Plague Inc. Bacteria Normal Guide – Tips on How to Complete!

The Bacteria plague type is basically the default setting in Plague Inc., though that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park. The pros of this type is that you have an awful lot of control over how you choose to beat it, while the cons include very few DNA points, resulting in little margin for error if anything goes wrong.

It’s a great plague type to cut your teeth on, as it offers a relatively slow play style that allows you to really dig into the specifics of Symptoms, Abilities, Transmissions, and more. This puts you in good stead for future plague types, as you’ll have a solid understanding of how the game works.

Ultimately, you are going to need a strategy to beat it though, and that’s where we come in. We’ve put together an explanation of how the plague type works, a strategy guide to beating it on normal, and key challenges and tips to help you beat it with ease.

How Bacteria Works

There’s a reason that Bacteria is the default plague type in Plague Inc., and that’s because it’s the one that you have the most control over. That might sound good in theory, but it does have its pros and cons – and these pretty much all come down to your strategy. If you have a solid strategy, you can follow it through to the end, and you’ll find this style an absolute walk in the park. Fail to have a strategy though, and your game can end before it even really begins.

We’ll go into strategy later, but to give you a taste, it’s best to infect the entire population of the earth before you even think about getting symptoms. Ideally, a bacterial plague type goes completely unnoticed until everyone is infected, and you save up enough points to kill everyone off faster than they can come up with a cure.

But, if you get a random mutation that is spotted quickly, you may face severe difficulty finishing the game unless you’ve got a ton of DNA points and the world is already 100% infected. It really does require a lot of hands on, fast reflexes, and managing the rate of infection to ensure that every country is impacted by your plague.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that there’s very little room to experiment with this plague style, as you just don’t have many DNA points to play with. It’s all about following a very specific strategy through to its conclusion. As a result, it can easily be one of the least fun plague styles to play – particularly when you remember that it’s pretty much always in your control and you don’t face much randomness aside from mutations, which are easily managed anyway.

Challenges

Below, we’re going to include a bullet point list of the various different challenges associated with this particular plague type:

• Low number of DNA points
• Little margin for error
• If your plague gets discovered before you infect the planet, it can be tricky to finish the game
• Lots of waiting with little action
• Infecting countries like Greenland and Sweden can be challenging, resulting in a loss of DNA points

Bacteria Strategy (Normal)

So, you want to beat the Bacteria plague type on normal, but you don’t know where to begin? Well, that’s where we come in. Follow our steps below and you’ll have no problem whatsoever.

Infect 100% of the Planet

So, first things first: the best approach to beating the Bacteria type on normal is to begin by infecting 100% of the planet – preferably without the disease being discovered. How do we achieve that? Well, with a combination of the right types of transmissions and adding no symptoms whatsoever.

Begin by getting Air and Water to 2 to get the plague spreading, then get Drug Resistance 2 to allow it to access richer countries. You’ll then want Extreme Bioaerosol and Cold Resist 1 and 2 to allow it to access the likes of Greenland, which is notoriously difficult to infect.

You may not always need them, but Heat Resistance and Bacterial Resistance can help during instances when you’re not making much headway infecting certain countries. We really wouldn’t recommend putting more than 1 tier in either of them though, as we’ve found it completely unnecessary during our play throughs.

At this point, build up your points and keep devolving any symptoms that pop up due to mutation. You’re going to keep building up points until you see the notification that there are no healthy people left in the world. That’s a sign that you’re ready to start killing them.

Go on the Offensive and Get Lethal Traits

This is when the game gets tricky and you’re going to need to adopt a solid strategy. Given that everyone is infected, and, hopefully, it hasn’t been spotted yet so there’s no chance of humanity being quite far along with a cure, you can start to be aggressive with your symptoms.

Hopefully, at this point you’ve got around 100 points, which allows you to get to the incredibly lethal Total Organ Failure, which will kill off the entire planet incredibly quickly. You can get to this symptom from any of the trees, though we recommend Insomnia, as it has a big impact on productivity, which will slow down humanity’s chance of a cure.

Hamper Humanity’s Chance of Finding a Cure

You shouldn’t have any trouble finishing off the game at this point, as everyone should die well before a cure is close to completion, but if you’ve got any points left over you can spend them on some abilities, like Genetic Hardening or Genetic Reshuffle.

We don’t need any Transmissions, Resistances, or anything like that at this point because the world is already completely infected, so you can refund these points to spend on slowing down research or speeding up deaths by increasing lethality. We thoroughly recommend you do this as well, because if humanity does find a cure, it’s game over for us. In fact, you can refund all points you’ve spent so far the moment that the world reaches maximum infection, as you’re not going to have to worry about battling a cure anyway.