 Alright, so as you all know, I'm a big fan of Advance Wars, I might be one of the best players of Advance Wars in the world. I've S-ranked everything that can be S-ranked in every Advance Wars game that's available. I spent a lot of time thinking about Advance Wars. The next Wednesday or Tuesday show of Geek Nights we will be reviewing Wargroove straight up. Now we did a test stream with me and Scott and as you saw I crushed Scott because he's not that good at this kind of game and also because he just moved his leader to a dumb spot once, but I think what I want to do is try to take everyone through. I have not beaten Wargroove yet. I've played some of this on the Switch. I'm going to start over on the PC for a stream, but I kind of want to take everyone through this game and try to elaborate on all the things that specifically make it different from Advance Wars because the reality is it is, like I said, really good and it's really fun. It's the closest thing to an Advance Wars game that's come out in a good decade, but it's not quite Advance Wars. It doesn't quite scratch that itch 100%. Let's see, let's get right in. We have to go through a tutorial that is a little bit annoying, but let's dive right in. Let's just do it. Yeah, that's right, go hide in the throne room. I am 100% sure this character becomes at least on the good side by the end of the game. Some unfortunate wretches. Now one thing that bothers me about this tutorial is that it is 100% prescriptive in that you literally cannot try anything different. You have to do exactly what it says or it'll yell at you. And the other thing that's kind of weird about it. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Just hold off, hold off lady. Okay, I guess I got to do this. How come all the guards between me and the throne room have one health? Like who went and stabbed these guys a bunch of times and then just left them there? Her sprite is really cute though. I do like this character. In multiplayer I like using her because her power is actually pretty devastating. Though I was pleased to learn, but also saddened to learn that it doesn't work on the enemy hero. This is indeed laughably easy. There's not much I can say about this compared to advanced wars at this stage. Yeah, plot plot plot. You don't really get much plot for a while. Oh, he has a burden of knowledge. See, now it's even going to make me use a menu. Yep, yep, select. I know, I'm aware. Okay, here we go. Overview. This is a nice quality of life thing. This actually is a big step up from any advanced wars game. Oh yeah, it's PC. I guess using a mouse too. But the fact that this view exists is really nice because it means you can have a big map and make it much easier for someone to try to come up with an actual proper strategy. A problem with a lot of games like this, or at least superficially similar to this, is that they won't give you a very large view. They'll force you to play a very zoomed in game. And as a result, you're not going to really, you're going to have to constantly scroll around and keep things in your brain to be able to have a consistent strategy. And they don't really feel like a proper war game. All right, let's kill these guys so I can get to a more real mission. I wonder if I just wait if he'll keep talking. I assume it won't do anything fun. I assume if I do that, eventually it'll just say, oh, you got found. And then I'll have to, I'll try it sometime, or I'll find a YouTube video. Hey, in the stream, yeah, I'm glad to hear that. We're, as you notice, we're actually doing talks that are researched again, as opposed to just our own opinions or things we already knew a lot about. Stay tuned for the talk we're giving at PAX East if you didn't see it already. The real harm of games. That's going to be, that's going to be a real talk talk. I love the animations in this game. I love these sprites. Secret reminds me almost of, she's not funny, friendly, like Marceline. She is kind of just dangerous, but she kind of reminds me of the girl from Cucumber Quest, just a little bit, except for the fact that she murders people. Hardly enough, kind of like the beginning to The Dragon Prince. Oh, look, I got an S-rank. Hoorah. Hope it's had times now. So, here is a big difference between this game and Advanced Wars. So, especially the later Advanced Wars games, they will often have, all right, I'm just going to blow through this tutorial as fast as possible. But, like, look at Days of Ruin or Dual Strike. The parameters for getting an S-rank are actually pretty complex. So, in Advanced Wars game, if you're trying to get an S-rank in a map, you pretty much can't lose units unless you really need to. You have to beat the map within a certain amount of time. You have to not lose units or at least not waste units. In fact, the way it actually works is you have to beat the map having lost or even built entirely the fewest units necessary. So, if you're winning a map in Advanced Wars and you keep building bombers in the back of your forces, just in case, or you build a bunch of units to make sure, even if you beat it in a short amount of time, you still won't get the S-rank. You got to basically build the minimum number of units necessary to win without losing units in the fastest amount of time. And it has a third piece. In Advanced Wars, there's this idea of power. So, in that, you actually have to, and at least one turn, kill as many enemy units as possible, do as much damage as possible. You need to do all three of those things and do them better than par to get an S-rank. So, as far as I can tell in Wargroove, the only parameter to getting an S-rank is that you have to beat the map within a certain amount of time. Yes, I'll find out more about pikemen. So, basically, what that means is that units in this game are basically just disposable. Like, you really don't care if you lose them unless you needed them. You might as well just keep making units, make units and just block all these strategies that are effective in Advanced Wars if you're just trying to win but are completely worthless if you're trying to get an S-rank are very valuable and viable in this game. Because in this game, just