I think the challenge has been nice so far in the game. I have definitely had to be thoughtful and there hasn't been an instance where I have failed and was frustrated by it yet.
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Wargroove |OT| Advance Wargs
- Thread starter hersheyfan
- Start date
Alright, finally made it back to stage 5 in Hard Mode Arcade for Ryota. Better not mess this up again. Having to start all over is way too harsh, though it does give the mode some extra tension.
I think I mastered that one "vertical water map," beat it in 12 turns this time around.
I think I mastered that one "vertical water map," beat it in 12 turns this time around.
Mission 3-3 is kicking my butt >_<
I need to somehow get
I need to somehow get
Mercia further along the map before that blasted dragon shows up
I dealt with the threat up north and had control of the center, then rushed her into a wagon and it worked for me
Got this on Xbox and am loving it, really wish I got it on Switch for the portability though.
Game got hard fast.
Game got hard fast.
The Caesar mission in Act 6 is a doozy. I think I can cheese it and I want to make it work rather than doing it the right way, even if it might be harder to figure out how to execute the cheese properly.
Finished the main campaign with 82 stars on the default difficulty. Not hard at all once you get over the initial hump of learning what the pieces do and what counters what. I don't find turning up the raw numbers to be an interesting form of difficulty, though (as opposed to a properly designed and tested hard mode where the enemy has different pieces, positions, and skills), so I left it on the default setting. I'm glad a customizable lower difficulty exists for those who need it, but I think it would a be a grave mistake to let players earn stars with the dials lowered.
I didn't want to comment on Wargroove until I was finished, as I had my fair share of misgivings about the campaign design, but thought that perhaps it was just early in the game and things would get better. Well, yes and no.
*
I should start by saying that I didn't particularly want Wargroove to be a straight Advance Wars clone, and I'm glad it wasn't. This is a game that needs to be appreciated on its own terms and for its own contributions to the genre, regardless of how desperately it begs for comparisons to AW on a cosmetic level. I certainly didn't think it would even try to emulate some of the more subtle mechanics that give AW its complexity and make it sing (like ammo/fuel management), and I was pleased to see novelties like the siege/capture mechanics and the overall attentiveness to the function of every unit, with a diverse range of movement types, terrain interactions, and positional bonuses. I like that it's transparent about its damage chart, even if the icons are unreadable. (I know the developers are aware of this and intend to change it. In general, I won't be saying too much about the UI as they've been very responsive to the glaring issues, fixing some of them in the first patch and giving us a clear road map for the others.)
In fact, I would say that begging for superficial comparisons to Advance Wars doesn't do Wargroove any favours. If you've played a lot of indie Metroidvanias you are probably familiar with the experience of seeing them execute most things competently, and even do a few things very well, but miss the boat on something essential to the Metroid experience, usually to do with the map design or the exploratory flow, and the Metroid comparisons (sometimes explicit tributes, like the Chozo-like statues in Guacamelee) just remind you of how much better Metroid did it in the first place. This was basically my experience with the Wargroove campaign: if you come in thinking you'll get a spin on AW, what you'll get instead is one reminder after another of some subtle sense or magic in AW that you never fully appreciated until it was gone.
For instance, I see that a lot of players have the vague impression that Wargroove is a bit of a slog, and they point fingers at everything from the unit movement and combat animations (which I quickly turned off despite enjoying the artwork) to the mission length and lack of mid-map save points. (Which I don't think is a problem at all; in the absence of AW, hour-long campaign maps are kind of a perfect and underserved niche right now, sandwiched between our sudden wealth of rapid turn-based strategy games with 5-to-15-minute maps like Into the Breach and SteamWorld Heist, and the cautious perfectionism of Fire Emblem where certain maps on the appropriate difficulty can take 3-4 hours to execute cleanly. This is a feature of the format, not a bug. That said, the mission length is admittedly a disincentive to replay maps for speed, especially when the benchmarks are not transparent.)
The truth is that the Wargroove campaign is a slog, but I suspect this is actually symptomatic of a deeper problem in its design. Namely: that for all the effort the designers put into tuning the micro-level mechanics of unit interactions and movement, the game drops the ball on the economy/management layer—the macro-level problem of what to build and where/when to build it—and this weakness is only further amplified by the blandness of the campaign maps.
*
Strategy players all know the pithy dictum from Sid Meier that a game is a series of interesting decisions (or as some would paraphrase it, meaningful and consequential decisions). Wargroove excels at providing a generous decision-space for micro-level tactics: where to move your pieces, what to attack.
But the macro layer is flatly uninteresting. One thing you'll notice very quickly about the campaign is the game's extreme reluctance to let you build. You'll have one barracks at the back of your base, and you don't have access to another one until you are so deep in the enemy's side of the map that the game has essentially been won. At first you might think this is a trapping of early tutorial maps in the opening acts, but as you play on and on—I'll spoil this much for you—it just doesn't get better. Probably a quarter to a third of the maps are dungeon crawlers (or "installation missions" in RTS parlance) that don't let you build at all. Many of the standard maps come off as narrow corridors—you build in the back, the enemy builds in the back, you meet in the middle—or if you're lucky, two narrow corridors.
