There's A Zombie On Your Lawn!

I recently shared a screen shot of an end game of mine from Plants vs Zombies on Twitter. This is that screen shot:

If you are not familiar with the game, you will have no idea what's odd about this. ...Okay, what's odd from a GAMEPLAY standpoint. For those of you in the know, what's odd is that there are no sunflowers present, which provide power to add plants, and the lawn is filled with powerful, expensive plants.

The simple answer is that I replaced the sunflowers with the Melon-Pults after the 8th flag. The mode I was playing ends with 10th flag, so I rarely keep my sunflowers once reaching 8th if I have enough to replace them with stronger fire power to end things with.

I decided it might be fun to try to repeat this ending layout and show how I went about it, so here it is. Round by round quest for a lawn worthy of slaughtering any zombies who dare to be on it!

FLAGS 1-2

 

I start off the game with setting up sunflowers and in no real hurry to kill zombies. They start off slow, and I can usually take out 2-3 of them just by setting up Potato Mines. How quickly they die determines how quickly they're replaced, so I wind up with a pretty big head start on sun power.

Poor zombie bastard.

This is how my lawn looks after the second flag (it's two flags per round, basically). Note that the items up above are what I've selected for the NEXT round, not what I used in the one I'd just finished.

The Starfruits are inexpensive and wind up covering a lot of angles. The spikerocks weaken zombies as they approach, protect against vehicles and significantly slow down Gargantuars.

The plants in charge of slowing down enemies via cold attacks, initially Snow Peas and later Winter Melons, are to the far left so that enemies have to make it all the way down there to stop the plants that slow them down.

The Cattails actually make the pool level easier than the supposedly easier front lawn levels, at least in my opinion. Four of them seem fully capable of fending off Balloon Zombies, and so long as Pumpkins protect the far left, they can usually handle the Digger Zombies with few problems. In short, they're consistently useful and spare me from using Split Peas and Cacti. Granted, Starfruits can do the job of Split Peas, but I don't plan on keeping the Starfruits around.

FLAGS 3-4

At the start of flag 3, I bust out the Magnet-Shrooms. Since setting them up complete with pumpkins can take a while, I set up the ones farthest right first. That way, by the time swimming zombies show up, the first few magnets are set up and protected by pumpkins.

 

 Magnets, always with the magnets...

By the end of flag 4, the magnets are set up, the Spikerock fields are complete, and there are some Melon-Pults, too. This is overkill at this point, but it won't stay that way.

Flags 5-6

 

Bye bye, Snow Peas! Make way for Winter-Pults! Stop snickering, Starfruits. The Melon-Pults are replacing you.

Flags 7-8

Yeah, sometimes those big guys take their sweet time dying and just sort of linger after the round is over. Jerks.

Flags 9-10

Okay, so I didn't quite make it this time through, but I came close, darn it! Three double sunflowers remain. I'm not sure if I screwed up somewhere or if the game just threw more powerful groups of zombies at me this time around, but this is still the process I use to get this result.

Now to figure out a layout that consistently wins while only using one-hit kill plants...