having a bunch of carts and just sticking them in the way on a bridge does not cost you anything. So, this is another, I've been skipping the, I guess, the lore here and the tutorial. This is another thing that Advanced Wars never had a concept of at all. That's actually good. So, in Advanced Wars, units are just units. They act independently of other units on your team. In this game, every unit has a particular map situation where if they're in that situation, they get a critical hit and they do more damage. Unfortunately, unlike Advanced Wars where I've internalized the math, I don't 100% know or understand the math for this game yet. So, what that means is that I'll sometimes make mistakes. A unit will take more damage than I expect. I'll do less damage than I expect. But the units themselves have these powers that rely on other units throughout their situation. So, for example, the swordsman, if my leader's out, the swordsman will do more damage if they are next to, orthogedly adjacent to, my leader. Those crits are a big deal. The pikemen will do more damage if they are adjacent to another pikeman. So, check this out. If I attack, see how that's flashing? That means that I'm going to do, pretty sure that just means nine damage. I think the math is actually much simpler in this game than I'd anticipated. So, I think I'll do nine damage. It's flashing because it's a crit, because I'm next to another pikeman. It does not matter what health that other pikeman is at. Yes. Now, this cute crap, like this guy chasing with the crown, I like. This reminds me a lot of the early pre-Days of Ruin Advanced Wars games. Like the first one that came out in the U.S. on the GBA. Oh, look at S-Rank. Oh, some lore. So, when I'm playing this game, Scott and Emily and everyone around has pointed out, I like this character. Like, she's fun to play with and, like, she's got a funny backstory. But her voice acting is really annoying. All right. Now, we got our first real map. Yeah, got to get that neutral though. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So, this game is definitely in the spirit of Advanced Wars and inspired directly by Advanced Wars. The people who made it were trying to make Advanced Wars 2. Or at least the spiritual successor to Advanced Wars. So, every unit in this game effectively has an analog in Advanced Wars. So, this guy here, these Rangers, they're effectively the regular old artillery, but tweaked a little bit. They're like, you know, in Advanced Wars, you have the regular infantry and then you got the mechs that are slightly stronger but don't move as fast. In this game, you've got the swordsmen that are the regular infantry. Then you've got the pikemen that are a little stronger, cost a little bit more, and don't move as far. This guy's kind of like the artillery, but he also has a melee attack. And his power is that he will do crit damage if he doesn't move when he attacks, like an artillery. But he will do crit damage if he moves, oh, sorry, he'll do no crit damage if he moves and attacks in the same round. So imagine if artillery in Advanced Wars could move and attack but just did less damage, that would actually drastically change the game. So swordsmen are basically the regular old infantry, pikemen are mechs, and Rangers are like artillery-esque. They're like an infantry artillery. I'll move right there, like you said. So this is another big difference between Advanced Wars and this is game changing. I'm not sure if I like everything about how it's implemented. I don't like the fact that units can't move into cities. It makes the map a little weirdly restrictive, but also because units can move over cities, just not through them, it creates a lot of weird situations where units can get to places you wouldn't expect. So you have to spend a lot more time parsing the map in a way that you wouldn't in Advanced Wars. I kind of prefer if units could actually go into and garrison a city. So if you hold A in Advanced Wars, you can hold B and see the range of unit could actually do damage. This game both does a little bit more and does it in a kind of annoying way. So if I hold A on a unit, I can see where they could move to, kind of shaded there, and I can see the places they could conceivably attack, similar to Advanced Wars. The only problem is because of the outline, in a dense formation, it's sometimes hard to see if for like it's not obvious immediately if this space is covered or not, especially if there's a unit here. It's a little bit annoying, but I can see that guy can attack up to here. So let's just hold another pikeman. Please, I'll get that crit and move this guy in. So in all these maps, like this is a sea, like I can't move over the sea, but effectively all the units I'm using are analogous to the infantry and regular old Advanced Wars. And infantry and pretty much any land unit can just go over these streams. Instead of Advanced Wars with these block everything, but infantry, everything kind of acts like infantry with few exceptions. And see those little skulls under hazard? Units stopping in a stream just take more damage, like they're just weaker. So if I build units from these barracks in Advanced Wars, units would start in the barracks, just like a unit would start in the city. Here they have to put a Jason to the city. That's interesting because in one sense, unlike regular old Advanced Wars, where a very viable strategy to end a match efficiently was to move units on top of enemy armories to prevent them from building units out of those armories ahead of actually capturing them. You can't do that as easily in this game. You would actually need to get four units surrounding this to prevent the enemy from building a unit inside of it. It also means that say there's units in these three spots, if someone built a unit here, they would not be able to attack through the barracks or through it, through the building, all the units because they couldn't end their turn here. So again, you get kind of weird situations with the adjacency. I'll try to just end this quickly. Definitely want to kill the unit first. So in terms of units and damage done in this game, so the map's going to end, so I'll make a