Turn city attention into mission progress
Track hotspots, posts and audience response without confusing popularity with the actual team objective.
Operational objective
Attention is a resource in Nova City, and the trap is that it feels like a score. Posts, hotspots and audience response can all move while your actual objective sits untouched. This page separates the two: how to use the city’s attention layer as a tool for a mission, and how to notice when you have started playing the metric instead.
Decision route
- Write the mission objective somewhere the feed cannot overwrite it. Everything below is only useful while that sentence is still the thing you are optimising.
- Use attention to move people, not to accumulate. A hotspot is worth creating when it puts a crowd somewhere you need it — or takes one out of where you are going.
- Time the post to the objective, not to the moment. Content published while a scene is still developing changes the scene; content published afterwards only reports it.
- Read audience response as a description of the city, not of you. Which districts react, and to what, is map information you can reuse long after the post stops mattering.
- Stop when the objective is met, even if the numbers are still climbing. That is the whole discipline this page exists to teach.
Failure review
- Confusing reach with progress, and finishing a session popular and exactly where you started.
- Creating attention in the district you are about to work in, then wondering why it is crowded.
- Judging a post by its response instead of by whether the mission moved.
!
Unreleased: how the attention system is scored, whether posts have lasting effects, if audiences differ by district in any modelled way, and how strongly this layer is tied to mission progression. Treat the above as a discipline for using a demonstrated system, not a description of its rules.