Win Plague Inc: The best strategies

Although it has been on the market since 2012, the PC game Plague Inc. still enjoys great popularity. It can be tricky to win a game at times, so in this practical tip we’ll show you how to do it quite easily.

Winning Plague Inc: Strategy for Easy to Brutal

You’ll need to adjust your strategy depending on the difficulty level. However, the difficulty levels from Easy to Brutal can be handled well with a single, general strategy. Note that every game of Plague Inc. will be different and therefore an absolutely always valid strategy does not exist – minimal adjustments must always be made.

• Start in West Africa or India. Don’t buy anything until you have over 50 DNA points. Only then will it be time to develop transmissions and skills of your disease.

• Buy in transmissions Water 1, Air 1, and Birds 1.

• If you started in India, you can develop rats 1 instead of birds 1.

• With skills, you should already be developing drug resistance 1 by now.

• IMPORTANT: Never spend all your DNA points at once. If your disease mutates a symptom, stop the game and devolve the corresponding symptom or your disease will be revealed!

• Depending on how fast your disease spreads, you can develop Water 2 next, so you can easily invade Madagascar, Greenland and the Caribbean in particular, as well as Polynesia.

• To really carry your disease quickly to the north and south now, you should now develop heat resistance 1 and cold resistance 1, cold resistance 2 should evolve you.

• If your disease spreads very slowly in rich industrialised countries (USA, Germany, UK, etc.) you can still develop drug resistance 2 here.

• Now that your disease can easily infiltrate any country, wait and devolve any symptoms that show up.

• Note: Genes that you can unlock will help you shape your disease in a significantly different way! For example, the gene “inactivity” allows you to give birth to a disease that mutates much less frequently!

• Once your disease has infected the entire world, things really start to happen. Before you develop symptoms, make sure you have enough points!

• 60 DNA points are needed for this combination: Genetic Hardening 1 (to protect your disease), cough, pneumonia, pulmonary fibrosis and complete organ failure.

• Counter attempts to cure your disease by putting remaining DNA points further into Genetic Hardening 2. If your budget allows you, buy the different levels of the Genetic Hardening 1-3 skill to reset the progress of the research.

• Genetic Hardening is more effective the more progress has been made on the cure, it is recommended to wait for 30% to do so. Genetic Hardening works the other way round, the earlier the more effective.

• Now you can wait until a cloak of silence settles over the world.

Sample strategy for Mega Brutal

The highest difficulty level behaves a little differently than the others. Here the problem is that the disease is often discovered long before you can make it really deadly. Although the principle of “keeping your head down” and remaining as inconspicuous as possible for as long as possible applies here as well, especially in order to infect difficult countries such as Greenland or Madagascar without being noticed, there are nevertheless a few adjustments to consider.

• In the community around Plague Inc. the opinion prevails that Saudi Arabia is well suited as a starting point for mega Brutal.

• It’s in the middle of the world map, has both air and sea traffic, and generally busy traffic that goes on all over the world, making it easy to distribute evenly.

• Also, not too many people live in Saudi Arabia, which makes it easier for the disease to spread.

• Note: More people in a country need to be infected the more people live there for the disease to spread to other countries.

• They definitely want to evolve Drug Resistance 1 and Genetic Hardening as fast as possible to make cure research as hard as possible.

• See that you always keep your disease more infectious than fatal. That way, it is possible for you to infect people faster than you kill them.

• This strategy is especially helpful when the disease has already been detected and the search for a cure has begun. The faster you eradicate people, the fewer will be left to search for a cure.

• Anaemia, rashes and skin lesions can help infect hard-to-infect countries like Greenland or Madagascar.

• Full organ failure and immunosuppression are particularly amenable to high lethality.

• If, despite all caution, you are discovered and cure research proceeds apace (this can happen quickly, especially with the virus), you should evolve madness, paralysis, dysentery and diarrhoea to make research as difficult as possible.

• Avoid sleep disturbance. It makes it unnecessarily difficult to enforce lethality.

• If an island like Iceland, Greenland or Madagascar closes its doors before you could infect it, restart the game. It is impossible to infect these countries once this has happened.

• By the way, if all this doesn’t help, there are also cheats for the game.

Differences in the individual diseases

In the basic game of Plague Inc. there are 7 different pathogens to control, each with its own peculiarities. Here we give you another short overview of the peculiarities of each pathogen:

• Bacterium: The starting pathogen is an average pathogen without particularly strong characteristics. The bacterium is more resilient to extreme heat or cold.

• Virus: This pathogen mutates very often, so it can be difficult to keep the disease secret. At the same time, this can also be to the player’s advantage if mutation is allowed in one direction without having to spend DNA points on it.

• With the virus, it is important to control the mutations well and not to spend too many DNA points to devolve the individual mutations.

• Fungus: While the fungus is the slowest spreading pathogen, it has abilities that allow it to quickly appear in other countries regardless of where it was started (spore explosion). It is also very resistant to harsh climates.

• Disadvantage about the mushroom is that you have to be lucky with the spore explosions to arrive at the right place.

• Parasite: Particularly good at remaining undetected, the parasite can live in symbiosis with its host and can be very suppressive of severity, allowing it to remain invisible for long periods of time.

• However, it takes a while before you will have enough DNA points to spread, as you don’t get them passively by infecting people, but only by clicking orange infection bubbles.

• Prion: Very resistant to healing, the prion (a misfolded protein in the brain) is equipped with the ability Neural Apathy, which slows down healing research. However, it has the disadvantage that the severity can skyrocket very quickly to extreme levels, which can quickly initiate detection and cure.

• Nano-Virus: A massive difference in the game with this pathogen is that humanity knows from the beginning that the pathogen exists and is looking for a cure from the beginning. The nano-virus is in fact a piece of experimental technology that has broken out into the environment.

• To compensate, the nano-virus is particularly infectious, has more resistance to climate (except humid), is cheaper to evolve, and symptoms that slow down research are gratuitous.

• Bioweapon: Very similar to the virus, the bioweapon becomes very deadly extremely quickly. Therefore, you must use the abilities of the bioweapon that make it less lethal wisely.