longer range unit who can get further. Are they going to attack me? Yep, let's see. I can take this. I can move this guy toward the end. Yeah, so see how the cities have health? So in Advanced Wars, if you have a unit in a city, they will heal every round some of their damage and it'll cost you money that is a proportional amount based on what the unit cost and how much they healed. And if your treasury's empty, then they won't actually get healed. In this game, to heal a unit, you got to start next to the city. And so I can reinforce. It'll show me the cost. I can spend my turn to drain health from the city to heal my unit, meaning cities are a finite resource for healing. Unlike Advanced Wars, where as long as you hold the city, you hold the city. So it means that just the act of rushing out and getting a city and trying to use that as the linchpin to your strategy doesn't quite work as well because look, the city is going to heal slowly. They have a very finite healing capacity as far as my units are concerned, and they can be easily taken back in this state. Also, when you take one, you'll notice the city has a built-in garrison. If I have the animations play, which I'm not going to do because they take forever, even though they're cute, you'll see that the units actually attack the city and the city fights back like in a civilization game. So check this out. It's only going to heal two? Yeah, two, because it drained the city down to one. So in Advanced Wars, I would not be making these extra units because I wouldn't want to be risking getting anything less than an S rank. But in this game, I don't really care because as far as I can tell, the only thing that matters is how quickly I beat the match. So let's just rush in. I'll descend the turn. So check this. I attack that guy to weaken him. Attacker has a very distinct advantage in this game. If you kill a guy with your hit, they won't get to counterattack, and damage they do is proportional to their health. All right, I can knock it out next turn. So you generally want to always be the one attacking. There are not, until much later in the game, there are no tank units. There are no units that can take a hit. Every single unit you have takes a huge amount of damage if anything leave and looks at it crosswise. So there's a huge attacker advantage. So in Advanced Wars, I would do things like this. I always make sure I do as much damage as possible before I finish something. In this game, I will keep building units at the back of my lines as long as there's even one chance, one percent chance the enemy could win. I'll keep building units and sending them across. I appreciate how the skeletons don't talk. They just chatter. Now like Advanced Wars, other than Days of Ruin, I also appreciate how this has that aesthetic of, hey, we're, we can all be friends and have conversations. We're just commanders of these armies. You want to have a fight? Yay. And then the fight is literally just hundreds of troops being killed. Like the disconnect between what actually happens in the game and how the leaders of these armies interact with each other is really funny. I've always loved that about Advanced Wars games. So knights are interesting. They kind of act like infantry would in Advanced Wars. They're almost like a motorcycle. They'll do some damage. I'm just going to heal this guy. Oh, it's teaching me how healing works, I guess. When you capture a structure, its health starts at half the health of the unit that captured it. But what that means is there's a sort of emergent, one of those odd strategies that comes up that I've already taken advantage of quite a bit. You'll often let the enemy knock out a one health city to zero, and then you just recapture it on your next turn and bring it back to five and then use that five to heal another unit. Like you will often want to engage in behavior where you let the enemy take your city on purpose. I'm not going to lose. So these guys, this is the crit that I don't like that much. These guys do a crit. If the thing they're attacking, look at this. If critical hit when it attacks from a location, six spaces away from where it started. So from here, one, two, three, four, five, six. It's confusing. It's easy to have a walk by one error here. Critically when it attacks from a location, six spaces away from where it starts. I would have to go one, two, three, four, five, six, and then attack a unit either here, here, or here. It's really hard to line that up in a way that would make sense because this game, units are hyper mobile. Everything can move like crazy. So say I wanted to crit the city. All right. So I'd attack here from here. So from here, I'd have to get here one, two, three, four, five, six. So if I was here, one, two, three, four, yeah. So I got to go like this. So one, two, three, four, five, six, crit. It's not as much as I like to fully math out games like this. I don't care enough to deal with this crap. These guys all the time. It's really annoying. I wish that crit was different. All right. So I'm going to play this like it's serious and try to get the S-Rang. And I'm going to try to play it more like I would in advance wars. In this situation, I want to rush in with a bunch of units instead of doing the pikemen thing. So I had complaints that these icons were not that intuitive and kind of hard to read and generally a pain. I saw there's already an update coming to our group where they're going to change how those icons look to make it clearer. What kind of unit is what. So first things first, I'm going to get that crit. Now let's just move in. I doubt I'm going to lose. I can always retreat. Yep. I'll crit that city. And because I'm critting it, I don't take any damage because I did a hundred percent. 