This slows the game down and constricts your meaningful choices in a number of ways:
- You don't have a lot of interesting choices in the midgame because all the capture points are functionally equivalent towns. It's exceedingly rare that you have the option of racing the opponent to a valuable location a little out of the way, a reason to divert resources and spread yourself thin.
- Your army compositions are inflexible; you're encouraged to spend on sustaining your existing setup, and any adjustments take several turns to kick in, as you are typically only building one unit per turn and it takes a while to send them up, even with copious use of wagons. (Full credit to the wagons, at least; they might be the best unit in the campaign.)
- Income and unit-building completely cease to matter in the late game: you no longer need more of the low-tier units that you can send to the front via wagons, and the highest-tier units take too long to get there. Once you get through the middle of the map with an income advantage you are basically assured a win, but it's slow, plodding win, because you don't get any real momentum.
Contrast this with AW campaign maps that have tons of contestable points in the middle and on the sides. In a good AW mission, the enemy controls mid-map construction points that give them a defender's advantage in reinforcing, and are difficult to besiege. But once you break through, the momentum is yours and you can bring the map to a quick and decisive finish. In a typical Wargroove map, you spend the first half of your mission time wearing down a low-unit stalemate line, and the second half of your mission time closing out a win that you already have in the bag.
*
Over the course of the campaign I thought quite a bit about how the game wound up in this spot.
I think it starts with the capture mechanics. Now, again, I like that Wargroove tries to do something new with sieges and captures, and it mostly succeeds (though I'm not fond of how the Stronghold objective just requires you to rush the building and knock it down without having to hold it; AW created a lot of interesting tension points by making buildings difficult to flip). But it does mean that contested towns spend a lot of time in neutral, with the armies working to deny each other income.
That's fine by itself, but a consequence you have a relatively low-income midgame, and one where funds are vacuumed up by repairs or spells (the Mage's Heal, the Witch's Hex). Your main economic decision in this game is: do I heal/reinforce at the front, or do I build way in the back?
That has a knock-on effect on unit costs. Notice how everything, all the way up to the top-tier units, is really cheap; there isn't a lot of spread in price. The most powerful units in the game cost 12x as much as your basic infantry. (This is mid-tier pricing in AW, not much more than Anti-Tanks and Landers, and well below the cost of any aerial or naval warfare.)
This creates a game that really, really doesn't want to let you spam units, because giving you multiple locations for building multiple units per turn would open the door to massing any unit you like. There isn't enough of a price differential from the weakest to the strongest units for the game to make you decide, "Do I spend on one situational super-unit here or mass basic units everywhere?" If the maps let you mass anything, they would let you mass everything.
Wargroove's solution to this, apparently, is to just not let you build. Until very late in the campaign, unit-building is not an interesting decision. You get just enough income per turn to build one and only one of anything you like, so you just pick the thing you need to balance your composition or counter a looming enemy threat, and you build it. Past the midpoint it's a waste of time to build at all; that's just more pieces in the back that won't be relevant, and you may as well spend entirely on repairing at the front.
*
This criticism is all directed at the single-player campaign, of course, and maybe a lot of these decisions make sense in the context of competitive multiplayer balance on symmetrical maps against another human player. But in an asymmetric campaign, it's not surprising to me at all that players are finding that something is off about the pacing; that somehow, the maps come off as slow and small, restrictive, or claustrophobic. Some of the missions have side objectives like a hero escaping on one half while an army fights on the other half, but even these feel excessively scripted: get from point A to B in a number of turns predetermined by the spacing, and don't die.
As I said up top, we should step out of the shadows of Advance Wars and appreciate Wargroove on its own merits—most of which involve the unit tactics—but supposing we interpret this lack of emphasis on economy and unit-building as the intended vision of the design, the game comes off as trapped in a space where it's Advance Wars Lite in some maps and Fire Emblem Lite in others, and it doesn't quite end up scratching either itch, because it doesn't have a rich and substantial management layer to call its own.
In Wargroove's defence, a small handful of the late maps do get better, especially once naval combat and full combined-arms warfare in all theatres is introduced. (Finally, in each turn, you get to decide whether you want to build one air unit in the back, one naval unit in the back, or one land unit in the back.) Honestly, though, I warmed to it near the end; it's just that the pacing of the campaign takes forever to get there, as it introduces concepts and units so slowly. I'm a slow and methodical player who completed the campaign in about 35 hours, which is longer than every AW campaign while accomplishing less with its time. I think it needed to get its concepts out the door sooner and not prolong the early, low-tech maps like several acts' worth of tutorials.
*
Wargroove is a charming game, a self-evident labour of love, undeniably content-rich. And as I said at the start, I didn't want it to be too slavish an imitation of Advance Wars, and thankfully it isn't; the more you compare it to AW, the worse it looks, and the less it scratches that itch. I'm glad it has its own identity, its own design priorities and vision. I just happen to think that vision is undercooked, and unfortunately, the best way to explain it requires that we talk about AW. The economic/macro/unit-building side of the game might make sense in multiplayer—I can't weigh in on this just yet—but makes for campaign maps that are a letdown most of the way. For a while I thought it was just the maps that were at fault, but as I played my way to the end it was increasingly clear to me that the maps were themselves tied down by the income and pricing structure. That entire side of the game just doesn't quite click.
