It's weird how luck based this game is... I just had a perfect run, catching all but a couple yellows, letting no purples go and getting pretty daring with the reds just so I could grab a few extra regular shapes... ended up with 1,300,000 points? I mean I can understand not quite two million, it IS a hard badge. But what the heck? Anyway, impossibility of the badge aside, always a nice game.
Toastmaster brings up some good points, I just wanted to add that another game to look to for inspiration would be Rome: Total War or anything in that series. It's the game that came to mind while I was playing this.
I know it's just a game mechanic but it's a bit unrealistic to think that shutting down borders airports and sea ports would completely prevent infection. I mean, since when has everyone in the world obeyed a law? A 1% chance per day of the country being infected in spite of its lock down or something would be nice.
Haha, Before reading the comments I beat the game with three ninjas and a fairy. Apparently it's the obvious choice, and here I thought I was clever... Something else to note is: put three, maybe four points in the extra candy upgrade before anything else then never put points into it again. Also, don't get the magnet upgrade at all. With those upgrades and that party I was maxed in all four stats and beat the end boss with full health by rank 3, commando I think (+45 stats) and probably could have done it earlier.
Spent the first day casually researching things, swatting a few flys away once in a while. Spent the first half of day two growing a big angry tree and the second half killing it. What a wacky guy I am.
I love that this game avoids artificially increasing the length of play time. It get to the point, not making you spend hours getting money for upgrades or level after level after level of the same kind of stuff. It gets hard quick enough and you don't have to spend all day just to see the cool gun, which, let's be honest, is why we all play this sort of game. I didn't actually have to replay a single level to max upgrades in a timely manner. 5/5
Here's a fun game: Toss a couple rubber balls around, light them on fire then, using a fire hose, see how long you can protect your buddy from being set on fire.