The last couple of weekends, I played Werewolves of London with different groups of people in real life (as opposed to my usual online playtests). One of these games ended with a police-triggered game over, on the final turn of the game. First time that has happened, and while it wasn't the worst thing in the world I didn't absolutely love that outcome either. As luck would have it, the person I met with for the other game had some interesting ideas for potential revisions, one of which was a complete revamp of how the police investigation works. So I took his general idea, and today I worked out the details for it, and here's what I have now:
Instead of the old "if you hit this Meat threshold then the police do stuff," the new system has police doing stuff every turn. Bribe money prevents them from doing stuff this turn, instead of undoing stuff from previous turns, and there is no more "police catch you, everyone loses" like before. And now there's variation to what they actually do. Sometimes it will be locking down random territories like what I already have, and sometimes they will target specific territories based on a game condition like "where there was combat last turn" or "where there is currently the biggest single investment." I don't know that I have all the details right just yet, but I think this new system has some potential and I'm looking forward to testing it out.
The other thing I learned from these recent games was that the I might need to have a 2-player mode with some rule tweaks. I think the last time I had a game of Werewolves with only two players was many iterations ago, so the information I got from that is completely obsolete now. And what I got from this one was that, with only two players, it was a lot harder to mitigate an early imbalance compared to a larger group where multiple players are all messing with each other. I'm not sure yet what the solution to this could be, but I'm going to wait and see how things go with the new police rules before I work on this. So in any case that's still a few more test games needed before I start hunting for publishers again.