I didn't need Wargroove's management layer to replicate the one in AW. I needed Wargroove to have a management layer. And I think the sense of slowness or even difficulty that many players are reporting can be pinned on the lack of macro-level options. You don't get to make that many economic choices, and they aren't all that responsive.
I wouldn't have criticized it this extensively if I didn't like so much else about the game, and if I didn't want it to be better. The campaign leaves a strong last impression, stronger than its early acts would suggest, but its systemic issues never really go away. I mean to play the puzzles next, and perhaps I'll say more about the game then, but I find it extremely revealing that these are one-turn tactical puzzles that also have no interest in letting the player build. Wargroove is an engrossing tactical game, but I'm not convinced it even wants to be a strategy game.
That leaves one unlockable stage to go, but you can't meet the requirement for the Epilogue from the campaign alone anyway, as the missions will only take you up to 96/100 stars. So I'll probably make up the deficit with the puzzle stages and Arcade runs instead of going for S-ranks, especially now that we know that stars and ranks are entirely based on speed, and I'll have to play them anyway. For much of the campaign I didn't know this, so I often played a methodical and perfectionistic style to complete maps with few to no casualties, particularly in the unit-only dungeon-crawling stages. I don't think I like a lot of these maps enough to repeat them for S-ranks, certainly not until the requirements are fully disclosed. Baiting, trapping, and burning down the enemy commander seems to be the fastest approach in many cases—and one that I used a few times myself—but it also trivializes some of the game.
I didn't want to comment on Wargroove until I was finished, as I had my fair share of misgivings about the campaign design, but thought that perhaps it was just early in the game and things would get better. Well, yes and no.
*
I should start by saying that I didn't particularly want Wargroove to be a straight Advance Wars clone, and I'm glad it wasn't. This is a game that needs to be appreciated on its own terms and for its own contributions to the genre, regardless of how desperately it begs for comparisons to AW on a cosmetic level. I certainly didn't think it would even try to emulate some of the more subtle mechanics that give AW its complexity and make it sing (like ammo/fuel management), and I was pleased to see novelties like the siege/capture mechanics and the overall attentiveness to the function of every unit, with a diverse range of movement types, terrain interactions, and positional bonuses. I like that it's transparent about its damage chart, even if the icons are unreadable. (I know the developers are aware of this and intend to change it. In general, I won't be saying too much about the UI as they've been very responsive to the glaring issues, fixing some of them in the first patch and giving us a clear road map for the others.)
In fact, I would say that begging for superficial comparisons to Advance Wars doesn't do Wargroove any favours. If you've played a lot of indie Metroidvanias you are probably familiar with the experience of seeing them execute most things competently, and even do a few things very well, but miss the boat on something essential to the Metroid experience, usually to do with the map design or the exploratory flow, and the Metroid comparisons (sometimes explicit tributes, like the Chozo-like statues in Guacamelee) just remind you of how much better Metroid did it in the first place. This was basically my experience with the Wargroove campaign: if you come in thinking you'll get a spin on AW, what you'll get instead is one reminder after another of some subtle sense or magic in AW that you never fully appreciated until it was gone.
For instance, I see that a lot of players have the vague impression that Wargroove is a bit of a slog, and they point fingers at everything from the unit movement and combat animations (which I quickly turned off despite enjoying the artwork) to the mission length and lack of mid-map save points. (Which I don't think is a problem at all; in the absence of AW, hour-long campaign maps are kind of a perfect and underserved niche right now, sandwiched between our sudden wealth of rapid turn-based strategy games with 5-to-15-minute maps like Into the Breach and SteamWorld Heist, and the cautious perfectionism of Fire Emblem where certain maps on the appropriate difficulty can take 3-4 hours to execute cleanly. This is a feature of the format, not a bug. That said, the mission length is admittedly a disincentive to replay maps for speed, especially when the benchmarks are not transparent.)
The truth is that the Wargroove campaign is a slog, but I suspect this is actually symptomatic of a deeper problem in its design. Namely: that for all the effort the designers put into tuning the micro-level mechanics of unit interactions and movement, the game drops the ball on the economy/management layer—the macro-level problem of what to build and where/when to build it—and this weakness is only further amplified by the blandness of the campaign maps.
*
Strategy players all know the pithy dictum from Sid Meier that a game is a series of interesting decisions (or as some would paraphrase it, meaningful and consequential decisions). Wargroove excels at providing a generous decision-space for micro-level tactics: where to move your pieces, what to attack.
