Greetings! I'll start off by saying that I'm greatly looking forward to this game. Thank you Chucklefish for answering the call for an Advance Wars spiritual successor. Lately I've been revisiting the 4 AW games to hold me over until Wargroove is released. As I was playing Days of Ruin, I remembered one type of scenario that could occur that use to drive me nuts: the enemy HQ is surrounded by a river, so you can only access it with infantry, mechs and air units. The problem is, if the enemy spammed anti-air units, it became incredibly tedious and annoying to try and finish the map. Additionally, infantry and mechs alone aren't enough to fight an army of anti-airs, and anti-airs are much cheaper than air units. The Days of Ruin AI loved to spam anti-airs if you so much as built a transport copter. Maps with this design feature were incredibly unfun to play. My concern is, will something similar to this be possible in Wargroove or are there safeguards against it? For example, I love how the HQ can be attacked and destroyed, so you don't have to get a soldier all the way to it, and the harpy and mage costs are roughly equal, and from what gameplay I've seen, the harpy seems to do decently well against mages (unlike battle copters in AW). Thoughts? Gryphon
Obviously the situation you described is an example of a poor map design rather than failed game balancing, albeit there are several issues with that too on later AW games. It is impossible to make this type of game without players or developers being able to (also) construct poor maps. In wargroove the ability to win games in 2 possible ways - by destroying the HQ or the commander - should prevent long stalemate games. It seems unlikely that some player would be able to bunker in with both the HQ and commander, especially since the game seems to be all about city/map control.
I would say that, given the gameplay we've seen so far, its probably possible but very unlikely to work. You still have your commander which can die, and units cost seems to be way higher than what you'd get in advance wars. Now though, as a custom map, and perhaps custom gamemode if they do that too, it could be possible.
