How best to weaponize the plague?

[mctarmac]

What started out as a fear of enemy spies spreading the plague has morphed into an offensive effort.

Question is, what is the best way to keep the plague alive? And does it spread between agents just by being in the same stack?

Was thinking along the lines of

a) Keep an agent infected in a remote area... periodically send out fresh agents to join the stack and keep the infection alive

b) Use a settlement in a remote area... infect it and maintain agents in and around the settlement; at any time the infection leaves the settlement, I would just send back in an infected agent?


I don't know enough about how it is transmitted, would a stack of troops do better at maintaining the plague? Or would the stack lose the infection when the family member commanding inevitably died?

Thoughts?

[Dredd]

To keep the plague alive, just do as you suggested and yes, it spreads in stacks without a family member, just make sure the captain leading the troops is infected, otherwise you won't have the walking plague. However, try not to use the plague as a biological weapon, you'll eventually want to capture the infected city/citadel/fortress and end up getting your grand armies infected, causing them to dwindle to the size of a baby's pinkie. Only use this tactic for places you know you'll never take.

[mctarmac]

House rules, trading empire, so I'm not really concerned about expansion. Was looking to keep Southern/Central Europe out of my hair as the Byzantines while dealing with the Mongols or vice versa. Trying to keep the smallest military I can;

Besides never a bad fall back option to keep alive out in the desert

[Surgeon]

Family members actually have a chance of making it through alive, or so it's worked out for me before. I'd probably try to keep the plague going in several settlements, just to make sure it doesn't suddenly go away without any hope of returning.

[Sitalkes]

Weponise the Plague - LOL!! A few cluster bombs would help - maybe this should be an option for the Naffatun or Mangonels??

[Dredd]

Nothing's wrong or funny about turning the plague into a weapon, it's quiet brilliant actually. The Middle Eastern armies used it as a shock tactic, they would fling infected bodies over the walls of their enemies and cause entire cities to fall to one disease. However, as I said before, this is ineffective and counter productive if you're a expansionist ruler.

[Silent Assassin]

Move your infected spies into each of your enemies cities . VOILA!!!

[Consulo]

I've used this tactic before as France. I completely crippled the HRE with plagued spies. It was pretty hilarious. Depending on if you're using a mod or not (which, really you should be using some sort of mod ) it helps to reduce the excessively fast and unbalanced growth in some of the games. You shouldn't have stone walled cities all across westerned and northern Europe after 80 turns. I'll also just hall off and exterminate cities and towns if need be, especially if I don't even want them. LOL