Hey fans!

We wanted to take the time to talk to you about some of the recent changes that we've made to our Power Plants system. You might have already seen some of these changes in action: across the board, plants are hitting much harder!

In the first iteration of the Power Plants release, you likely saw a variety of attributes improving each time you leveled your plant. These improvements tended to vary: on one level you might have been able to plant your plant sooner, on another, it might have gained additional health. The result of this approach was that by the time a plant reached the end of its leveling journey, you would have something incredibly powerful, but the improvements would be distributed gradually.

With our recent releases, we've added some challenging new content to several of our worlds. Lurking within these new levels are "Veteran Zombies"—more dangerous versions of familiar foes. Veteran Zombies have a pretty large spike in how much damage they can deal and how much punishment they can take. In some cases, these Veterans were more of a threat than most plants could handle.

In order to both address this and make the earlier part of your plant's growth feel more impactful, we've reordered when plants gain particular attributes, and in some cases, adjusted the rate at which these attributes are earned. Now you'll see more increases to damage and/or health in applicable plants early on. In the later part of the curve, you'll see more instances of values like cool-down reduction. This way you'll first work toward getting a more awesome plant, and then work toward optimizing it to be used more often or more effectively.

These changes have happened automatically, so no action need be taken to see the benefits. No progress that you have made already will be lost, and you should feel a pretty immediate difference! Additionally, we've increased the level cap that plants can reach, so if you've been accruing extra Seed Packets on plants, all of them will immediately go into effect, further leveling up your plants. You may already have some plants ready to go!

So hop in and check out the new and improved Power Plants. We think you'll like the changes, but the zombies probably won't!

John Stumme
Lead Game Designer