Last week i finally managed to kill everybody. and i didn’t even start from Madagascar!

http://www.whattheyplay.com/

Probably the best gamer parenting site, my advice? Play the demo yourself, if you think its shit? It is.

I think in general the problem with the game is it doesn’t go deep enough with the simulation. Sealing the country off is 100% effective in stopping infection from entering the country. And it has to be 100% effective because there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of *curing* your disease, only getting a (100% effective, global) vaccine that prevents new infections, and taking various measures to slow your infection rate. But of course those are completely useless because when everyone that’s infected stays infected, slowing it down just prolongs the inevitable. And there’s no modelling of things like secondary infections or people dying off simply because your disease has taken out the infrastructure that made life possible for them. So if 1 person out of six billion is successfully vaccinated and doesn’t die when your disease moves to the vomiting blood stage, you lose. Even though that person would have severely limited life expectancy themselves.

Anyway, the trick seems to be to get everywhere quietly first and then evolve into something very nasty all at once (which shouldn’t work quite so well since mutations like that won’t change the whole population).
Madagascar’s imperviousness seems a little high. I would think there’s a lot of fishing activity between it and the continent. Australia being tough to crack makes sense to me at least. The whole country is basically geared to seal itself off from the world at a moments notice. I don’t know how much real worldy factors go into this though, and there is always room for stupidity and obliviousness making things interesting.

It was indeed very creepy clicking through the countries and seeing the infected number being exactly the same as the ‘alive’ figure. Then it says ‘A vaccine has been created. Your disease cannot infect new people’… uh hooray! The numbers keep dropping. tick tick tick

Also putting ‘Madagascar’ in your name does not cause you to start in Madagascar. Where you start is completely random, I tried restarting about 30 times and never once started in Madagascar, even though it happened to be where I started in my 1st and 3rd games (whenI had no idea how to infect the other islands properly).

It’s unrealistic in lots of ways, sure, a lot of ways that help you, but the fact that locked borders, locked ports, locked airports are 100% effective is just broken as its implemented now. It’s kind of necessary to have this magical wall of protection so that you must use strategy rather than just brute numbers .. but it’s still very badly balanced for what it is. For heaven’s sakes, I’m looking at MEXICO.. its borders are closed therefore the rest of the American continent being heavily infected is irrelevant, so I guess deportations from the U.S. and rampant illegal immigration from South America just magically went away under the rule of the amazingly efficient Mexican government.

Some more event effects would help. Hurricanes and droughts should carry a high chance of drawing international aid and food shipments. It’d still be luck but it’d help narrow the gap of impossibility.

And that’s if you’re as subtle and careful as possible.

I <3 this game.

I saw that Greenland was at about 400 people and sat watching the number crawl it’s way down. It suddenly struck me how morbid this was.

Then I kept watching anyway.