Plague Inc. tips and tricks for wiping out humanity

Before you kill anyone, of course, you're going to have to choose how you're going to do it. Plague Inc. provides you with a few choices; Bacteria, Viruses, Fungi, Parasite, Prion, Nano-Virus and Bio-Weapon.

Each of these has its own pros and cons to factor in when making your choices - the speed at which they spread, mutate and kill are all rapidly different.

And you'll need to think long and hard about their abilities and how you want your strategy to play out.

Just as important as which lethal pathogen you're using is where you're going to deploy it. You can choose any location around the world to begin your infectious invasion, but some will be easier than others.

Countries such as America will be tempting with their large population, but the quality of their medical care will hinder the spread of your disease.

Likewise, poorer countries may have the disease spread quickly, but they'll have fewer ports and airports to spread the contamination globally.

As you upgrade your disease you can make it transmit faster by air or animal, become more resistant to traditional medicine, or even resist heat and cold - use these upgrades to make your virus thrive in its starting environment, before preparing it for the globe.

Your aim should always be to evolve the various resistances of your disease. These will help you spread it all across the globe, by resisting cold and heat, or by not being easily eradicated by simple medicine.

Make sure to first evolve most of the basic resistances, then move on to its resilience, and finally to how it can spread - via animals, mosquitoes, water, and whatnot. You want to have a very resilient strain so that it won't make life easier for doctors to eradicate it the moment it gets discovered.

Also, keep in mind that resistance to the environment is important only up to a point - after which, you will need to rely on other factors to create a proper "plague".

Feel like playing a game with Plague Inc.'s WHO? Then you should unlock various symptoms and evolutions for your virus, then remove them altogether. That will drive scientists nuts and will make your disease a tad more difficult to discover and cure.

Every time you remove an evolution, you will receive some DNA points back. Make sure you always add some key points to increasing its rate of infection but keep the symptoms that develop automatically under control (by devolving them), so it won't get noticed right away.

We've probably all had that game where we just created the perfect virus... only for it to kill every infected person and then die out. You should never create a virus that will kill the entire population before it will infect the entire world - that's not efficient and will also result in a game over.

In order to infect an area that you have not infected yet, you will need to evolve your disease and develop various resistances that will help it spread. Infecting the far Northern and Southern areas requires sometimes Heat II and Cold II resistances, so if you start to infect the world too fast, but it doesn't seem to work in these areas, make sure to go for these upgrades as well.

But that aside, if your disease is a little bit too deadly, you should remove some of its upgrades or symptoms that are making it that deadly. You can always evolve them later, but until then, you need to make sure you've infected everyone before you killed them.

The most dangerous disease is one you don't know you have, and as such, if you can make a disease that has infected everyone before they even realise it, you can quickly take down the world.

Doctors and the World Health Organisation will take notice as your disease spreads and kills people - going undetected is nearly impossible, but focusing on the transmission of your disease instead of the symptoms is a good way to start the early game.

Once much of the world is infected and scientists are focusing on a cure, that's a good time to bring out lethal symptoms which should quickly start killing off swathes of the population.

Ever had a cold sweat? That's a complimentary symptom that we've all dealt with at one time, and it's those kinds of frustrating combos that we want our disease to have - but perhaps slightly more deadly.

A good example is boosting the air transmission of your virus, whilst also giving those who have it coughing and sneezing symptoms, meanwhile, anaemia is a good coupling with blood transmission.

Also consider the locations you want to infect when picking symptoms - cold resistance is good for moving on Greenland, and even more effective when twinned with symptoms like sweating and pneumonia.

In conclusion, try to always activate multiple symptoms that spread the disease, since that will help you quite a bit.

Of course, the last thing you want is for your disease to get cured. The more people you infect and kill, the more the world's scientists will be attempting to exterminate you by developing a cure.

You'll need to work hard to get away from the potential cure - the most direct way is to use the drug resistance and genetic hardening upgrades on the Abilities screen.

These will lead to the genetic reshuffle upgrade, which will increase the time required to research a cure.

Other good methods include developing symptoms like insomnia and paranoia to slow scientists.

You'll even occasionally get news alerts regarding certain symptoms - things like "Diarrhoea is easier to cure" giving you a hint that you may want to avoid or even devolve your disease to avoid that symptom.

These are all of the Plague Inc. tips that we have prepared for you. If you're a fan of titles like this one, we have collated a list of the finest Android simulation games, and for iOS owners, we have the best simulation games for iPhones.