840 gold next turn, 840. I'll still be able to afford another night. So I'll get another swordsman. Let's see. Let's take some people out. That's the way to play it. So that interplay though of having to attack a city, potentially taking damage along the way. And then so you can attack it with any unit. So it's almost like Siv. You literally could like build some artillery and you got to attack a city and bring it down to zero and then have infantry move in. That's a drastic difference from the Vets Wars where any infantry can just take a city and will not take damage along the way. They just have to occupy it long enough without getting killed. So swordsmen will get a crit because they're next to that. Now because it's the leader, the leaders are just crazy powerful. There are zero indicators on the screen to figure out if there's a crit possibility. You just got to pay attention. You got to know I'm just rushing in. It's an early mission. I'm not going to lose. See there'll be a crit because it's flashing. That is the only indicator you get. That's that. I feel like she is also going to be a good guy by the end. Oh the big bad. Sturm. Oh of course S rank. All these wagons. So instead of APCs, there are wagons. The wagons have ridiculous movement. Like it's silly. And you don't even have to move onto the wagon. You don't have to get next to it. So doing the strategy in advance wars, you do the strategy where if you had n infantry and n minus one APCs or even n minus two APCs, depending if n was greater than like three, you could do the strategy where you could move a number of infantry faster than they could all each move on their own without each one of them going into an APC. You basically move the infantry forward and you pull the the furthest back ones even further forward with APCs and you rotate and you can move infantry in a hurry. In this game, units move so far even in the big maps that that's rarely a problem. And this wagon fucking books it. Look at this. All right. I only see so I only have to get next to it. This this dope. Don't be fooled. These guys can't do anything except get killed. Peasants cannot like be upgraded. They can't turn in anything. They just die. You can only move three, but I can go in here. This is a plot map where I basically just have to memorize or know what's going to happen. But I got to move these guys all the way up here without losing them and without losing my stronghold. Let's get some range guys to hang out. I assume some units will come from up there. I can just kill these guys myself. Didn't even check the range. I feel like I'm getting pretty good at eyeballing the range like I am in advance wars. I'm playing this enough. So one thing you might not notice when I talked about the defense. So for like mountains are super defensible. Forests are similarly defensible. Can't move over those planes actually have one defense. Roads have zero. That is actually very, very important. Let's take this guy out because I don't want range units getting up in my biz. I can't get a crit, but I can get close. I know another villager is going to come because that's how this rolls. And I know that villager can move three. So I can put this here. The villager will spawn here. He can move one, two, three, and then for free move forward to get in here because that's how adjacency works in this game. You can see where this guy can hit. So I want to make sure these guys are hiding. This is advance wars type strategy such that if they get attacked, I can attack back with this guy who's hanging out here. Let's take another one for good measure. And let's just slowly want this guy up to the end. Okay, let's pull back a little bit. I could probably just take these guys out. I can get away in time. Let's not sweat it. Oh, my groove is powered. Let's make this pipeline of peasants. And let's this guy down and let's keep him here for symmetry. Second pikeman, I'll drop him off down here and then I'm set. Well, those are pikemen, so I'll take some damage if I attack them. But because my groove is powered, I can do the groove thing. They seem to charge similarly to advance wars ones. Some are stronger and charged less frequently, like say hawk in advance wars, some are weaker, but charge constantly. It looks like a difference is in advance wars. Other units will charge it for you. So and getting hurt charges it faster than hurting. So in regular advance wars, it's almost like a rubber band mechanism. The more damage your units as a whole take, the more your charge powers up. In this game, this leader, the more they attack enemies and kill enemies, the faster it charges up. And otherwise, it just charges a little on its own. I continue doing this. Same strategies before. Back this off here. I let him attack. I can actually just do the crit. Oops, I ended my turn by accident. There's a quality of life change they announced. So let me let the enemy turn happen. And then I'll explain it. So in regular advance wars, when you hit a menu button, the button to open the menu, N turns at the bottom. So instinctively for playing advance wars, I'll end my turn by hitting A up A. I keep trying to do that in this game and not ending my turn. But if I accidentally double click A, I'll just end the turn. They are going to add a confirmation to end your turn if you have units. They're going to prevent that situation from occurring in the future. Let's keep my peasant pipeline moving. All I need to do is get these peasants to safety. That's the whole map. I forget if there's four if that's the last one. But regardless, I'm just going to retreat here because I don't need to kill these units. I only need to get the peasants to safety. But these guys as well. And a knight for good measure, why not? Oh no, my city. Oh no, my pikemen I don't care about. How many more peasants are there? Because instead of funneling another guy over, well, just in case let's be ready for it. Okay. Remember these guys crit if they don't move before they attack. See it drain the health of that city. So now this guy can't heal off of the city so easy. See it now. Check out this combo. This is how pikemen get pretty powerful. You basically make grids of them. So I can do this, get a crit because I'm adjacent. And pikemen are naturally strong against horsemen, which makes sense. So again, in advance wars, I wouldn't keep building units. There's no point. So this guy will only heal to eight because the city is weak. That's fine. I don't need to advance. I'm just going to turtle here, finish the map. Just in case there's more peasants. So this might be the last one. So let me just drop