It may be in a bit of bad taste given what’s going on in the world, but is anyone else playing Plague Inc. on their phones?
It’s a game where you are a variety of kinds of plagues, and your goal is to eradicate all human life on Earth, and to do this you upgrade your plague for various means (transmission, symptoms, the disease itself).
I’ve been tackling this game for a couple days now and I beat it handedly on easy mode, but when I switched to normal it’s been damn near impossible. I can’t even get past the first “level” of sorts.
Anyone else playing? Are you winning? Can you help me win because I’ve tried everything!
Yeah, its a fun game, I think I tend to select the DNA things that give you points back when you devolve a mutation, then any time a symptom mutates, I devolve it, get a few points back and try and let the plague spread to the world before it gets noticed, then it is really just a matter of time. Once the world is infected then ramp up the symptoms and everyone dies.
It is obviously not very realistic ( and it gets a bit dull after a while) as clearly a disease that has infected everyone can’t just suddenly evolve and kill everyone.
My strategy that I swear will work sometime is that I put as much into spreading it as possible, then once I get the “everyone is infected” message, I devolve everything and then put it into cure supression.
I lose half because of a cure, and half because people die but not everyone is infected.
I don’t put much into the actual symptoms because I hope that they evolve with my infection ability, but it still never works.
I think you need to put everything into symptoms and make it as leathal as possible, then the points you get as people die off can be used on cure suppression, plus the massive die off reduces the resources available for a cure
I haven’t played it in over a year, but I did play it obsessively for a few weeks after I got it. I recall Fungus being the most difficult mode for me, since it was very hard to transmit. I kept barely losing because there were isolated islands that were left uninfected. In the end, I think I won with Fungus by using one of the DNA buffs that minimized costs for the Spore Burst ability (which randomly infects a bunch of nations each time you use it, regardless of port status). I pruned any mutations that risked notifying people that they were infected, infected every nation I could, then bought all the Spore Bursts to reach the outliers. Then I ramped up symptoms and wiped everyone out. I may have even infected the whole planet before they noticed.
Thinking about the game, it does feel a bit in poor taste right now. But I heard that the CDC actually spoke with the developer about how they were modeling the infection patterns. The game certainly isn’t realistic in its portrayal of mutations, but it would be interesting to know if it actually can be used as a transmission model.
Sometimes I start in Greenland, just because they have defied me so many times.
For the fungus method , I try and spread as far as I can, it takes time, and keep the spore bursts in reserve until the last few hold outs , then spore bust them. then again after the world is infected, crank up the symptoms and use the DNA points form the deaths to boost resistance to a cure.
One other thing I do is try and get lv1 and lv2 antibiotics resistance early, helps with the infectivity.
The difficulty curve on this game is the reverse of normal and kinda dumb. It gets easier after you beat it, since you unlock customization for the virus which provides bonuses. Assuming it works the same way it worked a year or two ago.
So the first win is really hard. Second win is pretty hard. By your fifth or sixth it’s pretty routine.
I agree with SenorBeef. The only new game mode that was difficult was Fungus. The others were all easier than the default mode, and the added DNA buffs made things even easier. I recall hard mode not being much more difficult than Normal. The real challenge was figuring out the which strategies worked and then just duplicating them.
Good point, maybe they need to reverse it, and start out with all the DNA boost etc, then remove them as the difficulty ramps up. Still fun game, the zombie game and Rise of the Apes tie in were also entertaining.
I agree that Fungus was the hardest due to difficulty getting the disease to spread. Parasite (I forget the exact term) was by far the easiest because you could infect almost everyone with nobody noticing. In general, I had the best success getting diseases to infect the whole world if I had them start in Greenland or Iceland, since they were the hardest to infect due to their isolation.
Good game, but agree gets a bit samey after a bit. As said, the strategy of infecting the world without anyone noticing, then ramping up the lethality, seemed to work everytime regardless of disease. Don’t recall playing it on the hard setting, maybe you need to be more strategic there.
I love Plague Inc. I can see how it’d be hard to play on a smartphone, I need a mouse for that shit. It’s too easy once you’ve been playing for a couple days–unevolve symptoms, spread to the world, then change symptoms and kill the whole world. There was one level where I really struggled… maybe it was prion? And I struggled with the Planet of the Apes level because the win-condition was not stated well.
Fungus was actually easy for me: I beat it on the first try. It did take me forever, however. I had lethality ramped up too high, so I was killing faster than infecting. By that point everyone but two countries in Africa were wiped out and I was out of points so I couldn’t do anything. There wasn’t any way a cure would be found, so I just had to sit there and wait for my fungus to kill people.
I finally beat bacteria over the weekend by taking everyones advice, I just threw in a few points in beginning for infection, then threw the rest in lethality until the cure was started, fought against that, and everntually killed the people before they could cure me.
Haven’t started the next one yet, maybe tonight. Thanks for the advice though!