PvZ2 Chronicles of XarXee: The dawn of week 38 BattleZ (Day 71-ish of current profile)
Just a few hours away from week 38 (Witch Hazel) and the practice room vids/screenshots from Reddit and Youtube are already up. But before I searched for those, I had a few plant setups I wanted to try. I wanted to showcase my maxed Sling Pea on my screenshots. I got almost 3M with two Caulis. Not bad I guess. Then opened reddit and bam! Over 7M from Alien Gurke. He used the same set of plants for week 37. I use the same setup (week 37) but find it too finger tappy. I'm playing on a relatively big screen (tablet) and my finger travel time is too slow to keep up. Can't play on my smaller screened phone since it drains the battery too much.
So I put on my thinking cap and started to analyze how he got to score that high. Here are a few of my deductions:
1. Keep the sun flowing. Duh. Kinda obvious but can be a challenge at times. I have experienced sun-starvation so I have to find a way to mitigate this.
2. Keep the zombies flowing. Another duh. Using plants that chill or slow down zombies is kind of a no-no recently.
3. Waves are triggered by zombie kills. This I have to find out the hard way. I thought they just kept coming. But no, you have to kill the current wave first to make the next one come.
4. Kill the zombies ASAP. A really big duh. Easier said than done, though. With buffs and bruises, I have to get creative.
5. Plants don't react when zombies are off-screen. Sounds obvious and I saw this in action in my wide-screened phone (18:9 ratio). The zombies have to step on the play board first. This is actually a crucial part of the plant setup.
And now I analyzed his plant setup and tried to mentally calculate the damage dealt per lane. Since I'm not that good in mental calculations, I concluded that it's a huge number (hahaha). But seriously, with just three columns of threepeaters, a lane can have a maximum of nine peas that deals 110 damage each. With a boosted torchwood, quadruple that. And that's without factoring in the masteries of the threepeater or additional columns. So yeah, it's a huge number. Enough to burst a hamster ball without spikerocks or take down a gargantuar. And then tile turnip plus plant food, the current wave will be wiped out in a few seconds.
Now with point number five where plants don't react when zombies are off-screen, this is where the threepeater gets a kind of a leg-up. It watches three lanes. If one lane gets activated, all three lanes will be pea-ed so off-screen zombies will still get hit. This can be also be achieved by laser beans and shadow peas but may not be as effective since it only target its own lane and the left-most zombie must step on the board first. The dusk lobber comes close but she reacts a bit slower and only fires on a lane when the zombie on said lane steps on the board. So I think that's one of the secret sauces that makes this an effective setup.
So how do I replicate that using a different setup? Simply put, I can't. But I can probably come close. I will try this new secret plant setup and get a screenshot if I get over 5M. Otherwise, I would just have to copy his setup. Again. To be continued...