him up in here. Oh, I guess there's more coming. Retreat, play it cool. You can always reinforce one. Yep, one more peasant. Yep, that's the last of them. I went in two turns. And because wagons move so far, I didn't really need to bother defending that left side at all. Oh, I should have looked at the weather. I wasn't even paying attention. See how it shows in the upper right? The weather that's coming day by day. So now my artillery, look, this guy attacked me with high range and I can't attack back because now the weather's bad. But it's moot. As long as my peasant doesn't die and my commander doesn't die, I win. In the true spirit of a game like this, you never stop hustling. And pikemen will do some damage to my horsemen, but I do not care. Oh shit, I got to move her out of the way too. God damn it. Okay, forgot about that. Oh look, she can move four. I'll just retreat these guys form a wall in case let's even move this guy. Just not mess this up. You can move four. So one, two, three, four. So I can actually technically put it here. One, two, three, four. And she'd still be good. I could have put it one further away. I wasn't 100% sure if rain would affect her movement at all. So I guess I was being extra cautious. It matters not. I'm pretty sure I could kill Valder. So I'm curious what the game will do to prevent me from killing him. Will it just keep sending units? I wonder what would happen. Either the game will keep sending units to make sure that it is literally or effectively impossible, or it will make him unkillable. I should find out later or endeavor to try it, but right now I don't care. Pretty sure Ragnar becomes good in the end. Or at least good, Esk. Same with Sigrid. Pretty sure that guy Valder is just going to die. Tot, tot, tot. All right, the plant people. Pretty sure this guy remains evil all the way to the end, and I'm assuming he dies. I got S rank, right? Yep. So we've, we've asked everything so far, right? Right? Looks like it. All right, typical of advanced wars games. Let's have the misunderstanding fights with our eventual allies, starting with the cool plant people who looks like they're from another, they're from Starbound. Like it's the same race that's in this other Starbound franchise, and they just put it in this game. So, okay. Carnivorous plant people who seem pretty chill, other than this one guy. I like how Sedge's motivation is just I want to eat people because I am hungry, and none of the other plant people are like that. Oh, we haven't even gotten into the doggo yet. So, here's a problem. This is the first, and as far as I can see so far, I'm probably only Fog of War math. Fog of War in this game is not great. It is way less fun than advanced wars for a bunch of reasons. I'll try to explain. So the dog units, war pups for this faction, but they're all the same. All the factions are the same. The war pups are basically recon, but they can go into mountains like infantry. So in advanced wars, every unit has a site. So see this unit has a site of four, four, four, four, four. Everything has the same site range for except I guess the ranger is the range of five, which again makes them kind of weird. In advanced wars, infantry going mountains, recon like dog, the equivalent of dogs can't go into mountains, and recon have a huge range. So in this game, the dogs, which otherwise functioned like recon, can see very far if they're in a mountain. What bothers me is that look at this sighting range. See how it's just a distance from the unit? If that's simplistic, and that is kind of weak because the way advanced wars did it, which I do believe is superior. I'm not going to give war group a pass on this. In advanced wars, different units had different sites, and ranged units tended to have less site, not more. Now I don't know. Once we find the trebuchet, I got to see if the trebuchet has a long range or not for sight, but maybe it makes sense that the ranger has sight. I don't care about that. The problem is in advanced wars, site was the range, and you could extend it by being in a mountain, and forests and cities that you did not control were blocked from sight. So if this were advanced wars right now, I still couldn't see these units. I would see all these plane spaces, and all the woods that I don't have a unit adjacent to would still be opaque. So the fog of war in this game is just less interesting and less engaging. There's less strategy around it. I can't lay traps. Like in advanced wars, the trap would be like I put a unit here to catch you, and you won't see it unless you actually move a guy off the road to check out the forest. Oh, I messed up, actually. I could have done this better. I could have killed that guy and had this guy. Maybe it doesn't really matter. I don't need to capture cities. These are still the easy maps. Doggos cannot capture cities. Hey, buddy. Took a bunch of damage there, didn't you? Hang it out up there. Let's get the dog into the side. Dogs are pretty weak. Let's see, side strength. Yeah, it doesn't really look like a strength number. Dogs? I haven't really compared these, so these guys are effective against all that stuff. Dogs are effective against... See, it's interesting. It doesn't say dog is effective against mage here, but pikemen is effective against mage, but in my experience, dogs fuck mages up. So whatever. Let's capture this so I can heal. Also, the computer enemies seem to be able to see me just fine, like Fogor doesn't seem to affect them. Not gonna move, eh? Now, that guy can just attack my dog. This is another graph I have with Wargroove. I can't blame them too much because, as I've said on Geek Nights, if you look at the story of how the maps in Advance Wars games were designed, it was a huge, probably... It was an effort that was so large it probably wasn't actually worth it, but it did make a fantastic game. So a lot of these campaign maps, they're fun and they're well designed and they're interesting, but they're not perfectly designed. The fact that there's this trap where, look, this unit that's hidden here can attack both of these mountain spaces, yet the game, the heuristics it gives you, tells you to get your dog up here and it lays a