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You may have heard recently that a sort of new Advance Wars game, called Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, was announced and by all indications it is bound to be a graphical port of the first 2 Advance Wars games. Amidst the points I've been making to people, I got into the subject of how Game Boy Wars 3 didn't need to inflate money-to-deployment ratio to check soldier spam (granted, it has other problems, don't get me wrong) and it got me to thinking: WHY is Game Boy Wars 3 so much better at stopping Infantry flooding, or Grunt flooding as the case may be, than the Advance Wars games in general are? Well, we should go into detail in what happens with the Infantry Flood, because it does additionally provide insight on why certain units fall apart against scrutiny as well.
The Basics[]
For those who are wondering, the Infantry flood is when the player builds Infantry practically from every Factory on every Day. This happens easily because Infantry are the least expensive unit in the game in all installments of the Nintendo Wars franchise, and it becomes powerful because Infantry are deployed naturally as the basic starting unit that can capture properties and are uncontested in efficiency about it.
Everything does have a weakness, though, and the Infantry's weakness is poor combat, with minimized sturdiness and only a basic MG that can't damage armored or air units well at all. This sounds sufficient once the tanks roll and and start steamrolling Infantry, right? Yeah, actually, there are problems to address.
See, what happens is that vehicles are considerably more expensive than the Infantry. Take the Light Tank. This is the go-to direct-fire unit because it also has a cannon to blow up anything with only moderate armor or weaker, while using its MG to handle foot soldiers. This comes at 7000G and I should point out that Advance Wars By Web include as part of the terms of their First Turn Advantage Counter be to have Player 2 be the first player to have 2 Light Tanks out, for the same reason the Tabitank (basically Tabitha on a Light Tank) suffocates Days of Ruin competitive map creativity: Light Tanks are difficult to counter well when allowed to roam around, which is very feasible in early game, and when income is decent, it's not hard to want to keep building them. However, the sticking point is that Infantry are only 1000G each, and you can see from there how the exact opposite problem from anything the Light Tanks can pull snowballs.
One important factor is that the Infantry spam would have easily developed, both with the position of the initial Infantry and with the headcount from production, before the Light Tanks can start coming out. Yes, the Light Tank can shoot at Infantry freely in the direct combat, but besides that it can't 1HKO them without a high enough attack boost, there's the point that it would have to hit 7 Infantry to pay for itself. It won't be hard for Infantry to get out Artillery to start blasting at the Light Tanks to end them, and this WON'T result in a deficit for the Infantry flooder because Artillery are only 6000G for a heavy hitting unit that is suddenly unreachable thanks to the movement system involving scenarios such as a dived Submarine being able to block a high flying Fighter. Ironically, the Infantry flooder will use their headcount advantage to make actually problematic use of those scenarios. This also goes into how the Infantry flood has all that banked up money to work with to provide easy counter units.
And in case you're wondering if I forgot about a certain 4000G unit, said unit is also polarizing with it being hard to manage an in-between that both avoids causing FTA via overly early economy wrecking harassment, and addresses it being generally useless later on.
The Infantry's development is practically unavoidable without an inflated money-to-deployment ratio that would bring up why AWBW would involve the concept of the Expo Factory, which would be to encourage forward deployment and continued pressure. What matters, however, is making sure that it can be defeated when it IS developed, but of course, this is bound to happen by midgame, so it is important for the available resources of an opponent to be well-oiled. Advance Wars....has some problems with this, but to understand why that happens, it's a good idea to see why Game Boy Wars 3 succeeds without resorting to something asinine like upping the Infantry's price tag that would ignore how Infantry have been needed to check Mech Flooding.
GBW3 General Mechanic Differences[]
Before I start, I had made a custom map and an accommodating video showcasing how ineffective Bazooka flooding is rendered in my PALBal patch. You can view the video here if you need to see what is going on. There are mechanics changes that are definite cases of YMMV and will certainly color things, but I assure you that the general principles of what I will talk about will apply.
