If you’ve played Plague Inc*, you might be familiar with the stealth strategy. Keep lethality and severity low, ramp infectivity, bank DNA and let the plague spread quietly. Then, when most of the world is infected, rapidly increase lethality to kill off everyone who’s already infected.
It’s not the best strategy for score, and it doesn’t work on Mega Brutal or for speedruns, but on lower difficulties it’s reliable if banal. Some are easier than others, but with a bit of adaptation it can be used for all of the normal plagues, some of the special plagues, and most of the scenarios.
The intricacies of the stealth strat aren’t what’s on my mind, though. I’m fixated on that phase at the end. The part where you’re at ninety plus percent infected and every country has cases. At that point, the outcome is determined, it’s just a matter of going through the motions. Invest that banked DNA into lethal symptoms and watch that red bar turn black. You could do a genetic reshuffle or ramp severity to slow the cure if you needed to, but research is slowing anyway as people die and governments fall. You could turn the trickle of fresh DNA into even more lethal symptoms, but it’s not really going to speed things up enough to meaningfully improve your score. Victory is inevitable, humanity has lost and it’s just not official yet.
The thing is, I’ve had games where I got to that final phase and ultimately failed. Once or twice I didn’t have enough DNA saved up. A few times I just couldn’t outrun the cure no matter what I did. One time I infected Greenland, the last country on the list, and then went too lethal too fast and burned out with not enough infected to spread. Another time I forgot a few small countries in Africa. Once with Necroa Virus when all my zombies decayed, and once when I dashed my hordes against the last Z-Com strongholds. More times than I’d like to admit, I just screwed up and evolved the wrong symptoms.
I’ve also had games where I did succeed in destroying the world but had to pivot fast or even savescum after things went south in the eleventh hour. At first I thought that didn’t really fit into this thing that’s definitely not a metaphor for anything at all, but then I realized it does actually help illustrate the point.
I’m reminding myself that it’s possible to hit the end run and see the fortunes reverse. It’s possible for someone to seemingly hold all the cards and still lose the game for a myriad of reasons. Even when victory- or defeat- seems assured, things can turn around and do so in a hurry. It’s not a guarantee either way, but you don’t know for sure until you see the end screen.
In Plague Inc. This is a post about strategy in a pandemic simulator game. It isn’t about anything else. Not at all.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
commonly attributed to Winston Churchill, actual source is unknown
*Yes, I know it’s properly Plague Inc., but that’s just awkward to use in a sentence