The Pathology of Plague Inc.

[Corvo-Attano-77]

Wait... Didn't humanity lose much of it's genetic diversity 50,000 years ago or so...? We're boned.

Yep, we aren't that diverse compared to other animals, but still diverse enough to survive anything but the most impossibly unlikely single disease.

On topic:
Another area where the game sacrifices realism for gameplay is in the ability of the human race to suddenly find a Cure for a Virus. Also infected people never become uninflected (barring a Cure) regardless of what they do or how weak your disease is. Plague Inc. is a good game but it never once struck me as realistic, or scary.

 

[Wicky_42]

The most fun thing to do is maximize infection rate without having any symptoms. Once everyone in the world has it, turn on all the lethal ones.

Entire global population has heart attack all at the exact same time.

Trouble is, I always end up failing to kill anyone when I do that, as once a critical mass of people are infected you stop getting evolution points from infections, and only get them from pop-ups and deaths... leave it too long and although everyone's feeling like crap, no-one's really dying as they casually knock up a cure whilst you're scrabbling for enough dna to stop their hearts!

But once everyone's infected, you can just sell all of your spreading traits, then use them to buy more symptoms. For maximum cheapness, sell the low end symptom prereqs as well.

That works for, say, bacteria on normal, but on Hard you get diminishing returns on selling traits, and some disease types cost DNA to sell off symptoms (eg, virus), and each sale increases the cost (unless you get the mutation to counter that, though obviously that's a trade off). The issue is, if you have already bought lots of symptoms you need thirty+ DNA to get a decent killing trait, which you just can't get by selling traits in many scenarios. Though obviously it does work in several cases

 

[Biodeamon]

get the salt er... antiseptic

http://i1132.photobucket.com/albums/m573/mfjess/get20the20salt.gif?t=1307570285

 

[Blaster395]

I would like to see a version of this game with the following features:

1. End-goal isn't humanities total extinction, that is just unrealistically apocalyptic
2. Winning strategy isn't full spread no kill, wait until everyone infected, then suddenly crank up the killing.
3. A world map with province-level disease spread and realistic province migration via major roads (think paradox-style map).
4. Goal of causing long-term damage over sudden death spike
5. Multiple diseases in the world, along with multiplayer.
6. Evolving your disease doesn't cause everyone in the world to suddenly get the new version of your disease.
7. Ability to play as individual countries and try to respond to the disease without breaking your economy or causing riots.

 

[s0p0g]

I would like to see a version of this game with the following features:

1. End-goal isn't humanities total extinction, that is just unrealistically apocalyptic
2. Winning strategy isn't full spread no kill, wait until everyone infected, then suddenly crank up the killing.
3. A world map with province-level disease spread and realistic province migration via major roads (think paradox-style map).
4. Goal of causing long-term damage over sudden death spike
5. Multiple diseases in the world, along with multiplayer.
6. Evolving your disease doesn't cause everyone in the world to suddenly get the new version of your disease.
7. Ability to play as individual countries and try to respond to the disease without breaking your economy or causing riots.

5. makes for a nice setup à la Left 4 Dead - several teams of diseases fighting over who gets the most kills - hilarious

besides that, of course it's unrealistic - it's a game. look at any game ever, they all are - if i wanted to "play" even more reality, i could just go back outside. or to work. or join the army, if i was into RTS or shooters

but i completely agree on the no-single-winning-strategy - once i got it, i marched up right to, what was it? bio-weapon? in no time (although that one was a female dog, as it started killing WAY to early xD ) - totally takes the challenge, and thus the fun, out of it. oh well, that's what that brain parasite is for, right? kind of reminded me of Planet of the Apes 2, when they were revering the bomb xD


oh, and regarding Greenland (good god, i HATE you, Greenland): that's why i switched to starting there - once it gets out of there, you have a realistic chance of having all of Greenland infected along the rest of the world (as having ports shut down basically means Game Over), so i can be sure to have them Greenlanders at their... sensitive parts ^^ (sure, there's still Madagascar, but it's never as much of a hassle as Greenland)