Suggestions?

[Noctif1df]

Such a great post, yay having everything in one place (The easier to infect everyone.. muahaha? sorry, I know, lame, its late)

So just finished Bacteria stage (don't jump on me, I beat all of them on iOS and just started playing this like a few hours ago), so here's my first impressions, and some 'I'd like to see'.

1) Fun! But same issue as in iOS version, only reasonable solution that jumps out as an average player is infect whole world, downgrade all symptoms along the way, mass kill suddenly. This kind of kills a lot of tactics for me (other options just don't seem to really work), as well as realism (sudden world-wide mutation), and fun (no back and forth playing with the world, sneaking in steadily increasing symptoms, trying to resist cures). And this is on normal, nothing extreme. I'm not saying dumb it down / make it easy, and I'm sure hardcore players have found other solutions, but just provide more reasonable paths through?

2) Love the random events, they really add depth. More of those, particularly once things start going wrong, perhaps reacting to the specific type of plague (insanity vs public defecation vs bleeding out your eyes as you scream about the end times)... something where it feels like your plague actually has substance, not just attributes and achievements? Shouldn't be a lot of work, its just text boxes, and a sense of morbid humor certainly helps

3) More options would be nice for how to fight the scientists if you are trying to be kinda sneaky instead of rushing-massive-organ-failure. Things like 'branching strain' where you drop off your current direction of the plague, lose some of the points / symptoms, but the cure is now about that 'other plague'. Scientists finish it off and don't look into your new one until it actually draws attention, then they start from scratch (but progress much faster since they've dealt with something similar already). Or things like 'shifting strain' where you lose a random symptom but it backs off the cure research due to the unexpected and noticed change. Or 'chameleon strain' where your disease looks like a different one on the surface and gets treated as less dangerous than its symptoms actually are (they are treated as 'off cases')

4) More transmission methods could be nice, right now they are largely tied up with symptoms. So if you want to spread a plague via kissing then you have to make people nauseous. ... And that's all I should need to say about that.

5) Alternate victory scenarios accepted. If 99% of the world is gone, all animal life has been killed, and there is one last holdout in Greenland... yea, humanity is not coming back from that.

Ok, so that was that, its an awesome game (why I own it on two different devices) so please take that in the spirit of 'awesome but here's what may be even more awesome'

Now for some ideas of stuff moving forward (and I haven't played the worm or zombie ones yet... awesome!! so can't wait, so totally perfect as concepts)

1) More non-extreme symptoms. The worm already kind of goes in that direction, but this could be throughout - instead of going the route of blood gushing and organs cracking, maybe touch on plagues that trigger behaviors - aggression (like in the zombie one) which makes it harder to cure and easier to infect, promiscuity (much easier to infect - maybe combo with blood 1&2, dermal transmission 1&2, etc), increased appetite (maybe weak but becomes very strong transmission when paired with livestock), lethargy (decreases chance of detection, harder to cure if scientists get infected).. Or plagues that have weird affects but not necessarily 'oh crap everyone let's cure this right now!' - hair and eye pigmentation changes, porphyria, sparkle in sunlight, etc

2) Plague AI! So one fun thing I did way back in my AI course days was write AIs in Age of Empires that fought other AIs. Geek, I'm ok with it. Anyway, may be interesting to let players write out AIs for plagues changing themselves and such. Could then have player vs. AI battles in multiplayer

3) More interesting scientist options. Right now its just 'get cure. cure plague. pop the beaker'. What about a version of the game where the cure research has breakthroughs where they treat a symptom or limit a vector of transmission, but in doing so they 'use up' (lose) a bunch of the cure time - so the plague player is having to adapt around obstacles. Ok, coughing symptom is cured and it became very expensive.. maybe a rash should develop next..

4) Aliens!!!!!

5) And the AI virus that has been mentioned sounds fun - electronic virus making machines go berserk, maybe even trying to set off nuclear war or trying to get humans to build physical machines it can use..

6) Indirect plagues - plagues (or symptoms) that actually target humanity's food supplies instead of directly the humans. No food means no humans


Mmm.. ok, I'm good for now