Every day we're shufflin / Bingo!

[copperhamsda3]

So you've unlocked the cheats and want to win at mega brutal Shuffle Strain and Lucky Dip?

Ok so here's how we do it downtown. There's going to be a bit of luck because of lethality getting you discovered real soon (thank you for closing your ports Greenland. Again) but who cares what symptoms you have when you're evolving new ones every game week anyway?

Virus on Mega Brutal
ATP Boost
Darwinism
Aquacite
Extremophile
Trans-Stasis

Don't forget to set the cheat you want to achieve.

I've grown to love starting in Saudi Arabia. Russia gives you an easier time with Greenland but... anyway pick your favorite starting point and let's start this.

With Lucky Dip, the first thing you're going to do is unleash the beast. Viral Instability 1-3.
With Shuffle, you have to look at your options; Any instability you can pick to start, do so. Keep in mind the other things you are going to want and perhaps see if they unlock the other instabilities. Also look at transmissions. All 5 shuffle strain runs on mega brutal I never even looked at the symptom screen past the first glance to see if there were any juicy cheap high-infection symptoms.

Once you get your instability locked in, we go to transmissions:
Air 1
Water 1
Water 2
Air 2
Extreme Bio-Aerosol (Depending on how things are running at the time you may want to skip this, hit the abilities, and come back to this one)
This is where Trans-Stasis shines.
Now we go back to Abilities:
Cold 1&2
Antivirals 1
Heat 1

And back to Transmissions:
Birds 1 (break the border seals)
Rats 1 (get those wealthy urban countries)
Livestock 1 (Helps lots in Russia, which is the most likely transmission route to getting Greenland)
Insects 1 (hot countries)
I usually don't bother with blood transmission, you'll mutate all the fun symptoms that affect poor countries quickly anyway.
All of these transmissions also increase your mutation rate.

You will probably want to pop over and pick up at least antivirals 2 at this point. Depending on how your hot countries are doing, you may want to get Heat resistance 2.

Throw the rest of your points into transmissions or maybe some symptoms if there's some good ones to get, but honestly you should be mutating so fast it shouldn't matter. I won two games without buying a single symptom with every one evolved.

For shuffle strain, which I recommend doing after you lucky dip a few times to get the feel of things, you have to play it more by ear. You still want certain abilities, for example the aircraft filtration/boat filtration events are only overcome by Air/water transmission 1. Extreme? 2? no good, you have to find the 1 and unlock it to enable the transmission vector again.

Only abandon a game because you are in a position where a win is unattainable (Greenland, I'm looking at your closed port). These are supposed to be a challenge!

I started with an awful dip combo: Necrosis, Total Organ Failure, I forget but another super-lethal symptom, and genetic reshuffle 1 and 2 (which do nothing until there is cure progress made, they don't make the future progress harder).
This was almost Ebola like. Before I bought Viral Instability 3 I got discovered, I was constantly racing the death bar (I actually had Iceland burn out, they didn't shoot the infected or anything it just killed everyone before they passed it on, but got lucky with another plane), but in the end humanity succumbed to my dread killer.

Two other things: Beating the brutal counts for the normal as well, and for you lazy people out there, I imagine you can save the game just before victory and 'farm' the wins. But where's the fun in that?