But the macro layer is flatly uninteresting. One thing you'll notice very quickly about the campaign is the game's extreme reluctance to let you build. You'll have one barracks at the back of your base, and you don't have access to another one until you are so deep in the enemy's side of the map that the game has essentially been won. At first you might think this is a trapping of early tutorial maps in the opening acts, but as you play on and on—I'll spoil this much for you—it just doesn't get better. Probably a quarter to a third of the maps are dungeon crawlers (or "installation missions" in RTS parlance) that don't let you build at all. Many of the standard maps come off as narrow corridors—you build in the back, the enemy builds in the back, you meet in the middle—or if you're lucky, two narrow corridors.
This slows the game down and constricts your meaningful choices in a number of ways:
- You don't have a lot of interesting choices in the midgame because all the capture points are functionally equivalent towns. It's exceedingly rare that you have the option of racing the opponent to a valuable location a little out of the way, a reason to divert resources and spread yourself thin.
- Your army compositions are inflexible; you're encouraged to spend on sustaining your existing setup, and any adjustments take several turns to kick in, as you are typically only building one unit per turn and it takes a while to send them up, even with copious use of wagons. (Full credit to the wagons, at least; they might be the best unit in the campaign.)
- Income and unit-building completely cease to matter in the late game: you no longer need more of the low-tier units that you can send to the front via wagons, and the highest-tier units take too long to get there. Once you get through the middle of the map with an income advantage you are basically assured a win, but it's slow, plodding win, because you don't get any real momentum.
Contrast this with AW campaign maps that have tons of contestable points in the middle and on the sides. In a good AW mission, the enemy controls mid-map construction points that give them a defender's advantage in reinforcing, and are difficult to besiege. But once you break through, the momentum is yours and you can bring the map to a quick and decisive finish. In a typical Wargroove map, you spend the first half of your mission time wearing down a low-unit stalemate line, and the second half of your mission time closing out a win that you already have in the bag.
*
Over the course of the campaign I thought quite a bit about how the game wound up in this spot.
I think it starts with the capture mechanics. Now, again, I like that Wargroove tries to do something new with sieges and captures, and it mostly succeeds (though I'm not fond of how the Stronghold objective just requires you to rush the building and knock it down without having to hold it; AW created a lot of interesting tension points by making buildings difficult to flip). But it does mean that contested towns spend a lot of time in neutral, with the armies working to deny each other income.
That's fine by itself, but a consequence you have a relatively low-income midgame, and one where funds are vacuumed up by repairs or spells (the Mage's Heal, the Witch's Hex). Your main economic decision in this game is: do I heal/reinforce at the front, or do I build way in the back?
That has a knock-on effect on unit costs. Notice how everything, all the way up to the top-tier units, is really cheap; there isn't a lot of spread in price. The most powerful units in the game cost 12x as much as your basic infantry. (This is mid-tier pricing in AW, not much more than Anti-Tanks and Landers, and well below the cost of any aerial or naval warfare.)
This creates a game that really, really doesn't want to let you spam units, because giving you multiple locations for building multiple units per turn would open the door to massing any unit you like. There isn't enough of a price differential from the weakest to the strongest units for the game to make you decide, "Do I spend on one situational super-unit here or mass basic units everywhere?" If the maps let you mass anything, they would let you mass everything.
Wargroove's solution to this, apparently, is to just not let you build. Until very late in the campaign, unit-building is not an interesting decision. You get just enough income per turn to build one and only one of anything you like, so you just pick the thing you need to balance your composition or counter a looming enemy threat, and you build it. Past the midpoint it's a waste of time to build at all; that's just more pieces in the back that won't be relevant, and you may as well spend entirely on repairing at the front.
*
This criticism is all directed at the single-player campaign, of course, and maybe a lot of these decisions make sense in the context of competitive multiplayer balance on symmetrical maps against another human player. But in an asymmetric campaign, it's not surprising to me at all that players are finding that something is off about the pacing; that somehow, the maps come off as slow and small, restrictive, or claustrophobic. Some of the missions have side objectives like a hero escaping on one half while an army fights on the other half, but even these feel excessively scripted: get from point A to B in a number of turns predetermined by the spacing, and don't die.
As I said up top, we should step out of the shadows of Advance Wars and appreciate Wargroove on its own merits—most of which involve the unit tactics—but supposing we interpret this lack of emphasis on economy and unit-building as the intended vision of the design, the game comes off as trapped in a space where it's Advance Wars Lite in some maps and Fire Emblem Lite in others, and it doesn't quite end up scratching either itch, because it doesn't have a rich and substantial management layer to call its own.
In Wargroove's defence, a small handful of the late maps do get better, especially once naval combat and full combined-arms warfare in all theatres is introduced. (Finally, in each turn, you get to decide whether you want to build one air unit in the back, one naval unit in the back, or one land unit in the back.) Honestly, though, I warmed to it near the end; it's just that the pacing of the campaign takes forever to get there, as it introduces concepts and units so slowly. I'm a slow and methodical player who completed the campaign in about 35 hours, which is longer than every AW campaign while accomplishing less with its time. I think it needed to get its concepts out the door sooner and not prolong the early, low-tech maps like several acts' worth of tutorials.