This will cover key mechanic changes that would undoubtedly color things differently. I will cover a unique unit that is particularly involved in this section, but not the other general units, even the ones unique to GBW3, because although they, most notably the Convoy and Rocket Launcher, do involve mechanics changes, the principles behind their involvement don't change all that much when all is said and done. I just want this stuff in its own section because I have doubts that the mechanic changes would be the more responsible factor for stopping Grunt spam abuses, and even if they are, besides that I do want to punctuate how the unit makeup is important for stopping infantry spam, Game Boy Wars 3 has some immediately obvious balance flaws that counterbalance the mechanics.
The first and most important difference is the way deployment is handled. It is worth pointing out that every one of the Japan-only installments of the Nintendo Wars series allowed for deployment from any properties within a few tiles of the HQ, including the HQ itself. The deployment range limit in the Game Boy Wars series is 3 spaces away from the player's HQ. This rule was, naturally, abolished in Advance Wars for not providing map control incentive to improve gameplay pace. Game Boy Wars 3 chose, instead, to adapt to this rule by adding in the Materials system: the player must have not only enough Gold to purchase the unit, but also enough Materials to construct it in the first place. Materials are obtained from Factories, in place of Gold, and what ties them to deployment is that Materials price gaps are actually smaller than Gold price gaps with the highest Materials cost from a land unit being 50 from the Artillery+, compared to only 10 for the Grunt. You can see how Grunt spam falls into risk at burning itself out by having less ability to add on augmenting units for countering new threats.
Too many Factories still invites the risk of neutralizing the point of the Materials system, but on a custom map that I made, I made the third Factory per side into incentive to actually attack. This has the effect of limiting easy deployment otherwise provided by the deployment point count. This goes into the next important difference, namely the existence of the Work Car. The Work Car has multiple abilities with the terrain, most notably building Bridges over Rivers, but the most important one is to improve the strength of properties, which improves their income provisions as well as their repair rates and capture difficulty. There is also ruined properties that have to be repaired to be controlled--infantry can't take those, of course. In both cases, the added income means increasing the Gold-to-deployment ratio easily enough, and the Work Car itself is a higher tech level worker units, additionally with enough susceptibility to MG fire for the Anti-Air Tank to 1HKO it even on Forests. (No, that's not a bad example when Cities provide less cover than Forests in GBW3.) This obviously speaks for itself with design philosophies that I could get into but they're not the focus of this.
Game Boy Wars 3 also has a Linkup command that like the standard Join command needs 2 units of the same type with at least one of them damage available for use. The differences with Linkup is that it can be executed from an adjacent tile instead of moving the initiating unit onto the destination unit's tile, and what is done is that the HP counts can be shifted with the sum obviously remaining the same. Full Joining this way has the disadvantage of, besides incrementing the Lost Unit Count, not flooring EXP (the remaining unit's EXP practically will be used) or combining Fuel and Ammo values, but that's more an option that can be avoided than anything. Now yes, it seems that the Linkup command would encourage spamming infantry instead of delving into GBW3's unit variety, but this is actually more helpful for units like the MB Tank when multiple of those can be built because a primary MB Tank can be kept fresh while the backup gets itself healed off where it can. Joining isn't even responsible for the foot soldier's flood power anyway, since the foot soldiers are built to operate off of being swarm meatwalls instead of glorified fund salvagers. Ultimately, the Linkup command isn't detrimental and arguably supports tech units.
One last point to cover is the Flanking bonus system. Game Boy Wars 3 boosts units attacking an enemy on multiple sides. It's technically a debuff to the target enemy, but the end result is encouraging map control and, more importantly, giving ANY unit actual purpose with the combat even when it's something like the Supply Truck. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but infantry are slow enough that flanking them is ultimately feasible, and it does provide added flow to combating the foot soldier floods. That, of course, is a point that ties into the more important purpose that can be reasonably replicated by the AW games.
