this game has some glitches in it.
people started burning bodies of the infected before i had killed a single person.

:(

No symptoms, zero visibility... still spotted early. Indonesia, Australia and Madagascar are nearly immune that way

I had played this game before, it is definitely a must-try.

I've been watching madagascar for a while. No boats go there. It's Impossible to win this game.

A very interesting gameconcept which unfortunatelly was released in pre-beta status. The various bugs and gamebalance issues kill an otherwise great game.

This game is awesome, it definitely still needs a few tweaks though. I too noticed burning bodies before people started dying and madagascar does seem pretty immune... A commenter on newgrounds pointed out that the only way to take madagascar is to start there, which you can do by just starting a new game until its your starting location... if you are really desperate to get every last being on earth under your thumb.

I also couldn't figure out any reason to play as anything other than a virus, because evolving quickly is really a key strategy for winning.

But this game is totally awesome, I'd love to see them continue making sequels with the game getting more and more complex because its a genius idea.

I just infected Madagascar(started in Mexico). It's hard(very), but not impossible.

I'm sure that when bodies start burning, it's just the governments taking a precaution by burning all newly dead bodies, not just those killed by your virus. I managed to infect Madagascar but Cuba didn't get infected. It's kind of disappointing, though, that once a nation has shut off all modes of transportation into the country, it has absolutely 0 chance of being infected. It basically makes it pointless to continue. There's gotta be a crazy refugee that slips through the cracks when 100% of the rest of the world's population is infected.

I kind of like the poetic idea of having an island off the coast of Africa be the only place the last 19 mil. people of planet can live. I also like that the disease I made (Wafflitis) has maximum moisture immunity, so I imagin the oceans just teaming with Wafflitis. It's a good feeling, but not as good as being able to completely kill of the world would be.

I don't understand how if its airborne a country like India can be infected but the middle east area right beside it remains untouched.

Air doesn't cross borders?

Chris, it might be too arid for your disease to exist over there?

And what about migrating birds?
I had a virus with all forms of carriers and all immunities and it still could be easily isolated from by all sea countries. And it didn't cause any symptoms at all - how on earth did they notice it?

So, I infected literally 99% of the population of the Earth, save Madagascar, and somehow, with a deadliness of about a quarter of the bar... NO ONE IS DYING.

No vaccine created at all.

Broken?

I think you folks are expecting the inner workings of the game to be more complex than they actually are. I suspect that all the transmission methods only work inside a country - thus not crossing borders. Spreading to new areas only seems to depend on the channels which the govs let open and the percent of infected population.

Visibility i think does NOT keep the countries from knowing about infections! All it does is make the desease more difficult to combat (i.e. via hospitals).

Because of the broken gamebalance, this isn't really a strategy game.... its a "casual game" for people who do NOT care much about what actually happens... just click a few buttons and believe that they did something meaningful.

P.S.: To reduce it to the core, i think that there are in the end, just 4 properties:

1. Infection-rate (how much the amount of infected people increases or decreases. This INCLUDES visibility... visibility just gives a bonus to "healing" infected people. The various transmission methods as well as the countermeasures by govs as well just affect this attribute).

2. Death-rate (how many of the infected die)

3. Border-crossings and transports. They allow your desease to spread to new countries. The more infected, the higher the chance to spread but also the higher the chance that those "spread-links" get closed by govs. Its pure luck. I guess if there were an efficient way to slow down new infections, so that you can spread to many countries, but to each just with a low number of infections, you may be able to improve your odds.... but since that isn't efficiently possible its pure luck.

4. vaccine.

Vaccine is nice... once it backfired and instead of granting immunity to people made my disease immune to vaccination. Too bad Madagascar was isolated again that time...

What gets me is that this really is a simple, broken "casual" game as Lyx said (and I put "casual" in quotes because I've played ostensibly "casual" games that were far more robust), and yet these people went through the trouble of having not one but two spoken video tutorials because of how "OMG COMPLICATED DEEP FEATURE-FILLED" the game is supposed to be. Seriously, I actually listened to the tutorials in the desperate hope that they'd reveal something truly interesting, and I'm like, "what the fuck? Why are these here?" They seriously don't say anything that a graphical quik-help overlay (or frigging tooltips) couldn't say better and faster.

This game needs zombification as a symptom...

My screen is a bit dark. I had to watch the tutorials to find the dark-grey X on the dark-grey background at the top right of the tutorial nagscreen. The voice pissed me off. It wasn't nice to listen to, but sharp and bitchy. I ain't takin' that shit o' no bitch.

