Thanks for taking the time to comment and for your positive feedback.
I'll be honest - I haven't learned all the factions yet (including moles) so I'm sure there are some balancing issues that I'm oblivious to with certain factions. Good that you think it wouldn't be too harsh on lizards and cats though - I know they need all the help they can get!
You know what, infecting warriors is the first thing I mention in the Law of Root, but I haven't mentioned it once on the actual board - whoops. So Infected warriors are laid down, while virus markers are placed over tokens and buildings (and were designed to be half as wide so you can still see which tokens and buildings are underneath). That was part of the pun with DOWN with the sickness, but it doesn't totally work if it's not clear you lay them down!
Yes, I was trying to get some good push and pull with the two VP systems. I'm sure there would be tweaking necessary for the values. 1 VP per entirely Infected clearing worked pretty well until I played against the rats. They were up against birds and vagabond - birds were having a disaster and vagabond has no presence. So the rats logically put one warrior in as many clearings as possible for Oppress points, but that meant it was easy for the Cabal to entirely infect clearings and they were getting 6+ Endemic points for a few turns and raced away with it.
I'm very intrigued by factions that don't battle and ways to use the dice numbers to represent different things, but it's definitely still a work in progress. Removing such a core concept to Root as the ability to battle probably isn't a smart thing to do, but I'm interested in playing around with it anyway!