Chaining Flow and the Unit Family System[]
Players might have noticed that in the AW games, there are indicators of what the given units' weapons are strong against. This doesn't come up much in them because base damage values are based purely on the matchups themselves instead of the families, which requires handling an 18x36 table in the data to begin with, and then expects the player to memorize so many matchups. Game Boy Wars 3's approach, however, is different: all units use their own ATK and DEF values against given unit families to calculate the damage. Barring any other factors, the attacker's used ATK value for the defender's unit family is multiplied by 5 and divided by the defender's used DEF value for the attacker's own unit family to obtain the damage done in full HP count. This system actually works in the sense of simplicity by logic, and it's something a potential later installment of the Nintendo Wars series or a Spiritual Successor should take notes with. Of course, accessibility has nothing to do with effectiveness of the foot soldier floods. Rest assured that the Unit Family System, although it wouldn't seem like it at first, does in fact tie into how the units better flow at combating infantry spam.
I wish to point out how Advance Wars 1 has only 10 land units in total. If we don't count the APC or the Anti-Air Missile Launcher for their lack of attack capability against infantry, that reduces the number to 8. The War Tank and Rocket Launcher are both expensive, knocking that number to 6. Finally, if we subtract the Infantry, Mech, and Artillery for their culpability in the infantry flooding, that leaves 3 units: the Recon, the Light Tank, and the Anti-Air Tank. Dual Strike doesn't have any added inexpensive land unit options either, and Days of Ruin barely adds the Flare for as much which is basically an armored, slower variant of the Recon outside Fog of War, so forget that's even an option because the Recon falls out of favor past early game and thus relies on map design that can quite possibly degenerate into Recon FTA. The Light Tank can't 1HKO the infantry, so that just leaves the Anti-Air Tank, an 8000G unit trying to get rid of 1000G units in the way. The units do try working together, but 15000G to catch and still only damage a 6000G unit and taking out one 1000G additional unit doesn't sound profitable when the Light Tank has a big red bullseye painted on it that the backup Artillery can aim at while the Anti-Air Tank loses its burst damage capability as well from the damaged Artillery.
The Anti-Air Tank 1HKOing foot soldiers on terrain helps and it's able to actually do that consistently in Game Boy Wars 3, but I point to how few options there are to counteract foot soldier flooding because the real effectiveness come from the handling provided by the Unit Family system. You might have noticed how I mentioned earlier about the Anti-Air Tank 1HKOing the Work Car on good terrain even though the Work Car is a vehicle, not a foot soldier. This is because the unit family typing is more evened out between land units by making the division into Lite Land and Armor rather than Infantry and Vehicle. This is already helpful in giving more units some actual flow, as units focused on hitting Lite Land units won't get phased out as easily in mid-game since the Buggy's mirror isn't some dragged out wuss slap fight like the Recon's is and the Buggy can blast Work Cars as well. Arguably, the real Expy for the Recon would be the Convoy, but that also has the advantage of carrying around foot soldiers, so the Convoy still enjoys consistent usefulness later on by transporting around Bazooka soldiers. Perhaps the most important aspect to the Buggy, though, is that its least expensive counter, the APC (which IS outfitted with an MG in GBW3), costs more than the Buggy itself, so the Buggy actually forces active response from somebody who is flooding the map with foot soldiers.
The real winner of the UFS, however, is the Rocket Launcher. To elaborate, the Game Boy Wars series' take on the Rocket Launcher is to make it not a tech unit version of the Artillery, but actually its own thing as a way to combat foot soldiers, and Lite Land units in general in Game Boy Wars 3. This is easy to underestimate and yet it proves itself. Compared to the Anti-Air Tank, the Rocket Launcher can actually damage armor units, safely at that, though of course Artillery will still be better at that task, but even so, the Rocket Launcher can always be doing something in a case of battle lines. Here's the real kicker, though: the Rocket Launcher can shoot the infantry either to thin the herd and reduce the effectiveness of production rate, or simply ensure that a coordinated strike gets augmented by opening up a key target to KO without needing to flank the picket line. Add to it that the Rocket Launcher outranges Bazookas and it will be good at calling out foot soldier bloat. (And for those wondering, while all range fire units in GBW3 can move and range attack on the same Day, with the Rocket Launcher, this is counterbalanced by the Bazooka having javelin fire bazooka attacks in the first place, so the Rocket Launcher really would want to make sure it's hitting corner targets and whatnot from max distance to avoid retaliation. It also needs to watch out for GBW3's transport rules because a Convoy transported Bazooka can easily snipe it otherwise.)
