It is not easy to destroy all the inhabitants of the Earth. Bacteria may be one of Plague Inc's earliest fads, but it's still pretty difficult. You will need skills and a little luck to be successful in infecting everyone with your disease. Evolving your disease too soon will cause loss of traction, but evolving it too late and you risk a cure foiling your evil plans.
Casual mode is a bit too easy. The sick are hugged, no one washes their hands, and the medical researchers all play golf. It is in normal mode that the challenge arises. Doctors are working and people are taking certain precautions to maintain good hygiene.
We've put together a guide to help you achieve world domination.
Start of the game: start strong
Ideally, you want to start in a country with a large population and as many airports and ports as possible so that your disease can spread more easily. India and China are good candidates because of their size. Saudi Arabia has both a seaport and flights to all other airports.
Another successful strategy is to choose a country notoriously difficult to infect. You don't have to worry about infecting Greenland or Madagascar if you start there, but it will slow down the start of your game considerably.
As you earn DNA points, you unlock the ability to improve your disease. In the early stages of the game, prioritize the evolutions that make your disease more contagious than fatal. The dead cannot infect anyone else. Avoid progressing too quickly, as this can draw attention to your condition and initiate a search for a cure.
Try these transmissions and abilities to get started:
- Water 1
- Bird 1
- Air 1
- Drug resistance 1
- Bacterial resilience 1
Sometimes your disease mutates and develops symptoms at random. When these mutations appear, consider whether you want to keep them or delegate them. Again, you want to make sure your illness goes under the radar for as long as possible.
Game environment: spreading disease
Once your disease takes hold in a few countries, you need to spread the infection. These capacities will be essential:
- Bacterial resilience 2
- Bacterial resilience 3
- Cold resistance 1
- Cold resistance 2
Endgame: Achieving Total Organ Failure
Once you've infected most of the world, it's time to change your strategy. Evolve symptoms that branch out into more deadly symptoms. If you are running low on DNA points, consider delegating some of the delivery methods you chose at the start of the game. You will only get 2 DNA points for each, but the delivery methods are not useful at the end of the game; your points are better spent elsewhere.
At this point, researchers are working on a cure. The main way to stop them is to burst blue bubbles, but scalable abilities like Genetic Hardening and Genetic ReShuffle will significantly slow healing progress.
The deadliest evolutionary path leads your disease to total organ failure in four stages:
- Cough
- Pneumonia
- Pulmonary fibrosis
- Total organ failure
