Civilization VII features a variety of crises throughout each age, including a full-on invasion, a war of religion, and the ultimate crisis that will test all empire builders: the plague. It spreads rapidly, moving from town to city with ease, wiping out entire populations. If you don’t turn off the crisis system, you must learn how to stop the spread of the plague and restore your kingdom to the top.
It’s easy to miss a crisis like the plague spreading through your empire, as you might not have an opportunity to inspect every settlement regularly. However, as the faction leader, you owe it to your subjects to examine every property and ensure everyone is happy and healthy.
That’s precisely how you discover and detect the plague spreading through your faction. It begins as puffs of green smoke, often forming around the outskirts of a town or city, before inevitably spreading rapidly, thanks to trade routes and units walking between settlements.
The moment you notice the green smoke clouds that indicate the plague, send a Physician to the affected settlement to nip it in the bud. The sooner they arrive, the sooner these plague doctors can cure the entire city.
You can recruit a Physician from any city or buy one from a town. The unit will cost you quite a bit of gold, so get farming!
Once you have a Physician, keep rotating them throughout your empire to ensure they visit each settlement to reduce the risk of plague spreading rapidly.
After you deal with the plague, it’s time to restore hope. After all, most of your citizens were either sick or burying their compatriots, so everyone could use a feel-good bump. You can restore happiness in a plague-riddled settlement by constructing a handful of happiness-boosting buildings, like:
That said, be wary of any building that requires happiness as a resource to construct, like the Bath or Barracks, as they’ll put you in a deep hole after a plague spreads.
Lastly, there are a number of resources found throughout the world that boost happiness, including:
Definitely get your hands on Wine and Pearls, as they both provide significant happiness buffs during most of the game’s ages.
You can play Civilization VII now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.
