Get enough people infected and they’ll actively start trying to cure it. The moment your disease makes somebody cough in the ass-end of Australia, the national government takes notice and puts it on the WHO watch list. The problem is that the people of Earth are not going to sit passively by while a superbug wipes out civilization. It’s also Plague’s Achilles heel the symptoms are by far the most interesting and varied category of disease traits, but given the way Plague is set up you won’t be spending any points on them until the very end of the game. Adding symptoms is the only way to increase the severity and lethality of your disease, which makes them pretty important in so far as winning the game by killing off the entire human race is concerned. Finally there are the actual symptoms of the disease, which range from coughing/sneezing and insomnia to kidney failure, dementia and full-blown comas. You can give it abilities that make it naturally hardier in hot or cold climates, or which give it resistance to drug treatments used by wealthy countries. and you can pick transmission traits that make the bug particularly effective at spreading in each environment type, as well as giving it a higher chance of being spread via plane or boat travel from an infected country. Countries and regions are split into various categories - urban, rural, humid etc. Now, one thing Plague does have going for it over the Flash version is that the evolution traits available for your disease are much more extensive. From that point on your interaction with it is entirely hands-off and you can only indirectly control how it spreads through investing DNA Points awarded at various intervals into your plague’s evolution. Your virus/bacteria/brain-munching parasite starts out in one of these countries the only direct interaction you have with it in most scenarios is to pick which country it starts in. The map is divided into 40-odd countries/regions which are connected by land borders (unless it’s an island) and air and water transport, the latter two of which are visible on the map as little planes and boats plying various routes between different countries. The way Plague (and Pandemic) work is that you spend most of your time staring at a map of the world. This is a distinct problem for Plague, since while the concept was enough to sustain something running on Flash in 2008 it gets stretched pretty sodding thin when you try to apply it to a full-fat game. I am surprised, however, that so little has changed between the Flash version and this paid-for product, because when you get right down it they are exactly the same goddamn game. It was popular enough that I am not particularly surprised that someone has tried to make a proper game out of it, for that is what Plague Inc: Evolved is. Pandemic was a minor sensation at the time, consuming a couple of afternoons that I really should have spent working on my Ph.D and giving rise to the now-decomposing Madagascar/”SHUT. It was a game where you controlled a virus with the aim of infecting (and eventually killing) the entire world’s population through evolving a plethora of nasty symptoms and transmission abilities. If you’ve been on the internet for a little while you might remember semi-ancient Flash game Pandemic, which was released onto the world wide web nearly a decade ago now.
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