Board Thread:Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time/@comment-4804333-20140406152741

Hi everyone, just would like to do a bit of statistics regarding the damage dealt to zombies using different plants in the game.

What I mean by Damage conservation is how close to necessary the amount of damage needed to be dealt to KO a single zombie enemy. This means there are some plants which can evenly distribute the amount of damage it deals throughout multiple targets and there are other plants who wastes its resources killing weaker targets when the damage should be projected at tougher enemies.

For instance, we know that 10 peas shot at a regular zombie will kill it. 28 peas will kill a conehead and 65 will kill bucketheads.

Now lets take 2 diffferent plants (The Pea Pod and the Citron) and compare how well they deal damage and whether or not they can conserve that damage to target other zombies:

Firstly, take a conehead. 1 shot from a Citron can kill a conehead, also a maxed out Pea Pod can also kill a conehead pretty quickly.

Now, change that target to a normal zombie who only has 10 health and you would realise that the citron will deal 40 damage to a zombie who only has 10 health whereas the Pea Pod will stop shooting once it deals enough damage to kill the zombie.

The main thing I'm talking about here is using enough force to deal the necessary amount of damage to the zombie horde. The Citron's projectiles deals a lot of damage, but if his projectiles are overkill, it's basically wasted damage in which the projectile can be used to target something else other than weaker zombies which can be easily taken out by other normal plants.

The Pea Pod on the other hand is a great plant that conserves its damage by holding it's fire if it's not against any enemies on the lane it's on.

Other plants like the Snap Dragon, the Coconut Cannon, Spikes and Lightning Reed perfectly show that they can conserve damage by always dealing the maximum amount of damage per shot. The first 3 plant types are beecause they don't have a limit to how much damage they can deal with just 1 shot, the lightning reed on the other hand is great at conserving damage because it deals light damage which arcs to multiple targets, that includes chickens and chickens have the lowest amount of health in the game (0.25). 1 pea shot at a chicken deals 1 damage to it which is also overkill.

However, the most important thing about PvZ2 is how fast you can deal the damage and how much of it you can deal at once. The Citron and Pea Pod can deal lots of damage but the Citron can only deal damage in bursts that need to be charged up for a short amount of time and it can only deal that damage against one enemy at a time. The Pea Pod can continuously deal that damage quickly as it continues firing throughout it's attack and only stops once the target drops to the floor.

It's obviously a good idea then to try not to plant a citron on a mine cart as the citron can't conserve (i.e. spread) the damage dealt effectively throughout multiple zombies. A good example is a flock of chickens versus a citron as the citron can only deal damage to 1 target at a time and it wastes time charging up to deal with a single target only. You compare that to the Lightning Reed where the Lightning reed deals enough damage to take care of the chickens and it only needs to deal enough damage to kill them.

Okay, I offically have no idea what I'm saying here. Please help me figure out what I'm trying to say here T.T 