I kept track of how long it took me to complete the event in all three of my cities.
- Beta city, chapter five, ~ 3 hour scout times: finished with 3 days, 7 hours remaining
- Arendyll city, end of tech tree, ~ 1.25 day scout times: finished with 7 days, 9 hours remaining
- Winyandor city, chapter five, ~3 hour scout times: finished with 7 days, 10 hours remaining
My Winyandor city should have finished a day faster, except I was stupid and did stupid things in a stupid order at the last minute, so the Arendyll and Winyandor cities should be about a day apart. Also, if I didn't stubbornly refuse to upgrade my Winyandor barracks, I don't think the Arendyll city would have caught up as well. Even so, that's close. It suggests that the devs did a good job of balancing the event for smallish to largish cities
if said cities haven't gone extremely far beyond what they expect in terms of scouting, my Arendyll city being slightly outside the GZ but not outside it to the extent that I had to spend six days of the event on that.
My Beta city took significantly longer because, unlike the others, it didn't have the advantage of a lot of extra space for event buildings (until very shortly before the end, when it was too late to matter). I had and used the spoilers, which expedited things slightly, but my boost is steel, and I only had room for four extra workshops or steel factories at a time, so honestly I don't think much would have changed for me if I hadn't used the spoilers.
But I have the advantage of working from home and thus being able to check on things every few hours. I'm kind of dubious that someone who doesn't have that luxury, didn't use spoilers, and didn't have a lot of extra space to fill with event buildings would have been able to finish. Particularly in light of the fact that the last two steps are extremely easy to screw up even if you know they're coming (
)
and both of them have the potential to require a lot of time. And for people significantly past the GZ... you can set up a lot of things to trigger all at once, but dang, that does not leave you much room for error, and if you're busy and not using spoilers... yikes.
So I think, looking at my data points, that I'm inclined to agree that the event should have been a few days longer, and also that the last two events... well, from a narrative perspective, I can see why they're there at the end, but I don't think that really works mechanically, not for an event of this size. The "complete a tech" quest, in particular, would have been fine in an event like the Solstices, but it's not really very well-suited to these chamber-sized events. I'm glad "or be at the end of the tree" was an available option, though. Also, while I don't think my longer Arendyll scouting times affected me much personally, I do agree they should resurrect "or have X provinces complete" as an alternative to scouting for these shorter events until the longer-time players have been able to get back to shorter scouting times.
