Trouble with Prion on brutal difficulty

[Flambeau200061]

So, I have infected the whole world with my prion plague, I have 111 DNA points left to spend and whatever I do, the cure is developed way faster than the plague kills. what' am I doing wrong here?

[Olivier Batteux]

Hello,

First, having 111 DNA to spend is weird. If you play correctly you always have something to buy.

Usually, if you take all the lethal symptoms at the same time, it will take almost 4 months for the lethality to increase up to the level you have paid for, 4 months ago.
That is for a 'normal' plague type, but the topic of prion is to be very slow to kill. So you will have fewer lethality, and also a lethality that is slower to increase too.

So with prion, like with all others but here even more than usual, you must have your lethality increasing all over the game to be lethal enough at the end.

[Olivier Batteux]

OK, I have just tested prion in brutal again. I won at the 2nd try with cure at 68%.
The point is that you have to start taking risks at this stage. You have to start killing before every islands are infected. So once you have done the job to make each island ready to be taken soon, and once only a few islands are missing : save the game. Then start to kill, but reload back if a missing island is closed. It will work after a few tries if you had set the situation correctly before the critical stage.

Also, there are weird abilities with prion that probably disturb the research. You should take them when it's time to slower the cure (= when you have already everything including lethal symptoms, so that slowering the cure creates no delay on anything).

[Flambeau200061]

O.k. so it seems I took the wrong turn early on. I played parasite before and all went well when I went completely undetected until everything was infected, then devoleped all abilities that led to a quick kill. As this was very successfull I tried the same with prion and it worked up to the point where everything was infected again. I only developed traits that speeded infectivity a little and no symptoms at all, that's how I saved all those DNA points (worked well with parasite). only now the problem seems to be that prion doesn't kill as fast as parasite even with the same traits and the cure is much faster. So I guess I'll have to start a new game.

[Olivier Batteux]

Originally posted by Flambeau200061:

O.k. so it seems I took the wrong turn early on. I played parasite before and all went well when I went completely undetected until everything was infected,

It means that you were playing with no severity at all, else you would be detected, so you earn very few DNA during the game and spread very slowly. So you can win (in a very bad score) with the most basic plagues, in low difficulty levels, when there is no challenge at all. But it prevents you to learn how to play, and it doesn't work in higher difficulty.

There is an achievement for winning with bacteria before 365 days. It's a good school.
Later the bio weapon and the nano-virus (in normal difficulty and more at least) are good to learn how to play.
But the best is nano-virus, because everything depends on what you do when the cure is between 85% and 95%, so that you mustn't feel any emergency when you see the cure at 85% increasing very days, with a few % of the population infected.

[Flambeau200061]

Originally posted by Olivier Batteux:

Originally posted by Flambeau200061:

O.k. so it seems I took the wrong turn early on. I played parasite before and all went well when I went completely undetected until everything was infected,

It means that you were playing with no severity at all, else you would be detected, so you earn very few DNA during the game and spread very slowly. So you can win (in a very bad score) with the most basic plagues, in low difficulty levels, when there is no challenge at all. But it prevents you to learn how to play, and it doesn't work in higher difficulty.

Played parasite on brutal with the above tactic, it was the easiest so far. I had zero severity but very high transmission and didn't get any attention. Got most DNA points from infecting countries and the orange bubbles and saved them. So parasite was really, really easy.
I still have to unlock nano virus and bio weapon. I've played everything from bacteria on on brutal, normal didn't seem very challenging. It took some 15-20 attempts each time before I won (except for parasite), but most times you can tell that you lose as soon as there's a country you can't reach. It's usually a matter of timing. So I didn't play each time until the "defeat" message appeared. Prion seems the most difficult so far, the best I got was 1 billion killed, before the cure hit 100%, with almost all cure delaying abilities developed. It's really hard to balance. If the disease kills too fast you attract too much attention, if it's too slow you run out of time ...

[Olivier Batteux]

It's impossible to make the prion killing too fast if you don't make enormous adaptation mistake.

It's just that you discover that what you have done before works only for a very little part of the game.

With prion in brutal, you have no chance to win if you take no risks.

Also, have you unlocked general solo mode gene ?
It helps a lot to have metabolic jump, trans-stasis, darwinist, aquaphile, extremophile