I got lucky and managed to kill off madagascar without even starting there.
Cube and Japan refused to contract my disease. So they were the only ones left.

Madagascar can rot in hell irl

lol all that lived in mine was the civilized world(US, Canada, Greenland, West Europe,Japan) and Madagascar.

My pet parasite started in argentina and spread fast unnoticed to the entire world, inlcuding madagascar. I actually saw the ship arriving and infecting it.
"Humanity Overcome" with 91829 pts. i sold off the first symptom, got lvl2 moisture immune, airborne and waterborne. the rest was waiting 4 points to get necrosis, liver failure etc...

The 'civilized world'?

I ended up with a lonely ship wandering around the Atlantic Ocean waiting for someone to open a port. Even though the ship was from a completely infected country, it couldn't land in any port and so the game ended. I feel so sorry for those sailors lost at sea :(

It's absolutely doable to win the game:
Keep a low profile until EVERY country is infected.
This simply means: Realistic mode and parasite. Instantly sell the symptoms you got. Wait some seconds and get level one resistance of cold, heat and moisture.
Now lean back and wait. Buy some drug resistance as you got more points but nothing more!
After about 80 days you may have infected all the world and now you can spend your points.
Doesn't really matter, but the strategy seems like this: Get some more resistance (e.g. level 2), buy the transmissions and some infectious symptoms. When you infected a big percentage acquire some lethal symptoms.
When you worry about the vaccine development, buy some visible symptoms. Then will also Greenland close their hospital.
Thats it.

I too end up staring at Madagascar at the end of each game screaming, "Breath! Drink! Do SOMETHING!" With maxed out heat, moisture, and drug immunities, and every method of transmission checked, someone has to catch it sooner or later...or not.

Currently I am amusing myself in realistic mode. The entire world is infected (sans Madagascar, of course), max drug immunity, only two hospitals open, and I have 120 free evolution points. When I have enough, I am going to buy every terrible painful symptom I can afford and watch the population drop. Until now, my disease just causes you to sneeze. Soon, exploding hearts.

Its the lemurs in Madagascar. fo sho. they control everything even the shipping they know what we are trying to do.

I tried getting rid of all my symptoms and seeing if the world would start to reopen thinking it was gone. Nope, got all hospitals to close down so I sat and tried to run my score up. That doesnt work by the way. and about zombies, mix insanity with necrosis and bingo Zombies ate my neighbors.

Finally beat it after resetting the game until I started in Madagascar. Had myself a parasite, started with sores until I could afford to switch to cysts, then bought all of the transmission methods, then bought resistances all the countries were infected. After that I cranked up the lethality and watched them die. For some reason Greenland refused to close its hospitals even after every person in the country was dead, but whoever was working on the vaccine soon needed over 700 days to finish it. Silly human.

Manveru is correct. You need to keep as low as visibility as possible. Buy the cold, heat, water resistances first. When you're ready to explode, by a drug resistance and then buy your spreading. Once you do that, just be patient until you can afford a deadly symptom. My score was 47,734 by the time I figured out a strategy.

I won as a parasite starting in indonesia, lucky boat from greenland to madagascar ftw.

I started as Madagascar, Easy.

too bad highscores wont upload and you cant go back to check the disease table. just did my second total wipeout, not even starting in madagascar. had all level 1 and 2 symptoms in the end plus some big ones of course. p.edema rocks, adds infectivity and lethality with 0 visibility.
final score: 137508 :)

one time, i started out with "catching" and got "harmless" later (not this winning game) - otherwise the traits are still a mystery to me.

hmmmm. i was sure to reach a new highscore: I started with lvl1 resistances except for drugs (2)
water+airborne.

once I started spreading, I added
sores, fatigue, fever, vomiting
pulmonary edema and Hypersensitivity

my lethality rate remained so low, that the game ran on for more than another hour, slowly but steadily picking up evolution points, plus the traits of
durable, ablaze, apocalyptic, parasite, immune.
Just b4 everyone died I spent all my 200+ points, buying each and every symptom, the full resistance board and all infection types... xept for rodents.. i was 3 points short of buying the entire board.

Final Score? Only 14941!
So for all highscorers out there, appearantly the speed you kill off the world matters a great deal !

post scriptum:
above game lasted til April 2011

yup. my coolest speedokillerVIRUS lingered in china with no symptoms, but all around lvl 2 resistance. when it broke, i added air and waterborne and ZOOOM. got the entire world although madagascar hat shut down, it got infected about 20 seconds later. whoop out the lethality, not wasting points on opening tier four...
enough kill power to have the world truly peaceful before christmas of 2008 :)
starting august 2008 game over for the world on 17 October 2008.

not even three months and all is gone muahahaaa. so much for banking on parasites. final score:
182,503

I think a lot of the "bugs" in the game are there purposefully, because while they may be unrealistic, the game would kind of suck without them. Yes it's unlikely that Madagascar shuts down its one port every time there's a widespread fever, but if it didn't, the game would be far too easy.

