One general strategy that can help you succeed in Plague Inc. is to make your disease highly transmittable, but how do you go about doing that? For starters, you’ll want to ensure that each country on the globe has a few infected individuals; while doing that, it’s a good idea to invest in transmission. Symptoms will likely mutate in time, and even smaller symptoms like coughing can keep infecting people. Keep on investing DNA points in transmission even if you’re investing more on deadlier symptoms.
In its Plague Inc. tips and tricks, iMore suggested Greenland and Madagascar, as opposed to more natural, obvious choices like India. Sure, it’s these warmer, more tropical nations with low income and high density that make good choices, but it’s better to start with isolated nations as they have just one port of entry.
In real-life epidemics, people are fixated on the news, and you should be like that as well. The pop-ups will occasionally give you a heads-up if there’s an important news event, but you should also check all of the headlines once you tap on the News icon. That’s going to see which countries would make a good target, and which countries are devolving into a state of anarchy. This will also give you the heads-up if there’s any medical advance that could put your efforts to waste.
It’s going to be a bit costly later in the game when you’re upgrading symptoms, so have a well mapped-out plan beforehand. This means determining which symptoms you want to upgrade more so than others, and spreading your upgrades across different paths. For instance, you can go for coma or total organ failure on the Symptoms tree, and also upgrade Extreme Bioaerosol to help your disease spread itself through means of travel.
Each country on the map has an “I” next to its name – tap on that letter “I” and you’ll get a snapshot of how things are holding up in there. You’ll see info on the country’s climate, its infected and death counts, and the number of healthy people as well. This data can come in really handy, especially if you’re targeting a nation that’s making advances in curing your plague.