It is worth noting that the Humvee has very efficient point countering against the Rocket Launcher, due to mobility allowing for outkiting the Rocket Launcher to bolster that hard hitting anti-armor. Of course, the Humvee is equally subject to the UFS's involvement by being a Lite Land unit, which, while redundant for what the Humvee wants to do in the Rocket Launcher matchup, does have the Humvee still subject to being chipped down to size by the screening units' MG fire and/or grenade blasts, and no anti-armor unit like the Humvee would be complete without costing more than Buggy to prevent easy gameplay against what is supposed to be defensive bricks. Even with that, though, the Humvee still helps against the infantry swarm a bit, primarily by sniping off Artillery, which alone shows how anti-armor helps stabilize the usability of what is otherwise a more expensive Convoy that can't transport foot soldiers. In fact, just comparing it to the Convoy at all from generally similar stats displays the Humvee to be still capable of doing something against vulnerable Lite Land targets. It's not entirely optimal, but there's your summary of why this system works at curbing infantry: EVERY unit consistently plays a role at hammering the foot soldiers to a high enough floor minimum degree.
Just to punctate my point of how GBW3 gets going with combatting foot soldier flooding by having units both be good at defeating them AND manage an efficient role, I will cover each of the involved land units:
- Work Car - property development; uses auxiliary MG for Lite Land units
- Convoy - mobility with aux. MG for Lite Land units and cost-effective, although not very tempo based, defense; transports foot soldiers to protect them
- Buggy - mobility with grenades for blasting Lite Land units
- Humvee - mobility with aux. MG for Lite Land units; anti-armor, seriously
- APC - armor to force anti-armor response (useful against the Grunt flood, not so much the Bazooka flood); transports foot soldiers to protect them
- Anti-Air Tank - terrain 1HKOs Lite Land units when undamaged (seriously)
- MB Tank - resists Bazookas via high DEF; also uses cannon to blast Armor units particularly confounding Anti-Air Tank aggression
- Light Tank - discount MB Tank for Grunt flooding
- Rocket Launcher - rockets for safely wiping out Lite Land units; also chips lesser DEF Armor units
- Artillery - damages both Lite Land and Armor units safely
You can see that there's quite a few options even if I couldn't think of anything about the IFV. It is worth noting that the Supply Truck can only contribute to flanking and if you don't need active resupplying, it won't even do that very well. Even so, the available options are still able to contribute to getting Grunt flooding under control.
Why does this matter?[]
Now you might be wondering why bother to do this analysis. It's not like the Advance Wars communities for the most part will do things like be any less passive about stopping the likes of generally nasty people who are proven racists. I will say to that that there are some people who are just as against said nasty people as I am, and the real problem is with the holders of power in those communities for how there's active need for actual diamonds in the rough who understand about the point of compassion. Even then, though, they still have too much power to hide behind mixed with their oxymoronic notion of tolerating intolerance. Of course, that just means that a passive approach against the mess isn't going to work in the least. Fortunately, I had aimed to get Bureaucrat powers for this place to discourage slander in my direction from the general community members from seeping onto here, so I ended up with a gift for calling out this problem. Please, people, for the love of God, inform me if somebody is rampaging with rhetoric about AWRBC being "diversity for its own sake" when I don't recall ANY of the Nintendo Wars games EVER bringing up skin color, not even the Battalion Wars games which has Colonel Austin being one of the more patient good guys and Xylvania being a Nazi Germany allegory. I would want to be on top of stopping such messes.
