First of these. The plan is one whenever something worth showing changes, rather than one a week padded out to look busy. Nearly all my time right now is going into balance and the endgame, so that is what this one is about.
The release city. Twenty-two districts, and you play one of them a night.
The full city is 22 districts. The only thing that brings a district's infection down is CLEAR, which means going there and playing it. You play one district a night. So the soonest you can get back to somewhere you already took is night 22. A clear currently fades over 14 nights. You can finish that sentence yourself. Every district you take is gone again before you could possibly get back to it, so the campaign cannot be won by clearing at all. I simulated it against the live rules and nothing wins inside 400 nights. That is not difficulty, it is a number I got wrong, and it is my fault for shipping a decay rate without checking it against the size of the map.
Clearing stays the only way down. What it needed was somewhere to put the LOOT so the work stops undoing itself while you are on the other side of the city.
SUPPRESS is the one you will use most nights. FORTIFY is what the whole campaign is now shaped around: 22 districts at 0%, bought and kept.
Asked a lot, so here are my working guesses. Guesses is the word. These are what I am tuning toward, not measurements, and they will move.
4-5 hours if you ride every night down to stage three and take the risk. Two hours in, you are somewhere around night 11.
7-8 hours if you pull out early and play it safe. Two hours in, around night 20. Buying the whole city outright is roughly a seven hour LOOT bill at current prices.
Treat both as rough. I rebuilt the balance simulation from the shipping code this week because the original was never saved, and the new one disagrees with the old one sharply enough that I would not bet money on either yet. When I have a figure I trust, I will put the harness next to it so you can tell me it is wrong.
There is a Linux build on the demo now. Full disclosure: it has never been run on actual Linux hardware. It is shipping anyway, because a build nobody can install is worth less to me than a build somebody can tell me is broken. If you are on Linux, and especially on a Steam Deck, please install it and say what happened. Even "it launched and I played ten minutes" is genuinely useful.
The demo is still ten nights, and none of the above touches it. All of this is full release-side.
Next one will be whatever comes out of testing SUPPRESS and FORTIFY on the real map. If it goes badly, that will be the post.
— DustyEffsky