I particularly enjoyed Act 6 Side 1 (Salty Sea Dog), the final Caesar-versus-the-bandits map that consists of an island assault on a ring-like archipelago; it might be the best map in the game. You have a lot of options for where to concentrate your attack right from the start, lots of midgame tension points that actually let you build in the middle of the map, and various options for either concentrating your attack or spreading yourself thin. You can get punished for poor choices on one wing but make up for them with a solid counter-punch on another.
6-2 (Felheim) is also quite nice: it's a right-to-left map where you control three heroes and three forces (land, sea, and air), but permits a lot of different approaches, dangles an obvious but challenging speed path in front of you, and lets you concentrate on one theatre of war at the expense of the others, concentrating your heroes in one location or another as needed. And again: it lets you build in the middle. The midgame capture points are optional but also consequential.
For the most part I found the unit-only, dungeon-crawling "installation missions" to be relatively bland, especially the ones that are just army-on-army clashes in a fairly open space with the occasional obvious gimmick, a barely disguised tutorial for a Commander's Groove. But the final campaign map before the credits, 7-2 (An Ancient Adversary) is a genuinely solid Fire Emblem imitation, one where every piece matters and every piece must survive against overwhelming numerical superiority. I didn't like how my first attempt was wrecked by surprise (the first mind control followed by a stab in the back), but once I saw the gimmick, I cleared it on the second try without much of a problem, if cautiously and slowly. It might seem odd that the final boss stage (not counting the Epilogue, which I haven't seen) in an ostensible AW clone would actually be a FE clone, but what is even stranger is that this should come off as the right choice, the one that actually plays to the strengths of the game. Because if you look at 7-1, the last army map—well, there you go again. One barracks in the back, one tower, one port. One look at the map and it's obvious what to do. There was no way they could finish on something like that, a map that would properly belong somewhere in the middle of the campaign, not at the end.
6-2 (Felheim) is also quite nice: it's a right-to-left map where you control three heroes and three forces (land, sea, and air), but permits a lot of different approaches, dangles an obvious but challenging speed path in front of you, and lets you concentrate on one theatre of war at the expense of the others, concentrating your heroes in one location or another as needed. And again: it lets you build in the middle. The midgame capture points are optional but also consequential.
For the most part I found the unit-only, dungeon-crawling "installation missions" to be relatively bland, especially the ones that are just army-on-army clashes in a fairly open space with the occasional obvious gimmick, a barely disguised tutorial for a Commander's Groove. But the final campaign map before the credits, 7-2 (An Ancient Adversary) is a genuinely solid Fire Emblem imitation, one where every piece matters and every piece must survive against overwhelming numerical superiority. I didn't like how my first attempt was wrecked by surprise (the first mind control followed by a stab in the back), but once I saw the gimmick, I cleared it on the second try without much of a problem, if cautiously and slowly. It might seem odd that the final boss stage (not counting the Epilogue, which I haven't seen) in an ostensible AW clone would actually be a FE clone, but what is even stranger is that this should come off as the right choice, the one that actually plays to the strengths of the game. Because if you look at 7-1, the last army map—well, there you go again. One barracks in the back, one tower, one port. One look at the map and it's obvious what to do. There was no way they could finish on something like that, a map that would properly belong somewhere in the middle of the campaign, not at the end.
*
Wargroove is a charming game, a self-evident labour of love, undeniably content-rich. And as I said at the start, I didn't want it to be too slavish an imitation of Advance Wars, and thankfully it isn't; the more you compare it to AW, the worse it looks, and the less it scratches that itch. I'm glad it has its own identity, its own design priorities and vision. I just happen to think that vision is undercooked, and unfortunately, the best way to explain it requires that we talk about AW. The economic/macro/unit-building side of the game might make sense in multiplayer—I can't weigh in on this just yet—but makes for campaign maps that are a letdown most of the way. For a while I thought it was just the maps that were at fault, but as I played my way to the end it was increasingly clear to me that the maps were themselves tied down by the income and pricing structure. That entire side of the game just doesn't quite click.
I didn't need Wargroove's management layer to replicate the one in AW. I needed Wargroove to have a management layer. And I think the sense of slowness or even difficulty that many players are reporting can be pinned on the lack of macro-level options. You don't get to make that many economic choices, and they aren't all that responsive.
I wouldn't have criticized it this extensively if I didn't like so much else about the game, and if I didn't want it to be better. The campaign leaves a strong last impression, stronger than its early acts would suggest, but its systemic issues never really go away. I mean to play the puzzles next, and perhaps I'll say more about the game then, but I find it extremely revealing that these are one-turn tactical puzzles that also have no interest in letting the player build. Wargroove is an engrossing tactical game, but I'm not convinced it even wants to be a strategy game.
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Any pointers for puzzle 15 - storming the keep? Have been stuck for like ... an hour again.
Here's my observations:
Only the ballista (right), spearman (right) and swordman (right, on the mountain) can even reach the keep.
There's no way to make the swordman or ballista crit, even if the spearman crits (by air dropping another spearman next to him) the total damage output on the keep isn't enough.
I can only reach the commander with the swordman (to his top left) and the ballista. Not remotely the damage I need.
