Plague

[Jagger]

Are there any guides out there on dealing with plague?

I am taking standard precautions but I just can't seem to get rid of it. It keeps reappearing and I am not sure if I am spreading it or it just keeps reappearing on its own. I suspect I am spreading it through my troops.

[Snoil The Mighty]

+1 on that. My first campaign to hit plague years it seemed over and done with in about 10 trurns (20 years, though I may try the mod soon if I can find it). That was as Venice, next time was as Spain, and it's 20 turns of plague and counting now, and I have deliberately avoided moving anyone during the last dozen or more of those turns, the campaign is just on hiatus for me until then because I can't really make more military cuts without really jeopardizing things (h/h diff)

[Quillan]

Are you talking about the regular plague or the Black Death? For both, the basic idea is the same: total quarantine! The very first turn of a normal outbreak, generally none of the characters in the infected city are actually plague bearers. You can tell because there will be a small rat icon in the upper left hand corner of their portrait on the details screen (right click on them to bring it up). It can be hard to see but you can also hover your mouse in that are and it will tell you if they are. Anyone clear you move out of the city. Anyone infected stays in the city. Nobody else enters until the plague is gone, and once it's gone characters stay put until they are uninfected, as it will tend to linger in them a turn or two.

If you take a character who is infected with the plague and move into a clean city, you'll have an instant outbreak there. Moving an infected character out of a just cleared city and back in will cause another outbreak there. Yes, it is possible to infect your own spies with plague and spread it to enemy cities, and that's a viable form of warfare. The AI doesn't do it to you deliberately, but that doesn't mean they won't do it accidentally. Any agent recruited in a city currently undergoing a plague outbreak will probably be infected from the start.

You'll notice that a city currently suffering from plague doesn't trade with anyone, so its income takes a nosedive. Getting a random outbreak in 2-3 major money making places at once can really hurt your finances. Public health modifiers may reduce the chance of random infections or make it end a little sooner, but I don't think that's ever been established for certain.

Black Death is like normal plague, except that it's a little more deadly and it is scripted. There's no way to avoid it, but you can avoid spreading it around to places that either haven't gotten it (yet) or have just gotten over it.