Digressing aside, about the games themselves, this still doesn't change that the Advance Wars games still inevitably support the infantry floods unless you resort to map design that suffocates creativity. It's not like AWRBC will necessarily so much as improve the Anti-Air Tank to be better about 1HKOing foot soldiers, something that by itself would be a MASSIVE improvement for balance when AW1 makes a daily ATK boost for the Anti-Air Tank into a complete luxury unless your CO's name is Max and thus he speaks for himself. I can point out that I have remade my Mixup map on AW1 to handle a Max VS Sami display as well as a show of Sami VS Grit and it does show signs so far of working decently at improving gameplay, but punching through the floods is still too much of a Max luxury and the top 3 COs (Max, Sami, and Grit) is still VERY obvious with Sami and Grit also having notably dragged out gameplay to display that they'd be frustration-inducing at best particularly in the event of Chess Clock involvement if that doesn't get addressed. AW1 Max definitely has to be banned under any competent house rules or such, but the only option left in AW1 for daily Anti-Air Tanks dealing more than 105% before defenses will be Kanbei, for a slightly expensive unit that has enough emphasis on RPS, and this is a problem when infantry flooding is already indicated to still be a plague. AW2 at least improves things with more developed CO abilities and better CO balance overall (granted, the non-broken CO percent is lower, but the count itself is still higher than in AW1), but again, the Anti-Air Tank failing to be a reliable enough solution to foot soldier floods certainly already caused balance problems with AW2 mechanics.
Still, as I said, there's always hope that a future game in the franchise or a Spiritual Successor could take notes to see what works and what doesn't. For one, in the midst of handling the AW1 videos, when I was handling my Mixup map, I had placed a marker for where I would want expected battle lines to avoid the drawbacks of both straight lines (prevents flanking) and pure 45 degree diagonals (limits mobility on both sides), and I ended up seeing the Expo Factory being too close to said battle lines and thus potentially become overcentralizing. That's where I came up with placing Mountains right next to the Expo Factory, just to prevent overly easy offense, and of course this also has the useful side effect of keeping Recon FTA from happening because the capture can't be disrupted, and since Sturm can't have Recons suddenly able to cross Mountains either, the map is practically Sturm-proof in this one simple step as well. Because of that, the central terrain can afford to be more versatile and thus more involved in gameplay instead of having to be bland to avoid being an enabler of infantry flooding. Though as the way things go with Grit shows, map design can only do so much to alleviate key problems if the core gameplay has problems.
At least my points about unit makeup also provides insight on another issue: how the Anti-Air Missile Launcher, the Fighter, and the Submarine are deemed inept units. The latter two wouldn't be such in a bubble, but all 3 would still be unable to attack infantry. The least expensive unit the Anti-Air Missile Launcher and the Fighter can attack is the Transport Helicopter which map design should be checking to avoid having the APC become redundant; after that, the Battle Helicopter is next and that costs 9000G. You can see how these units are easily undermined by target existence failure and thus are doubly susceptible to the floods. Worth noting in particular is that the original Famicom Wars did at least give the Fighter an MG that could attack land units and that's been kept as a staple in the Game Boy Wars series so it could actually contribute to combatting infantry floods, but Super Famicom Wars locked the Fighter to pure air-to-air and the rest is history. The Anti-Air Missile Launcher never even got that much except in Battalion Wars 1 (by happy accident) and my PALBal patch of Game Boy Wars 3. It gets away with this issue in Battalion Wars because units are predeployed there anyway, but the turn-based games have more of a sandbox nature where air units will not easily be as common. As for the Submarine, it attacks only naval units and all that implies with their even higher costs.
Closing[]
When all is said and done, this analysis doesn't change how the games are designed and probably won't do anything useful for them. Foot soldier flooding is still going to be a concern in the built-in games. However, the whole point is to see what happens and how future games can fix the underlying issues while maintaining what does work. Of course, it does mean having to get past the communities' racism and its enablers. Nevertheless, I can at least provide my 2 cents about gameplay where the racists and their enablers won't have the power to throw about their gross hypocrisies.
One thing is for sure: when it comes to gameplay and not social issues, infantry spam methods do have to be called out and analyzed.