When to switch city roles
Match police, hacker, courier and creator activities to the objective instead of chasing every hotspot.
Operational objective
Nova City lets you act as police, hacker, courier or creator, and the temptation is to treat those as four activity feeds to chase. They are better understood as four different ways of getting information out of the same city. This page is about picking the role that answers your current objective, then leaving it when the objective changes.
Decision route
- State the objective before opening any activity list. "I need to find someone", "I need to move something", "I need to be seen" and "I need to see" are four different jobs, and each has an obvious role attached.
- Match the role to the kind of access it grants, not to its rewards. Police access is procedural, hacking access is remote, courier access is physical and creator access is social — the reward tables matter less than which door each one opens.
- Commit long enough to finish one loop. Roles that are swapped mid-task waste the setup each one requires, and the city does not pause while you change hats.
- Switch on a change of objective, never on a change of scenery. A new hotspot appearing is not a reason; needing a different kind of access is.
- Record what the role showed you. The point of spending an hour as a courier is not the delivery — it is that you now know which streets, gates and back entrances exist for every future job.
Failure review
- Chasing every hotspot the city surfaces and finishing the session with four half-loops and no map.
- Picking the role with the best rewards for a job it gives you no access to.
- Treating a role as an identity rather than a tool, and refusing the one that would have finished the job.
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Unreleased: how roles are unlocked, whether they carry progression or reputation, if any activity is time-gated, and how freely you can switch mid-session. The selection logic above does not depend on those answers; the scheduling advice will be revisited once they exist.