Now my instinct would be to clear the bridge and somehow get another attacker or critical booster up there (like, with a wagon) but I can't load my commander into the wagon she just spawned...
Another instinct of mine is to somehow make it "up the river" to reach the commander, but there's no unit that would have the movement range to eventually get there...
Any nudges towards the right solution welcome
Here's my observations:
Only the ballista (right), spearman (right) and swordman (right, on the mountain) can even reach the keep.
There's no way to make the swordman or ballista crit, even if the spearman crits (by air dropping another spearman next to him) the total damage output on the keep isn't enough.
I can only reach the commander with the swordman (to his top left) and the ballista. Not remotely the damage I need.
Now my instinct would be to clear the bridge and somehow get another attacker or critical booster up there (like, with a wagon) but I can't load my commander into the wagon she just spawned...
Another instinct of mine is to somehow make it "up the river" to reach the commander, but there's no unit that would have the movement range to eventually get there...
Any nudges towards the right solution welcome
There is a neutral port on the map for a reason.
Nuru's buildlist depends on what construction facilities you own.
Oh my god. I needed that spoiler hint.
I had no idea about that. - There's no mention about it in the Codex...
I was assuming it was something like that - but my guesses were that she had to stand on a beach to teleport in naval units.
Thank you so much.
edit: ok, knowing that, i solved it in 30 seconds. I had all the "puzzle pieces" (how to capture the building, how to get Nuru to the beach) figured out individually, already.
I mostly agree with your assessment. I just want to add that, in my opinion, the campaign is ridiculously easy (I S-ranked all of them first or second try.) Not just because the maps are easy to figure out and the build orders are fairly stale, but also because of the braindead AI.
The AI will often prioritize building the ineffective Ballistas and Harpoon Ships, even when I have no sea units and the port is at the corner of the map. In AW, the Artillery is 600 and Rockets are 1500. It makes no sense why they would build Ballistas when they're just 100 cheaper than Trebuchets which hit much harder. It will abandon positions when in range of certain units, instead of making a stand. It will target villages instead of halting your offense. So many times their Warships will target my villages even when they're in reach of my Turtles or my own Warships. Last thing I want to say is I've never seen the AI build Wagons. They're low cost and their movement is so large on roads (almost every map has roads), I feel like the AI is severly handicapped by not using them or not prioritize attacking them at all. It's so easy to load Spearmen, move to the other side of the map and unload them in forests or on mountains, thus creating a favourable position. The AI is just not equipped to deal with that. Having better artillery would have helped, but like I said Ballistas are overcosted for what they do. More fog of war maps would have increased the difficulty and variety as well. I think there are only two in the entire campaign? Forests not hiding units kind of take away the interesting part of fog of war though.
I think I'm mostly done with this game. There's no incentive to improve beyond S rank and Arcade mode is bit of a joke. I haven't really delved into multiplayer, but I feel like the build orders aren't too interesting because of the poor unit balance and some COs being so much better than others. I've enjoyed my time with it. The writing is stellar and the characters are charming as hell. I hope the updates and community content creation will keep the game alive. It deserves all the recognition and praise.
Saw a post on the subreddit about upcoming updates:
AI still can cheat through FoW, but that's still being worked on.
Anyone else here been creating some custom levels? I ask because I'm running into some trouble trying to integrate an event. I basically want to replicate the 'spawn allies from villages when taken' motif from Caesar's campaign mission but I can't see any option to interact with villages at all in the Event Editor's conditions menu. I would imagine that mostly anything in the campaign can be replicated so I'd appreciate help on how to get this to work.
On another note, I'm disappointed to learn that there is no volcano biome tile set - apparantly the devs couldn't find a way to balance it for custom maps. It would be nice if they could find a solution because I really want one for my campaign's endgame levels.
Oh, unrelated but why is there no ocean backdrop for the cutscene editor like the one present in the campaign's ocean missions? It seems like a baffling omission when the devs went out of their way to add three seperate beaches and castle interiors. You can't really have naval units (outside of merpeople) in cutscenes as is since they just look silly hanging out on land.
On another note, I'm disappointed to learn that there is no volcano biome tile set - apparantly the devs couldn't find a way to balance it for custom maps. It would be nice if they could find a solution because I really want one for my campaign's endgame levels.
Oh, unrelated but why is there no ocean backdrop for the cutscene editor like the one present in the campaign's ocean missions? It seems like a baffling omission when the devs went out of their way to add three seperate beaches and castle interiors. You can't really have naval units (outside of merpeople) in cutscenes as is since they just look silly hanging out on land.
I'm watching the video, and I'm about a half hour into it. Here's the other changes I've seen them mention thus far.
-quicker skipping of battles animations/cutscenes.
-option for end turn (yes/no) confirmation
-can set zoom level when playing on tv now
-turn rank requirements shown for campaign
-can set a checkpoint in campaign (like a save state instead of suspend save). Locked out of S-Rank if used.
-no more smoke puffs visible from enemies spawning units in Fog of War
-no battle animations in multiplayer Fog of War (so if player 2 & 3 get into fight, player 1 can't see what units they are if they are in fog)
-you now correctly share visibility with allied team(s) in Fog of War
-fog visibility updates quicker after movement.
