#luck based

[nitwit-tum]

This is too real for me

[bat-pipper]

Trying speedpaints out! 5.6 hours of work compressed into 4 minutes. No sound, candles look really sus sometimes so be careful

[mzcain27]

I 👏🏻 HATE 👏🏻 VOLTORB 👏🏻 FLIP 👏🏻

[hiroshimishima]

After several games on Mega-Brutal difficulty, I've come to the conclusion it's a hopelessly broken "cheat mode" in favour of the AI. If anything, it only further pushed the game into "luck based" than ever before.

Even with zero symptoms your plague can be detected by a "random" blood analysis that may be performed within a few months or while you're in the middle of spreading across the world.

The cost of abilities, transmissions, and symptoms changes periodically for no fucking reason. The game calls it "genetic drift" but it feels more like a bug than a feature. Even with Sympto-Stasis, my last game had Necrosis jump up to 41 DNA but by the time I'd gotten there, it'd fallen down to 23.

Sometimes, it feels easier than Brutal, other times it feels like the game is fucking with you. I had gotten every country infected, everything going well.. then suddenly it says "Greenland executes a group of infected" and instantly there are no infected left there. I was minutes from beating and the game "randomly" decides I should lose.

By the way, one of the scenarios is pretty much "Crap Shoot" the game. Your country is chosen randomly. I see a lot of people restarting until they get China, Saudi Arabia or one of the other "good choices". Talk about built-in-frustration or "trolling the player".

Speaking of cheating AI... the new cheats for beating all plagues on Mega-Brutal feel kinda pointless. Lucky Dip can completely wreck your game if you start with too much severity, and Shuffle Strain doesn't sound remotely useful. Both emphasize "random" again, and I keep feeling like the developer really doesn't know what he wants to do other than fuck with his fans.

Which is probably not what you should do as a developer of a popular game. I wish I could down-grade back to before this voluntary patch because I really don't think it's made the game better at all. Mega-Brutal feels less like a challenge and more like a test of patience with "surprise failure" lurking around every corner.

[hiroshimishima]

Whelp.. I've hit that unhappy point in Plague Inc where I can no longer do rely on anything like strategy. The following scenarios are 100% luck based.

Pirate Plague Shut Down Everything Volcanic Ash

For the record, I did get 3 Biohazards for Golden Age on normal using Virus, but that same strategy doesn't work for brutal. It just won't spread fast enough.

I'm still testing VA to see if I can do it with all 9 plagues, but the other two are absolutely guaranteed to fail most of the time, especially PP with it's lack of ships. Your only hope is that "spontaneous infection".. 3-4 times in one game. Unless there's some trick that nobody is letting out for infecting islands.

I suppose you could do PP and SDE with Neurax or Necroa using the ability to send things to other places.. but not very likely in under a year, particularly for the slow-ass Necroa virus.

I know some people have done it, but their "tactics" haven't worked for me. So I guess all I can do is consider them lucky. I think I may end up just putting the game down and moving on.

And frankly, that makes me kinda feel kinda sick.

[hiroshimishima]

Having played Plague Inc like.. almost non-stop since I got it on the iPhone yesterday, I've come to a very interesting conclusion.

No matter how many people claim strategy and talk about tips, it basically comes down to two things:

Did you infect Greenland before they closed their port? If no, start over.

Did they start working on a cure and you aren't getting any DNA? If yes, start over.

I have literally played over two dozen games as Bacteria, and the only times I've actually won are on "Casual". Every time I've attempted Normal or Brutal, I end up either getting slammed before I can finish infecting the world or .. yep, Greenland.

And of the time I've won on Casual, it's only been about half of my attempts. Because fucking Greenland again.

Seriously, this has got to be an example of deliberately leaning on the RNG because there's no way that Greenland not getting infected could be happening that often.

In fact, just to make it more apparently.. there's an event wherein Greenland spontaneously gets infected for no reason. Maybe that should come up more often, Ndemic.

I sincerely hope the difficulty isn't simply as an incentive to pay you guys more money... cause I'm totally cynical enough to believe it.

[hiroshimishima]

While part of me thinks this will probably rub some people the wrong way, to deny it or otherwise lie about it would be a mistake. Be prepared for a lengthy rant if you bother reading past the jump, because I'm venting my dissatisfaction big time right now.

I played the game a couple of hours at my cousin's house while he wasn't using the laptop. My very first game, I did really well and got to sector 6 or 7, I forget which. By did well.. I managed to keep my original 3 crew until sector 5 at which point a random event decided to kill one. The other two survived the ship was ablazed with oxygen running out and the O2 chamber broken. One died before it could be fixed, the other repaired it and keeled over dead.

The next 20-30 games I played I never made it past Sector 2. Fuck, I was lucky to clear sector gods-damned one! So long as the odds are reasonable, I do well in ship battles. But when I'm zerg rushed on my first jump, or my ship catches fire and my crew can't battle the flames AND fight off the ship.. you're screwed. There's no time to get scrap for upgrades or equipment, it's fucking stupid.

I haven't felt like I wasted my time so much since I played Evoland which caused the FPS to go into negative FPS (so to speak) when I hit the Diablo area because of the outrageous number of enemies and particles.

If you like FTL, that's great. But don't try to feed me bullshit about skill, don't make excuses that it's a "roguelike" - because even those aren't this bad/laden with luck-based factors. I've never played a roguelike where I died within 2 minutes of starting. Skill has nothing to do horrible random encounters that either benefit you or, rather often, leave you worse off than before.

And yeah, you can choose to not do anything. As a result, you end up not getting much in the way of parts, scrap, or fuel. You'll be entirely at (again) luck's whim if you encounter a slaver ship which you can obtain a party member from. If you don't run into a ship that's so far out of your class you'll be ripped apart in a matter of seconds. Skill has nothing to do with this.

This may as well be called Unwinnable: The Game for I've heard of people actually being able to beat it. I read some poor soul's positive review about how it took them over 120 hours to finally beat the game once. This isn't like some lengthy RPG with tons of side quests or grinding, there's no way it should take someone that long to beat this game once.

Yes, I get it, it's a beautiful fucking game. It's indie and I'm glad that so many people support it.. but to me it's unbalanced as fucking hell and far too much is outside your control. There isn't even any sense of progression. It'd be different it were like, say, Dead Rising where you slowly accumulated stats or experience that made each attempt better or last longer.

Please, don't bother to say stuff like "You just suck" (cause I don't) or "Keep playing it gets better" (cause after several hours it hasn't). I am neither "trolling" nor am I "butthurt". If anything, I'd say I feel ripped off, but seeing as how I got it via a bundle (with games I did like) I can't really justify that.

At this point, I might look into trainers or perhaps something using cheat engine. See if I can't eek some enjoyment out of a game I did sorta pay for.. but I'm not holding my breath. I do not like having to give up on a game, especially one that so many people are apparently labeling "GotY" for some fucking reason... but that's exactly what it's looking like.

And I hate the situation it's put me in.