Nevermind the Mad Agassans.
I went for another stealthy speed virus and killed the entire world SAVE Madagscar by Noon on 7 October 2008.

Final Score: 209,214

there is seemingly no big score bonus in wiping out that tiny last country. go for mass and speed instead.

Grrr... everytime I've come close to getting the whole world, the program crashes on me when messages pop up about vaccines (either starting research, or immunity, or etc).

Damn Apple with Firefox!

Ahaha, has anyone else had an easier time with this in "realistic" than "relaxed" mode? I don't think I've ever killed everyone in relaxed, but I've done it multiple times in realistic...

Well,I only got to symptoms tier 3 with ONLY deepression as starting with it.I was a virus,and the only countries healthy were cuba,new zeiland,and madagascar(NO DIP)AND i ended up with about 96k points.

Here's the strategy I used after getting frustrated. I stated with Madagascar at one point but upped the transmission too quick and the world locked it off.
1) Realistic, Virus
2) Sell all symptoms, buy Heat I, Cold I, Moisture I, Drug I
3) Put speed on fast and go to sleep
4) Wake up to "Vaccine" screen with >100points and entire world infected
5) Get II resistances, all transmission
6) Buy symptoms that increase lethality, based on description
7) Watch the world crush itself...silly humans
Screen Shot

Where can I find Pandemic I?

I managed to kill 100% of the population. But there were still two boats going for it right at the end.
Madagascar is such a pain.

I started in Madagascar once. That was the one time I won. Other than that it is just a few countries that screw you.... I find it best to pick Parasite and build up all resistances before picking any symptoms.

PS: Anyone know if it is possible for the countries to re-open their ports?

Here's what I did to beat the game in relaxed mode:

Started as a virus in Peru, sold off the bonus symptom

Hung out for 10 minutes or so until I had 70+ evolution points.

Grabbed Cold 2, Heat 4, Moisture 4

After they started a vaccine, I waited until they had 12 days to complete.

Then I got all the transmissions, plus Drug 4. This stalled vaccine development since all the hospitals got closed real quick (I guess).

Waited to see if I could infect Madagascar. They closed the shipyard, but not the borders. I managed to infect a couple minutes after they closed the shipyard.

Bought all the level 1 symptoms, then upgraded (it gave me nausea). I bought diarrhea, then upgraded symptoms. It gave me depression, and I bought hemorrhaging.

by then, all countries were infected, and only 50M people were healthy. The infectivity grabbed all the healthy people, and they all died off.

i got all lvl 4 resistances, air and waterborne transmission, and no semptomes. i went to eat and came back and the vaccine was bieng deployed so i added semptomes and it failed so they tried again it was tacking 900+ days so i got insect transmition and boom... they shut everything down so i restarted

I defeated Madagascar and killed the entire population of the earth. The game is very realistic. You must keep visibility and lethality to a minimum until all countries are infected. Then ZAP! hit them with increased lethality!

I got every region infected, but got vaccined. Sad.

i got every country infected and this is how i did it. i started in madagascar then infected mexico then america then china then every other place. i tell you how it worked.
1.madagascar is very immune but thats where i started of.
2.once you get to america or china or somrtimes europe{both}. its easier to spred the virus because theres a lot of transport to spred your M.F virus.
3.once you get the virus to the major cites you should evole your virus more since you will be geting a lot of points.

but its very hard!

... have the whole world all resi... no points... need points... MUST KILL.... it seems it taks 10 mins for me to get 2 more points and i need around 22points for something that can start killing. Everyone is infected, but still 0 deaths.

I infected everyone and screwed over when the disease was deployed!

i cannot get madagascar no matter how hard i try. i have restarted 50 times and still can't start there. still a good game though.

Wow, Madagascar twice in a row. I failed miserably on the first, I'll post later to tell you what happened.

NO ONE IS DYING AND 1 MILLUON PPL ARE INFECTED AND LETHALITY IS 3/4 THE WAY UP

You will get a lot better scores if you just ignore the Madagascar. Waiting 50-100days to infect it isn't worth it. They don't even have a hospital, so they won't be able to make the vaccine and ruin your game.

I got the "Harmless" trait. Madagascar still closed its shipyards. >:(