-Ryota buff: can dash through allied units now (doesn't damage own units but can set up groove easier)
-Tenri nerf: now charges slower as it was supposed to
-They are aware of other balance changes, but they'll be in a separate balance patch
-Mentioned Nuru: First attempt will be to massively slow her charge rate, also mentioned possibly not allowing summoned unit to move
-7 new co-op maps included with the patch
-Team number reflected on overview screen (so you can quickly see who is on what team)
-Fixed quickplay timer bugs
-Can insert AI in online play
-Can no longer suspend quickplay match, is meant to be synchronous
-Renamed 'Exit' to 'Suspend' in the menu
-Enabled international keyboard on Switch, so you can type in whatever region
-Volcano biome might come in the future for custom maps
-Fixes to colorblind mode
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I can help more in about an hour or two. Just set up location markers for the village(s) you want to have spawns (unique for each) and then you can have them tagged when creating the trigger events. 1 event will be of current player owns a structure in "location" then it outputs the event of spawn units at that location. Location tiles will need to surround the locations as well so they have spaces to spawn.
OMG the Ryota buff! So good!
No need to help further, I got it up and working just fine thanks! I was tripping up on the individual triggers for each village. Seems simple in retrospect but I'm still getting the hang of things.
Thanks, again!
Yes, for all the problems I had with the campaign, I did like the game enough to put in all this time, and I'd rather have this than no Wars-alikes at all. You need some hit-and-miss experimentation to keep a genre vibrant and for both developers and players to refine their sense of what does or doesn't work. It's encouraging that the issues with the core systems seem readily solvable with community content, though I haven't played around with the editor yet to see how flexible and customizable everything is.
I solved all the puzzle stages in two quick sittings yesterday, and they were even better than I expected—consistently fun, and perhaps the best mode of the game. It's like the whole campaign was an overlong tutorial to get to the good stuff here in the checkmate patterns. This shouldn't be a surprise, given how the puzzles play to the strengths of the game (critical hit formations, lots of different movement types and terrain interactions, and CO powers/Grooves in a context where balance doesn't matter) while papering over the major weaknesses (enemy AI that plays defensive and scared, unit pricing and building, mission pacing). They're not particularly tough, with about a half of them basically doubling as Groove tutorials, but they raised my opinion of the overall package considerably.
Then I checked the campaign to look at the Epilogue as I now had over 100 stars, and sure enough... another dungeon-crawler that doesn't let you build.
Wargroove's puzzle mode actually has a pretty unique place in the genre, in that you normally don't see these kinds of puzzles in a large-army format with lots of expendable pieces on the board. Endgame chess positions (the archetype for this sort of logic) are usually quite stripped down, and even in dense positions it's obvious which pieces are too far out of the way to be relevant. Into the Breach, the gold standard in video games for this format, is all about squeezing every drop you can out of every piece and every move; you know you'll have to use the totality of your resources at hand, so you play for maximal efficiency.
Here it's quite different. Wargroove's puzzles are about board vision: they're incredibly dense and busy, presenting lots of pieces to move or enemies to attack, and the central challenge here is to narrow this information down to the hotspots that are relevant—the enemy units you absolutely must destroy, or the squares that specific units of yours must absolutely occupy. You need a large-army game with consistent, type-based unit interactions for this kind of puzzle to work. Some of them fall pretty easily to a few basic concepts (if you see a transport, that tells you a passive critical assist with a spearman or dog is likely to matter; if you see a six-tile route from your cavalry to the Commander/Stronghold, you know it will probably have to participate in the kill), and some of them look as though they must have multiple solutions (because they fell a bit too easily to the first thing I tried). But the best ones are quite good at drawing your eye towards the relevant subgoals, then putting you just short of achieving them, with a shortfall of one damage point or one square of movement—which signals that you're on the right track, but you need to make one or two subtle adjustments to free up one unit or unblock one tile.
My favourites here were 13 (Desert Bones, the one with Caesar and the gated-off trebuchet) and 23 (The Long Way Round, where Tenri has to deliver a villager to the exit). In either case, it's not hard to figure out what you'd like to do, but the subtleties of the terrain and enemy placement put you in a spot where you're sure this would be straightforward if it weren't for one specific square that is just slightly inconvenient. I was also quite fond of 12 (The Winding Bridge, the villager escort with Koji), since you have such a wide range of potential targets for your Sparrow Bombs and you have to think about how to use them most effectively not just to inflict damage, but to open up space for movement.
And then there's 15 (Storming the Keep), discussed further up the page:
I actually loved the "aha!" moment of figuring this out, and I thought it was quite fair, if also different enough from everything else in the game that it's the one and only time the player has to think about this mechanic, so you can't solve this from experience alone. Throughout the whole campaign I thought that Nuru's available summons were just a map-specific constraint for the sake of balance, and there were one or two moments where my plans were caught off guard by how she could only call up the basic units (soldiers/spears/dogs). This puzzle does come off as a case of "This is how we actually implemented it on the back end, so let's trick it out and see if the players catch on," but I think the clues are sufficient.
