In Pandemic 2, your goal is to wipe out as much of the planets population as possible, in as little time as possible.
There are several ways to do this, but the game is setup in a way that some ways work better than others.
This guide applies to Realistic mode by the way. A lot of this will apply to Relaxed mode, but the game goes much faster and you don’t have as many options for symptoms.
1. Picking your poison
First, you must pick a disease class. Each disease has pros and cons. Virus is typically the best, because you can easily outweigh the environmental effects by purchasing some resistances. Also with a Virus, you really don’t need to purchase transmission effects since it spreads pretty fast on its own.
2. Your starting country is important
The country you start in can make or break your game when it comes to getting your disease to spread worldwide quickly. You’ll notice that Madagascar shuts down when someone sneezes, so starting there can help with the luck factor sometimes. The drawback to starting in Madagascar though can be that it may take a while for your disease to spread to other countries, since not much goes in and out of Madagascar.
Here are the optimum starting countries. I would suggest restarting your game until you get one of these if you plan on worldwide infection: Canada, Cuba, Greenland, Madagascar, New Zealand, West Europe.
Greenland is my personal favorite, since they have a low population, and they have both an airport and shipyard.
3. Developing and spreading your disease
Now that you have your disease, you want it to spread quickly without everyone getting alarmed too soon. Basically, you want every country in the world infected before they realize what’s going on. To do this, keep your symptoms low. I suggest selling whatever you start with and purchase (or keep if you started with it) sneezing by itself. Also buy Cold 1, Heat 1, and Moisture 1 and no others for now. Don’t buy any Transmissions yet either, since these make countries shut down their borders quicker.
Watch the Breaking News and wait for it to spread to three other countries, then sell sneezing so you have no symptoms at all. This will allow your disease to spread fairly quickly without much alarm.
If you’re lucky, you can infect all countries before they raise the alarms and start shutting down airports and shipyards, which generally comes at around 60 to 100 million worldwide infections. If you haven’t infected Madagascar before they shut down their borders, then you’re screwed and you’ll have to restart if you want to kill the world, because that place becomes an impenetrable fortress at that point. Cuba and Argentina are similar, so with some luck, hopefully you can get into all countries before they are alarmed, and then go to the next phase.
4. Kill them all!!
If you got lucky and got your disease to spread to every country, then this is the fun part, because you’ve been saving all of your evolution points to start your mass extinction. Start by purchasing all four drug resistances. Follow it up by purchasing sneezing, coughing, and vomiting to help spread your disease quickly. At this point the world will probably try to start making a vaccine for your disease, so lets shut down those hospitals to keep that from happening.
After a couple days, purchase tier 2 and tier 3 of symptoms. Keep whatever they give you as starting symptoms, but make sure to purchase ataxia, diarrhea, fatigue, fever, hypersensitivity, pulmonary edema, and then finish with kidney failure. Tier 4 is a waste of money and not necessary, as these symptoms will easily kill the rest of the population fairly quickly, and it will also shut down every hospital in the world pretty quickly and kill their vaccine efforts.
5. Win
After the last remaining citizen is dead, you win and you get your points. If you got lucky and got the perfect storm of infecting the world quickly, then you may end up getting the Impossible badge by killing the world in 100 days or less. This is no easy feat, and will require playing quite a bit.
Damn you Madagascar!
