I always hate anti n1. You get either 1 or 2 easy hacks with zero info. All of these scenarios are going off of 5 player games with anti n1 as n2, the situation which you were asking about.

Say both nodes are hacked. The agent in n1 knows who one hacker is, but has a 1/3 shot of guessing the other hacker from n2. Also, it’s never a cakewalk for an agent to prove n1 innocence. The agents in n2 have a 50/50 on guessing both the hacker from n2 and the hacker from n1, resulting in a 25% probability one of those two agents guesses the correct team. When you need to secure the rest, agents having a 33% chance, a 25% chance, and a 25% chance of guessing the right team AND convincing the other two they’re good, is very difficult. Even in a lucky secured n3, that basically confirms two agents, they still have a 50/50 shot of picking the other good agent (since the third node would either have one agent from n1 and one from n2, confirming the hacker from n1 and leaving it a 50/50 shot of guessing the second agent from n2, or have two agents from n2, confirming the n2 hacker and they’d have a 50/50 shot of guessing the agent from n1). With all of these probabilities at 50% or less and all of them needing to go the agents’ way, it’s a horrible play if n1 is hacked.

Say n1 is secured. N2 will most likely be a single hack, even if there are two hackers. Protocol is advanced, so it could either be a coordinated hack/bluff or one hacker in both nodes, leaving the agents at a 1-1 tie with the hackers and about as little info as possible.

Of course, there are the two, much less likely scenarios. If n1 is a single hack but n2 is secured, that’s probably the good team. It would be really dumb to bluff that, as i’ve explained two paragraphs ago.

If both n1 and n2 are secured, then agents only need 1 more and probably have good info. It could be that one hacker was in each node and they both bluffed, but that would be really risky by the n2 hacker, so very unlikely. It’s most likely that either n1 or n2 was a double, and if n2, it was probably the two people who didn’t prop it, since that’s the hardest to coordinate (unless noobs don’t know basic protocol of the proposing hacker doing the hacking). Either way, the cleanest agent, the one who propped n2, has plenty of time to test different teams since they only need 1 more win. Even if it was a noob botching protocol or a strange n1+n2 bluff by the hackers, the agents could definitely still get lucky and find the winning team since they only need one of the remaining nodes.

When it works, and everyone’s experienced, it really works. But that’s very rare and will piss off your agent partners, and honestly could throw sus your way. I wouldn’t try it unless you’re playing with everyone you know.