JoseyVA:
Although they may be making your life a thing of misery right now, plagued citizens are a thoroughly fascinating species of walker rendered all the more intriguing because they are so difficult to research. Since you have health-care providers out the wazoo, I'm inclined towards the view of Grumpus TT that the scenario is going to plague you and there's not much you can do to dodge it (Unless, of course, you have the odd unsanitary hut out in an industrial area. But even in that case, trying to eliminate those few vital huts might force such a radical change on your city design that you wouldn't want to contemplate it.) So the advice I want to offer you relates to what you can do to get through the nightmare of knowing for a fact that you are going to have a plague walker appear with as much of your gorgeous city left intact afterwards as possible.
If the appearance of the plagued walker is replicable both as to the game day of his appearance and the square occupied by the housing from which he will emerge, then a couple more tricks could be tried in an effort to lead the diseased menace out of your housing block and into uninhabited territory as directly as possible. However, let's assume a somewhat worse case scenario by accepting Grumpus TT's suggestion that plague is a "canned event", meaning that it could well be replicable in time but not in space (location).
If you can identify a temporal "window" within which the plague walker will appear, then you can reload your most recent pre-plague "save" of the game and duplicate your earlier work until game time reaches a point a bit before your best guess at the earliest time plague could hit. Save the game again at that time. After saving, slow game speed down to a crawl, like speed = 10 or 20. Now we are going to creep through the perilous days
I have only seen a few plagued citizens in my limited experience with real cities, as opposed to the few huts in one of my roamer labs. But I remember quite clearly that on some occasions when I got the anouncement of an eruption of plague, I had the game running at super low speed and a promptly went to the "site of the event" and cut the roads. On those occasions, the plagued citizen respected the cuts in the road; he did not blow through them to continue around the loop to infect the whole freaking housing block. Mind you, a roadblock won't work, only a road cut.
However, if the game is running at too great a speed, you simply cannot hit Pause fast enough to prevent the walker algorithm from generating a trajectory/path for the diseased dude. Once that path is generated, it's too late to block your plague walker with road cuts. He will march right through them. Heck, even ordinary roaming walkers are not deterred by a road cut made right in front of them once they have hit the bricks to execute the preestablished trajectory for one of the four legs of their walk cycle (quadramble). Having got as far as Itjtawy, you almost certainly have seen this phenomenon sometime before now.So you are looking at something similar to what programers call a "race condition". Can you get to the P button before the plague walker's trajectory is generated or not? If you can, then the "Go to site of the event" button in the game's pop-up anouncement window will get you to the general vicinity where plague is just about to appear. At speed=10, you can chop the roads in the block into tiny pieces. The trajectory-generating routine will kick in shortly and send the plague walker on a relatively benign walk that has him rattling back and forth within one of the short pieces of road your cuts created. Once you observe the limits of his road-cut-delimited walk, you can reconnect many of the other bits of severed road to restore services to the remainder of your block, while you wait for the plagued walker to ignominiously expire.
Hope this helps.
StephAmon
[This message has been edited by StephAmon (edited 06-02-2002 @ 02:53 AM).]