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I recently purchased Plague Inc: Evolved, a wonderful game made by our glorious, merciful, and genocidal overlord(s) at Ndemic, and as I played through each disease I found myself greatly enjoying the unique traits that each individual plague had to offer, especially so in the case of the Necroa Virus and the Simian Flu.

As I'm sure you're all aware, these two plagues put an interesting spin on the typical Plague Inc. formula by giving the player access to two unique resources that could be used in tandem with your plague: the living dead and the intelligent ape.
Both were used to great effect and the various strategies assosciated with both plagues created enough variety to keep them distinct from one another:

The Necroa Virus turned the lethality rate to your advantage by allowing you to send armies of zombies after healthy countries and help finish off ones that were already crippled by plague; bypassing the cure and allowing you to march on until every last corpse on the planet had been turned to dust.
The challenge with this plague was that the zombies would eventually decay and, if they weren't used to their full effect, humanity would manage to outlast the undead hordes and be able to rebuild.

The Simian Flu took the same concept but applied it in a different manner. In each country there is a set number of apes that can be infected, just like humans, but there's a twist; the disease doesn't make apes suffer, it makes them smarter.
Apes go underground and act as an insurgency: freeing their captive brethren, infecting more humans and apes, and eventually rebelling against mankind altogether and ushering in the Planet of the Apes scenario we all know and love.
The unique handicap of this plague is that while you never have to worry about the apes succumbing to the ravages of time(in fact, prolonging the game actually works to your advantage thanks to the fact that ape colonies generate a steady supply of DNA points), the maximum ape population is relatively small, preventing a forceful takeover of the planet, and you cannot replenish any losses you may sustain over the course of the game, which are pretty much guranteed to happen. Thus, apes are always outnumbered and outgunned by the human race until the very end, when humanity is already on the verge of extinction.

After completing runs of both of these plagues I thought to myself: What could top Planet of the Apes and The Walking Dead?

I looked at the attributes of both plagues and after a great deal of thought I found a very simple answer to my question: Aliens.

Here is the basic idea that I came up with:
An alien organism somehow winds up on Earth and begins to evolve under our loving guidance. It starts out as a small number of spores that can't reproduce without a host. As time goes by it develops and becomes stronger, but at the same time it becomes more noticeable. Now, you have to make some very important decisions.
Do you: _
A. Stick to what you know and remain a plague with untold evolutionary prowess?
or
B. Forsake your humble origins entirely and try to become the greatest predator The Third Rock From The Sun has ever seen?

This is just an idea of course. I just want to get some feedback on this crazy idea I've had for the last couple of days and perhaps, maybe, possibly, see if it can gather enough support that we may see another out of this world plague added to the game.
I like it! Definitely would be interesting to see.

You have my support.

NdemicMarc

Really cool idea - we do want to do an alien plague at some point! I like the way you've tied a big decision into the game - would be good for formulating strategies etc.
(30-07-2014 09:36 AM)NdemicMa Wrote: [ -> ]Really cool idea - we do want to do an alien plague at some point! I like the way you've tied a big decision into the game - would be good for formulating strategies etc.

I'm glad you like the idea. Big Grin

The thought process I had was that the alien plague would have even more potential for evolution than the other plagues, without risk of unwanted mutations, but at the cost of limiting your options to some degree and preventing you from devolving past a certain point.

Say for example you were to go down the predator line and you needed to decide what your aliens main mode of travel would be. You chose to evolve wings for your alien so that it could fly, so it would be able to travel much faster than its land and sea based counterparts, but it wouldn't be as stealthy or as efficient in combat as those respective evolutionary lines. Now say you decide to evolve a trait that makes the flying alien less noticeable or better in combat. You've comitted yourself to that particular line of evolution and now you can't devolve flight. This doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have aliens of the other two types as well (I hope...), but the increased complexity of the organism would dramatically increase the amount of DNA required to evolve any further and it would be extremely difficult to continue without the appropriate genes or abilities offsetting this handicap.
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