trap. There's literally nothing you could have done to prevent. It just doesn't feel right. Like, the game does not... It doesn't have that level of polish that I want from an Advance Wars game. It's a mild annoyance, but it is an annoyance. Also, that animation of revealing and unrevealing moves way too slow. So, luckily, dogs, the way they crit is if they're surrounding another unit. This guy is basically invincible in this map, so let's just capture... Damn the torpedoes. And let's heal this guy for the future. So, like, this interaction didn't feel good. I had to take damage from a trap that was laid... Like, following the game's rules didn't really help me avoid that trap. I'm gonna lose that dog, I think. Oh, wow. But, see, like, in Advance Wars, say I could move this dog here and they wouldn't see me. I could hide. There's a lot more nuance to Fog of War. These guys don't really move fast enough to get through that wood. Noted these guys. See, they have a move of three. They have a move of three... Foot units take three movement points, or two movement points, to get through every square of forests. And horse units take three. All right, doggo. I'm not gonna move you up there, because they'll just get attacked. I could slowly creep these guys up. Maybe I will. I just want to end this quickly. Oh, no, I don't want to. See, there's the other thing that bothers me. In Advance Wars, like early Advance Wars games in the campaign, there was usually a clever way to beat a lot of maps. Like, there's a trick to it, a particular strategy that's very effective, something clever. In this game, most of the maps are basically just a slog. His groove is ready. Should I capture this? Why not? I just keep moving these guys north. But, like, this is the kind of situation where there would be an obvious strategy of like, follow the road, slog through a battle, take this thing, and then use that to build the units you need for the second half. But then there'd be a clever way where if you sent units like through this forest, you could set up an ambush. I have yet to find many, if any, clever ways to beat some of these maps. If you see what looks like a clever way through something, you're most likely just gonna have to wait. They actually made Valder invincible. See, that's... I hate it when games do stuff like that. I wish instead, they would just make it to where there's no way for you to beat him. But like, let you try. Like, put too many units out. Just literally just start flooding the map with units. Do something fun like that. Or if you beat him, make something funny happen, or something interesting happen, and then like, make up some excuse for him to have not actually died. Oh well. I like it when there are clever things you could do that would unlock a like funny moment or a story bit that wouldn't otherwise impact the game. I don't like it when a unit just has plot invincibility. Oh, so units are spawning behind me. So that's that's the uh, the timer. I do appreciate that. Because there's one other changed aspect in this game compared to Advanced Wars. That's fundamental. There is no concept of fuel. Units can move and move and move forever. That makes Air Units a little overpowered compared to Advanced Wars. Because if you have a fighter jet, it burns through its fuel, you got to have like a supply chain. This game does not require supply chains of any kind. Let's not bother healing him. But because there's no fuel, you could run the game in loops and move units around and play like ridiculous draw. And there's all sorts of crap you could do. So at least in the campaign, it seems like the way they get around that is they'll often have game timers that are intrinsic to the game. So the game timer in this case is all these units that I won't be able to beat are going to start coming up behind me and taking these cities. And if I try to fight them, notice I only have one barracks. I can only build one unit per turn and I don't have access to any particularly expensive or strong unit. So there are no good ways to fight like a real battle that would not actually kill him. I'm about to get attacked by a bunch of dudes. Let's put the elder shield out now. So I can stick it to block and enemy has to attack this. It'll also deplete over time. But it means my units will get a big defense bonus. And in Advanced Wars, I would never do something like this. Like I like the Advanced Wars as a game where you don't want to let your units die. You want to be very careful. In this game, just go for it. Like units are hyper expendable in this game and it's very hard to maintain like area denial strategies or zones of control. Because look, I don't have any tank units. No unit I have can take a hit. I can't like have a unit hold the bridge. Any unit I put on the other side of this bridge is just going to get slaughtered by the first thing that attacks it. See? Any one of my units except my leader that would have happened would play this right. I'll probably lose that night. I would like to weaken this guy. Oh, there's Sedge. All right. Just killing him will win the map. But instead of clever strategies, I pretty much just want to slog it out. Oh no, my doggo. At least I can say in the animations of the game, if you actually let them play out, all the other units just like die if they get killed in the animation. The dog units don't. When a dog gets attacked, the referee is at number of dogs to reflect the damage. Just run away. It's kind of cute. All right, check this. One, two, three, four, five. Nope. I guess I'll do 100% anyway. I could try to save those cities, but I don't think I need to. Oops, he's got those pikemen. Guys, I can only make one unit per turn. I want to keep making the strongest units. Actually, a ranger would be okay. Oh, there's Sedge. He's locked in. He dropped this again. Where's things first? I feel like I'll just take him at seven, six, five, one, two, three, four, five, six. Oh, actually. All right, now he's hidden by the stupid fog of war. Let's just charge in. I'd like to end this. These early maps are not that fun. Five, six. This is much faster than trying to go up and actually deal with that barracks. I love his