Comments on: Thoughts: Plague Inc: Evolved

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 20:26:32 +0000

Ooooh, you just reminded me of the gene unlocks, which are another thing I really disliked. Basically Plague Inc. loves locking the things that make it more fun away behind a barrier of pointlessness. I would have been far nicer if all of the genes and all of the plague types had been unlocked from the start, since it would have allowed me to pick and choose the best things about the game and ignore the parts I think are bad.

And I did experiment extensively with trying to balance symptoms and infectivity. I could never get it right; it seems that even with 70-80% of the countries infected and being destroyed the ones you missed will finish the cure without too much trouble at all. Adding symptoms introduces too much uncertainty and too much risk, making you far more reliant on hefty dollops of luck than you would be otherwise. Perhaps the genes do make it easier, but since they were all locked off for me (I had little interest in replaying plagues I’d already completed just to unlock genes) I didn’t have that option. Stealth by contrast was a relatively reliable method of winning, and since I had to win four times to unlock the good stuff that’s what I ended up gravitating towards.

By: Zorak

Zorak — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 23:57:46 +0000

I have to disagree with you on the stealth approach being the only and best approach to winning. Increases in severity translate to increases in DNA points (popping red bubbles gives you more DNA). Sometimes the best strategy is finding a balance between symptoms (gaining you bonus DNA for each country infected) and using some of that extra DNA toward spreading your disease to the hard to reach areas while also investing in slowing down the cure progress. Also, adding lethal symptoms will not only gain you bonus DNA from deaths, it will both reduce the population (which reduces humanities ability to produce a cure) and lead to anarchy, panic and other nasty side effects. All of these things can slow the cure progress considerably.

These strategies can be further boosted by utilizing the right genes for the right situations. For example, for the spore level you can use the gene that reduces ability costs to their base cost (no upscaling), spend your initial DNA on symptoms and then go all out releasing spores into the air and collecting the bonus DNA from the severity. Then you can start using that to slow down the cure that they will soon be working on and start introducing more and more lethality to slow them down further while killing them off steadily and gaining constant DNA to ultimately use on getting all the cure stopping abilities.

Yes, there are some random factors and sometimes they can really screw you over, but most of the time there are ways to react and counter most situations if you know how. Even the Madagascar/Greenland situation is not hopeless if you are able to fully upgrade animal migration after all ports are closed.

By: lucidor

lucidor — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 23:26:28 +0000

“The base game is basically built on top of a giant RNG, for all that there’s apparently a “hyper-realistic” infection model underpinning the spread of the virus”

Somehow I missed the opportunity for common cold first to infect us all, and second to develop the ability to kill us all later, which somehow would transmit all over the world without having to infect us all again…