For the last week or two, the main game I’ve been playing has been Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, recently released on Nintendo DS.  Especially with GDC all last week, it’s been easier to slot in a War here or there than to dive full-steam into a big PC or console game.

The thing I love about Advance Wars is how simple and elegant it is, and how those elements along with its excellent balance create a deceptively deep overall experience.  Still, many of the objective-driven single-player campaign battles do feel like “puzzles”–often it is less an issue of dealing with evolving tactics, and more about figuring out the one overriding tactic necessary to beat that particular battle.

There are also a number of optional battles that are evenly matched on either side, allowing for more of a straight-up tactical battle than the puzzle-esque flavor of the main campaign missions.  It was in one of these battles that, for the first time, I experienced gameplay that could actually be remotely compared to “war” in an Advance Wars game.

The  battle is training mission T7, for those with the game.  It consists of four basis, including the player’s positioned in each of the four corners of the map.  Each base is cordoned off by thin rivers–passable only by air units and relatively weak, slow-moving infantry–with a few neutral bases in between the player bases.  Without getting too much into mundane description, the overall result of the layout is that practical assault ability is severely constrained–everybody has a strong defense, but it is extremely difficult to send lots of units into an opponent’s base.

After several failed attempts, I completed the mission over the course of a single game played over about three days.  Eventually, I had to build up forces and engage in grueling, protracted assaults on one enemy at a time, attacking on multiple fronts and being sure that I was keeping enough production in my other bases to stave off attacks by the other two AI players.

The defense-heavy structure meant I was essentially sending countless ground units to die in a slow war of attrition against a thick defense strong against air and infantry.  It is hard to convey how epic this Goddamn battle was–it felt like storming the beaches of Normandy (I know what that was like because I play video games), grinding troops through a heavily defended beachhead, knowing that perhaps one out of ten will actually make it through to even attempt securing an objective.

It was completely counter to the “puzzle” nature of most Advance Wars.  There was no magic strategy, only a whole lot of troops knowingly sent to their death, as I faced off against my computerized opponent in a battle of reactive tactics and production management.  Though I always had plenty of pure income, my production bandwidth was miniscule–and there was a hard cap on overall troop count, so simple stockpiling was not an option.  It was not at all difficult to maintain a position in the fight (unlike some AW battles) but extraordinarily difficult to make actual headway against the opponents.

There may have been battles like this in other Advance Wars games, all of which I have played, but if so I haven’t come across those particular scenarios.  I also of course don’t know if the designers actually intended mission T7 to be some kind of 2D, pixelated invocation of Normandy.  But for being fought on two small LCD screens in a game that is otherwise a fairly abstract representation of real-world combat, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin mission T7 sure as hell made me feel like I was fighting a war.

Tags: advance wars, constrained military production bandwidth, normandy, war

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.