horse. Oh, now the second round of misunderstanding before they become allies. Oops. Yep, S-rank. I see three stars there. All right, so much like Advance Wars Days of Ruin, there are main missions and side missions. Oh, I'll play a dog mission. So, if you didn't notice from all the promotional material that dog, that dog's a commander just like any other commanders. His animations are great. I will turn them on. I also love these outlaws because their dialogue kind of reminds me of, like, I don't know, the Lupins guy from Monty Python, like their Monty Python-esque brigands. All right, here's a good boy. This is another silly mission. I just have to beat it as fast as possible. So, let's see if I can still get an S-rank, despite it being a little silly. Now, see, this is the kind of thing where a clever Advance Wars map, there'd be a way to send someone around the outside and, like, go in this other door. But no, the only, the best way to beat this mission is to go straight in. It's just super obvious. Open each door along the way and then do the boss fight in here. So, I want to point something out because I saw this here. Does anything stand out about this map? I'm going to scroll down real slowly. Anything catch your eye? So, one, there's treasure chests here. But you see, they don't show up when you hover over them. And, like, if you hit B, there's nothing. It's just flagstone. Interesting that carpet and flagstone are two different tile types that both give you defense. A decorative tile that's functionally the same as flagstone, okay? But what's this here? Nothing shows up. But clearly, if you've played a game like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars never has these kinds of things. What the shit is this? What's going on here? That is clearly special. It is, like, there's something on. And sure enough, if you move your unit over onto it, it appears and says dot, dot, dot, and nothing happens. So, I did look online to see what the deal is. Spoilers, it's a thing. And I'm not going to explain what the thing is, but don't worry about it. Don't even consider interacting with it in your first playthrough. It only does something when you play through this again later. Like, after you've beaten the game. But, like, sending the dogs around the outside gets you very little. You can't, like, cleverly send the dogs around the outside because the forest makes the move so slowly. Look, if I try to go around the outside, one, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight turns, you can see it's just worthless. There's no clever way to beat this map. Just charge in. And rely on the fact that your leader will do plenty of damage. Actually kind of messed up. That swordsman could go behind my leader and attack my dog. Which you will. All right, I should turn on his animations because they are cute. See, he's got little troops that hang out with him. I love how they pet him. If I attack that door, it'll say something like, don't attack the door yet until you've opened all these other doors. Basically, this powers like Eagle's power. All the orthogonally adjacent units will get a new attack. It's super effective. See, I just have to do this sort of methodically and boringly. Notice other units can't see through the walls, only dogs can, which is okay. But not that exciting. See, what was I going to do about that? There's no, like, there's no strategy around handling that the way Fog of War works in this game. You got to do this a pretty boring way. Notice also that his health slowly regenerates over time while no one else's does. So leaders, because that happens, you can really, there's a lot of these missions where you have to sort of use them as tanks. Because thus far, that is still the only tank unit I've got. I have no other units that can take a hit. So I can't use a lot of, like, normal strategies. So that ranger is going to attack my ranger, probably. See, so I'm going to open the AI, I'll be stupid and attack my leaders. No chance they'll kill my leader, but they will all take significant damage and save my other better units. I have one dog left, so I got to protect him. Might as well use my inspire now. That way I can charge up again. It ends up being actually rarely useful because of its very small range. Yeah, that'll open it. Oh, good. Another ranger. Oh, I wonder where those prisoners could be? Probably. Hey, all this outdoor space means nothing. Don't waste your time out there. Like I'll go for the crit. There's no way to see that guy. I'll take some damage. Pillars just mean it's harder to move my guys out and it takes a while to arrange them. I appreciate all the different variety of maps, but a little more care could have been put into this one to make it a little more fun. Now, here's an actual strategy. Because there's two doors into this room, I actually want to send some of these units back because I'd like to come into the room from multiple angles simultaneously. I'll keep all the pikemen together for obvious reasons. I'll send the bulk of my units down because there's going to be more enemies down here. I'll send these range units all toward this door of one piece of cannon fodder. Yep. Actually, I'll move the dog up here, move these guys into position and have them wait outside that door. Ooh, what are my favorite Advance Wars style games? So, Advance Wars. I literally have not found one that satisfies me other than Advance Wars. I mean, Desert Commander on the old NES, which is basically Advance Wars is close, but it really just comes down to which Advance Wars is, do I think, are the best. Of the Advance Wars is, I actually think I enjoyed Days of Ruin the most because while it didn't have the fun theme and had a lot of flaws relative to the other Advance Wars games, or at least a lot of significant differences, the one thing about Days of Ruin was that it had a much better, I don't know, the mechanics of warfare in that game were much better. Like the game was very much a game about tactics. No, no units were like overpowered or underpowered. Resupplies and chains and the motorcycle units, like everything's just really tight in Days of Ruin. Dual Strike is the most fun of the traditional