choose parasite. sell all symptom you need to have no visibility. just wait and the number of infected will grow. buy all drug resistance. You must still have zero visibility at this point. Starting region doesnt matter but Japan sure wins for me(you get airborne and heat free.)after resitances buy transmission. then buy syptoms that will get you to infect people with the lowest visibility possible. Just wait and madagascar will be infected too. As soon as madagascar is infected(you should have tons of evo points now) buy symptoms that will infect and kill people. Your visibility should have had a huge jump and the world is making a cure. but due to your virus' lethality all hospitals will be closed before the cure is made. buy resistances if you have points. all will die
I wish there was some way to tell exactly how much of each of the 3 stats (visibility, lethality, infectivity) any particular symptom will add, before spending points to buy it. Some of them tell in their mouseover descriptions but only with vague terms (e.g. "this makes the disease very contagions but it's also noticeable because people can hear coughing".
Is there any way someone can post a chart for the symptoms, using numbers? A solid way I can compare how visible one is compared to another, or weigh the visibility vs infectivity of a single symptom, to decide if it's worth spending points on at any point. Like, say the bar for each stat goes from 0 to 100 (0 being no effect on visibility/etc, 5 being a 5% increase in lethality/etc, 100 being the bar filled up completely)
It could be a simple list that looks like this: Sores: +7 lethality, + 3 infectivity, + 5 visibility Sneezing: + 1 lethality, +15 infectivity, + 15 visibility Pulmonary Edema: +15 lethality, +0 infectivity, + 6 visibility
(I've just made up these numbers, but if I had a list like this with real info, then I could say "oh, sneezing makes the disease VERY visible, I don't want that yet" or "every place is infected so i just want to boost lethality, so pulmonary edema is a good choice".
Oh btw I just tried a new game using the strategy in the original post. I started out in Indonesia (realistic mode), and the disease didn't spread ANYWHERE until just over 50 days, and then it spread so rapidly that by day 60 there were only 5 or 6 regions not yet infected. There were then so many reactions (governments handing out masks, closing schools, etc) that places started closing ports. Madagascar kept its ports open longer than other places, but still closed before getting infected.
I think that probably the only way to have a better than 0.01% chance of winning, is by starting in Madagascar. It's the #1 most significant factor in the game... and to be honest that seems rather unbalanced. Starting-zone is a random factor that you don't get any choice in, yet you can pretty much tell whether or not you can win a game as soon as it starts, just by what zone you're in.
