Crew, you might find yourself in a position where a Crew member will unexpectedly round the corner and would be able to identify you, with no vent to escape.

Self-reporting in those instances can be useful but usually needs to be paired with displacing the body in order to mask suspect behaviour. Displacing a body is the strategy of saying that you’ve found it in a different location than it actually was in. Sometimes you can know that a specific area of the map had no crew in it, sometimes you will have to make the judgement call and take the gamble as the alternative of saying where the body exactly was, gives too much information to the crew.

The bee’s knees is when you can put a body on the complete opposite side of the map, making crew distrust with whoever they were bunching up on that side and keeping you save. An alert and on the ball crew will almost never let that happen, so you will have to evaluate how concentrated they are as a group and take your chances based on that.

Metagame - Work Impostor-like behaviour into your crew rounds

Now we are getting into the more meta gamey type of tips. When you play a lot with the same people,  you will naturally pick up their tendencies and playstyles. Some people, unfortunately, aren’t very good at masking their Impostor behaviour and improving that area comes from analysing your crew playstyle first.

Ideally, especially the start of your rounds are played exactly the same way both as crew and as Impostor. Given that it’s the first information people see, they will deem your behaviour as suspect if you deviate from the Crew scheme you have played all night and will look at your every action more in detail.

One playstyle that has generally worked is to be the player that keeps track of everyone’s movements at the beginning of the round. As Crew, this helps you identify who has grouped with who and which side of the map a kill might have happened. As Impostor, it allows you to identify kill targets especially when a group of two or so split off to go to the other side of the map. This playstyle will see you wiggle around the starting location to see where everyone is heading, then go down to the common task to later loop back into the best kill area while for instance Lights are switched off.

Perhaps you will also take the tradeoff of appearing to be always suspect as a Crew member, normalising suspect behaviour as part of your gameplay. While this will likely tank your chances of winning as Crew, it will help you out on Impostor in a big way. Maybe you sometimes forget on Crew how exactly you walked and which tasks you did or you keep wiggling in front of other Crew members in a way that an Impostor would if their kill cooldown was just about to become available and they are lusting for the kill. The same concept translates into voice talks in which suspect behaviour like being unable to remember who you saw while playing Crew will help you out as an Imposter as people will know that you are sometimes forgetful.

Among Us Imposter Tips - Who to kill?

Ideally, you want to take out the usual town leader as soon as possible. In some groups, this will cause the communication structure to fall into chaos. Here you can either take over and divert attention away from you, or inject false information safely. 

You will also want to take out the detective type of player that has a playstyle of gathering information, usually sitting on Cams or Admin tables. They are an easy kill target too as they are usually alone. 

Moreover, you most definitely want to thin out the heard of confirmed innocent Crew members if your visual tasks are on. You don’t want to find yourself in a 3v1 with all three of having seen each other scan.

Imitate your group and switch your style up frequently

As the aforementioned play patterns emerge and you get to know how your friends play, some have a very particular flavour of playing Imposter. Some will constantly use doors to keep you slowed down, others will often use lights instead. If you realise that someone has a play pattern that’s quite unusual for your group and has maybe even been talked or joked about, use it to your advantage by imitating that style.

Don’t totally overuse that strategy as the Crew will eventually also catch on to that happening too. Switch it up frequently and make sure that you remain unpredictable in how you play. This once again extends to your crew rounds in which you should switch between running the town, just staying informed and becoming the detective that just gathers information and is slow on tasks. Cycle through them at a solid pace and never become clearly identifiable in your playstyle.

We hope you could take something away and bring it into your group play. We admit that some of these strategies are most definitely sweaty, but can also create utterly hilarious scenarios of grand betrayal that everyone is able to enjoy.

Image via InnerSloth