Advance Wars games, but it is also deeply flawed in the sense that some of the character combos are really broken and there's, it is like the height of this one weird trick to beat the game. One weird trick to take out someone's base early, stuff like that. You get like Sammy Eagle and you take two turns, Sammy can cap in one shot, save up your power. So if I had to rank the Advance Wars games in terms of like how good, how good they are at being strategy games, these guys are all kind of weak. I'm going to lose some units here. I suppose that's fine. I can't get the units out in time. So if I skip Days of Ruin because it's like, it's hard to rank Days of Ruin compared to the other Advance Wars. It's just in reverse order, reverse chronological order of their release date. Dual Strike is real good. Oops, oops, I ended my turn early. Dang it. I just waste a little bit of time moving these guys around. Use Inspire to get two attacks all in one go. This is all the units I can get. There's nowhere else I can go. Let's wait one more turn. All right, let's do it. I miscalculated that. I will wait one more turn actually because of that. I don't get the S rank because of that, so be it. Maps like this, I don't care that much about getting the S rank. Everyone get in here and help me fight this dog. Take some hits, whatever. All right, let's take those hits. Yup. See, he's ranged. That's another thing. Ranged units will attack back. Yeah, he'll just die. He's going to die anyway, so let's just put him in the way. And let's do this. That way it might charge one more time. Let's weaken those ranged units substantially. You're just mopping up. No reason to attack with him. I'll just let the enemy potentially waste his turn. I think that's the last dude. See, it doesn't tell me why, and I'm pretty sure it literally just comes down to the total turns it took. I spent a couple of turns farting around before I went through the doors because I wanted to play it more cautiously. This isn't like advanced wars. Because it's a pretty simplistic measure, I don't care that. I don't feel the need to go back and get that third star because that mission wasn't that fun. I think I'll play at least one more in the stream, and then it's time to maybe do some other things tonight. But I will continue these streams to do every single mission in the campaign and try to S rank as many as are fun to do. But now the misunderstanding will be over after this last battle. That's the tank. Those giants, which I can't build yet. That's the first actual tank unit. It's the only goddamn unit that can take a hit. It kind of functions like a medium tank. It moves a little bit further than infantry, but not that much further. Like five instead of four. Their crate is if they are wounded, they will do more damage. And trebuchets, they create if they're firing at their maximum range. The range is two to five. These are more like rockets. They don't shoot quite as far as rockets from advanced wars. Oh, we'll turn off the animations again. Oh yeah, S rank is different from three stars. So if you just hit A, I didn't even see that there was a little metal that tells you a rank when I was playing the game. Until now, when I was trying to stream and I got distracted, didn't keep mashing A. I didn't even realize there was a rank at first. I just saw one, two, three stars. But it still seems to be based almost entirely on the number of turns it takes to beat the, beat the mission. Game tells me to put the pup there. He's got more income than me. And a map like this, the way to win is to get more income than the opponent and maintain it for a little while. Then you'll just win. I'm gonna need more units to be able to capture. I'm actually going to build a swordsman. I'm not worried about getting killed, so I'll just capture hiding that forest for now. Even though you can't actually hide in the forest, I will take less damage if anything enters the forest. Gotta protect these trebuchets. I'd like at least one range unit. Yeah, so like in advanced wars, turn timer, as long as you beat the mission within a certain number of turns, you could beat it faster than that to get bonus points. So maybe offset an area where you did less well. But generally the way to get an SRK in advanced wars is to be hyper efficient, to like build the minimum possible units while doing the maximum possible damage and beating it as quickly as possible. So my instinct, which I have to really disavow myself of, is to like never waste a unit. But I found in this game, I'm often encouraged to waste units. It's pointless. He still has more income than me. Battle pups can move a little further and they do decent damage. I'll start building them so I can get them to the front lines quickly. There's my next opponent. Moves five, so one, look at all these places he can attack. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. I think that takes three movement to move on to. I like Fog of War and other games. I just don't like it in this game. It's not fun and it's too simple compared to say how advanced wars handles Fog of War. The fact that I can't hide units or set traps is kind of annoying. All right, let's get a knight to be able to crit now. Rush in at the end and finish somebody. Two, three, four, five. I'm willing to lose that unit. I doubt there's another giant hanging out there. I'll let him be expendable instead of trying to heal him. It has come to butthead. Don't think there's anything close here to hurt me. One, two, three, four, five, six. Not quite. I'll capture it at one. I'll risk it. I'll retreat and heal. Oh, there was a giant hiding back there. That's where I miscalculated. All right, all right, all right. You run away. Drop the shield. Oh crap, that dog might actually kill me. That might not be much I can do about it. Oh, I should have moved that guy first too. Oh well. Well, if that didn't end me, then I can win pretty handily. Yep, that ended me. Unlike, say, advanced wars, like I said, the Fog of War missions are just not that fun. Oh, whatever. I think this is good enough stream for today. I will pick this up starting here and continue until I beat the game. And stay tuned for more of this.