Plague Inc. Questions.pdf

1. Infectivity - The infectivity of a disease means how well it transmits from one person to another. The more infectious the disease is, the more people are infected each day. Severity - The severity of a disease means how severe the disease is. The more severe the disease is, the more likely it is that people will take notice. Lethality - The lethality of the disease means how deadly the disease is. Higher lethality means that more people will die from it every day and more research will be done to find a cure for the disease. 2. In this task, I and my partner, Masih, decided to name our disease Ken in both playthroughs. 3. In our playthroughs, we’ve decided to start our disease in South Africa in both games. 4. There are 3 routes of transmission: Land, Air, and Boat 5. There are many symptoms in the game that can be evolved, like nausea, sweating, fever, and total organ failure. The symptoms of the game can deal with many body systems including the digestive system, affected by vomiting, the respiratory system, affected by coughing, the nervous system, affected by seizures or paralysis, and many other body systems, which can be affected by total organ failure. 6. The 4 abilities that you can evolve your disease with is cold resistance, heat resistance, drug resistance, and viral instability. Cold resistance allows the disease to be more effective in cold countries. Heat resistance allows the disease to be more effective in hotter countries. Drug resistance and, all of the upgrades after drug resistance, allows the disease to be more resistant against drugs and slows down cure research for the disease. Viral instability makes the virus more unstable, making the mutation rate higher for the disease. 7. In our first playthrough, we were able to kill everyone in the world. In our second playthrough, at a higher difficulty, we could only kill approximately 100 million people. 8. In the first playthrough, the first symptoms we evolved were coughing, sneezing, pulmonary fibrosis, and finally total organ failure, in order to ensure that people would start dying fast. After that, we decided to upgrade viral instability so that more symptoms would be evolved without the use of DNA points. In the second playthrough, at a higher difficulty, we decided to do the same strategy but we were unable to evolve total organ failure, which is the most lethal symptom, due to not having enough DNA points. Our rate of earning DNA points at that time was very low, meaning that the disease was cured before we could try our strategy.

9. There are certain symptoms of the game that can help increase the disease infectivity, like sneezing or coughing. However, in both playthroughs, we’ve only began evolving symptoms after most of the world population has contracted the disease, meaning that we were unable to evolve the symptoms purposefully to infect people. 10. The only routes of transmission that we’ve decided to choose are by air and sea, in order to save DNA points. This is because air and sea transmissions are the most effective route of transmission. 11. The transmission rate increased as we’ve evolved the transmission traits in both playthroughs. We’ve found that as we evolved more transmission traits, more countries are being infected and more people were being infected each day. 12. The types of resistance that we’ve evolved were both cold and heat resistance, environmental hardening, both drug resistances, one genetic hardening, and one genetic reshuffle. 13. This affected the rate of transmission since cold resistance allowed the disease to survive more in colder countries, like Canada, and allowed more people to be infected there. Heat resistance allowed more people to be infected in hotter countries, like Morocco, while drug resistance allowed more people to be infected in richer countries, like Japan or the UK. 14. We were successful in killing everyone on the planet in our first playthrough, with the strategy of letting our disease remain dormant until we’ve infected everyone in the world. We then upgraded every symptom we could, killing everyone rapidly. However, we didn’t manage to kill everyone in our second playthrough, as we played at a harder difficulty level, despite using the same strategy as we used in the first playthrough. 15. The mutation rate was slow at the beginning of the game. However, as time went on, mutations began happening more frequently, due to the evolution of the viral instability trait, which increased the mutation rate. After evolving viral instability, mutations began happening every 10 - 20 seconds. 16. The mutation rate was slow in the beginning because the disease hasn’t been evolved a lot. However, as the disease evolved, the mutation rate has increased. Evolving the viral instability increased the mutation rate by a lot, with mutations happening every few seconds. 17. The cure rate was at zero in the beginning, since nobody noticed the disease yet. However, as symptoms evolved, the disease started to take notice and cure research started. As the disease started to become more severe and more lethal, cure research rate increased. However, as countries become more and more affected by the disease,

cure research would begin to slow down, until the government of each country has fallen, which makes cure research rate at zero again. 18. The simulation at casual difficulty can be described as inaccurate since it is likely that the disease would be discovered at its dormant state without any symptoms, if everyone in the world was infected. The government would also take a lot more action than in casual mode, as shown in pandemics throughout history, like smallpox, influenza, malaria, etc. However, the simulation can be described as pretty accurate in brutal or mega brutal difficulty, which I would say best describes how much humanity would work in trying to cure a disease.

LASTLY…..if time Play the game two more times: 1. Try to kill humanity as fast as you can. 2. Try to kill humanity as slow as you can. As you play the game in both roles, reflect on what methods you chose and the outcome. Comment on whether or not you were successful and what you would change for next time. We were actually more successful in trying to kill humans as slow as we could, rather than trying to kill them quickly. Likewise, given that our objective was to first infect all humans before we increase the severity of our virus, trying to kill humans quickly would result in the increased awareness of our disease throughout the world. Hence, we faced many difficulties in killing humans quickly, as countries quickly began creating a cure for our virus. However, if we were to kill humans slowly by increasing our methods of virus transmission and sustaining the virus in all environmental conditions in order to infect the entire world, we would eventually kill humans much quicker before a cure is developed.