Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: PhiladelphusWhile Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

I bet they figured in that China is (or very much was) a very isolationist country. I mean when I play the game, I choose Madagascar and they are an island, and it still spreads everywhere before that whole island is infected.

I just picked China as the country with the largest population*, but it's my experience with every country in the game: unless you take specific mutations to increase air or water spread, you can easily infect 50—100% of the population of any country before a single person in another country contracts your disease. In the real world, though, SARS-CoV-2 spread from China while there were just a few thousand cases in the country at most. And not just to a single other country, but multiple countries had infected people traveling to them around December–January a year ago (which then spread to other countries, etc.). Once your disease is infectious enough to have infected a few tens of thousands of people (at most), it absolutely should start showing up around the world, because people move around a lot these days (or did, at least).

*But also, China is hardly isolationist—people come and go to, from, and through it all the time these days. I flew through Shanghai on my way back to Melbourne from visiting family in California back in January, a Chinese colleague of mine was visiting her family around the same time, and one of my PhD supervisors moved from China just last year. And that's not counting all the non-Chinese tourists and business people who visit China year-round, who would be prime targets for picking up a new disease and taking it back home.

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I gave up on Portal Stories: Mel some hours in, because it felt like puzzle after puzzle after puzzle was just "Here's a room, divided into smaller rooms with Emancipation Grids. Laboriously and carefully take a cube through them, by carefully turning them off and on in an irritating sequence. And if you mess up the tight timings required and accidentally vaporize a cube in the next-to-last grid, have fun doing it all over again!"

That's my memory, at least, though to be fair that was years ago at this point and I've been thinking of replaying it recently to see how my memory holds up. Perhaps I'd appreciate it more now. Maybe that was just a "phase" of the game and I stopped before it got good, who knows.

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While Plague Inc is certainly a fun game (and this DLC looks interesting), I now find its claims of being a "realistic simulation" especially ludicrous when nearly the entire population of China can be infected with my new disease before a single person in a single other country catches it. Sure, a lot of diseases aren't as infections as COVID-19, but if upwards of a billion people can catch it in the same country surely someone in a nearby border town's going to pick it up, right?

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Nice to see Valve updating various parts of the UI over time like this. :smile:

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Ooh, nice! That should be interesting to check out. :smile:

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I've been playing the demo for a few hours now, and this is the closest game I've played to a mouse-driven Dwarf Fortress. (And I do like how fluid the workforce is in this game, with people instantly switching from hauling to constructing to having specialized jobs and back automatically without you need to specifically set their jobs.) The demo's apparently a version of the game from May of this year, so not up to date, but it's got a good number of features already. (If a somewhat…eclectic selection of them.)

Also, maybe it's better in the paid version but the demo is absolutely full of language mistakes: what I'm pretty sure is supposed to be a "Tome of Knowledge" is instead referred to (in multiple places!) as a "Tomb of Knowledge". :dizzy: I normally wouldn't bother pointing such things out, but in this case there are so many such errors that it might actually make it hard to figure out what to do from in-game tooltips. (Though like I said, maybe the paid version has corrected these by now.)

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Well, my PhD is hopefully wrapping up in the next few months and I look forward to ditching my university-provided MacBook Pro (:sick:) and picking up a personal laptop running Linux. And hey, pangolins are one of my favorite animals :wub:, so this might be something to keep in mind. :smile:

Quoting: The_Aquabatimho not a nice name considering the reputation of the said animal.

The reputation as the world's most illegally-trafficked mammal [External Link], with populations declining over a million in the last decade [External Link]? Yes, I think it's high time we set about improving this tragic reputation by making people aware of these majestic animals and working to protect them better!

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This sounds amazing, just need to convince a friend to pick it up. :happy:

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Quoting: razing32I love trailers that don't tell me anytihng about the game /s

I know right? A 52-second video—nearly a full minute long—that can be summed up with the 10 words "Hey, there's a new expansion coming called 'The Cure.'"

That said, it could be interesting to essentially play in reverse; I'll check it out whenever it comes out.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeSpeaking of drifting off-topic... I saw a video a while back that was all about some of the ridiculous creatures in Dungeons and Dragons throughout the years....

And now I want to see the specs for a Giant Platypus! I mean all other animals seem to have a 'Giant' version of them... Imagine riding one into battle?

Platypuses are like real-world Owlbears, except they're Duckbeavers.

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