Only used troops on a few levels where I found myself waiting for spawns and sent them to capture the flag. Click above each troop unit to turn green light to red to stop them from auto-sending. Last level easiest if you capture the flag. Put all my troops back to auto for last level.
So despite completing a level with no errors or hints, I was getting only getting the no mistakes star at the end of the level. Played through 11 levels. Noticed at the level select screen it said I had zero stars. After reading some comments, disabled the two options under general and now it gives me both stars at the end of the level but the level select screen only shows and counts one star per level. Tried two different browsers. Seems broken.
Hard - started in Madagascar. Impossible - started in New Zealand. Still need to get lucky with spread to nations without borders prior to shutdowns. One game Indonesia managed to avoid infection.
My very last city was Samara, Russia. I know there was at least one other not named Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Only had two US cities also and they were not top 5 pop cities either.
Attempt 5 failed with a frozen screen... but I got it done on attempt 6. The two glitches were unable to use knife both on Chrome. The two black screens and frozen screen were on Edge. Success was on out of date Firefox 69.0.3.