The main clue is the barracks. This is a one-turn puzzle and you have absolutely no use whatsoever for a barracks, so it looks irrelevant. But it's also a Nuru mission where she is way out of position, and you have funds in the bank, so you know it will involve summoning. I think the idea here is for the player to check what Nuru can build (because of course you want something that packs a punch, and ideally you'd like to hit the Stronghold hard, but only a dragon or warship would have the reach), then come away disappointed that she is limited to ground units, then notice: hey, I have a barracks, and access to all ground units beyond the basic three, and look, there's a port. It takes a bit of out-of-the-box guesswork to capture the port, then check Nuru's build list to see what happens, but that becomes the logical thing to try. So this puzzle acted as an advanced tutorial in disguise, even if this is something that will never practically matter outside of this one puzzle. I actually wish there were more puzzles like this one that coaxed the player towards discovering hidden mechanics, but perhaps there wasn't much else to discover.
The main clue is the barracks. This is a one-turn puzzle and you have absolutely no use whatsoever for a barracks, so it looks irrelevant. But it's also a Nuru mission where she is way out of position, and you have funds in the bank, so you know it will involve summoning. I think the idea here is for the player to check what Nuru can build (because of course you want something that packs a punch, and ideally you'd like to hit the Stronghold hard, but only a dragon or warship would have the reach), then come away disappointed that she is limited to ground units, then notice: hey, I have a barracks, and access to all ground units beyond the basic three, and look, there's a port. It takes a bit of out-of-the-box guesswork to capture the port, then check Nuru's build list to see what happens, but that becomes the logical thing to try. So this puzzle acted as an advanced tutorial in disguise, even if this is something that will never practically matter outside of this one puzzle. I actually wish there were more puzzles like this one that coaxed the player towards discovering hidden mechanics, but perhaps there wasn't much else to discover.
The Ryota and Nuru changes (if the latter goes through) break their respective puzzle maps, so I wonder if the puzzles will be retuned or if the mechanics will be left as is, inconsistent with the rest of the game. Otherwise, Ryota's change is definitely for the better. It's not intuitive that he can't use allied units for pathing: the Codex text about the mechanic says that you can use allied units to make setups, but it's very unclear about how you make setups not by slotting units into place but by knocking out enemies that are out of place, and I assumed it functioned like the former and not the latter until I tried it. And then I never used his Groove again (far too situational, not worth the setup) until his puzzles. But the last Ryota puzzle, 22 (A Bitter Struggle), relies on the current functionality and is extremely satisfying to pull off, so it would be a shame to lose it or to have it trivialized.
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So as a big fan of Fire Emblem, would I likely enjoy this game? I haven't heard much about it.
...Maybe! I have been, and I'm a Fire Emblem fan who'd never played Advance Wars. It's still a very tactics-focused game, with little in the way of macro strategy.
Unlike Fire Emblem, all your units (except your commander, a powerful hero unit) are expendable, bought at barracks and other buildings with your income via capturable towns. If your commander dies, it's game over — in that sense, it's sort of similar to Fire Emblem, where the classic way of playing is to reset when a unit dies.
I'd say give it a shot. It has a wealth of content and is inexpensive.
Does it have anything to do outside of battle? With units being purchasable, does that lower the sense of needing a great strategy to won? In other words, can you just suicide your units into the enemy? And, if units survive, do they carry over to the next mission?
I think you would. There is no persistent progress or management metagame that carries over from map to map, and most of your units are expendable types rather than characters, but apart from that, this is definitely a game that asks you to use your Fire Emblem brain. In a few cases, you'll recognize some of the mission objectives right out of FE (defeat the commander, defend for X turns, escort the defenseless villager), and late in the game there is one specific mission I thought was an excellent FE tribute. Think of this like FE without any inventory/weapon management or RPG-like character progression, and with buildable soldiers.
Well, no, there are no real RPG mechanics to do outside of battle. There's Puzzle Mode, which isn't able normal tactical combat. Instead, you have one turn to solve a pre-arranged puzzle of how to do an objective with the allotted units.
There's also the ability to create your own (and play others') customized maps and campaigns, complete with the ability to make entire cutscenes, all with the tools used to design the official single-player campaign.
As for the difficulty: it's reasonably challenging — more rigorous than Fire Emblem often is, because of the lack of RPG mechanics affording the potential to become overpowered or cheese things. There are also several difficulty sliders to fine tune it if you desire more challenge.
Units do not carry over between missions. You'll often have different commanders for missions, too, each with their own unique power.
I haven't been following this thread, so I don't know if this has been answered, but I've tried multiple times, unsuccessfully, to get into Advance Wars, before eventually discovering Fire Emblem. Wargroove looks even more appealing to me than AW did, but before I bite, what are some of the main differences between Wargroove and Advance Wars?
I don't know. But they said the patch should launch simultaneously for all consoles/pc.
- Each unit type has specific conditions for critical hits, which do ~50% more damage than normal. Spearmen critical hit when next to another spearman, Knights if they travel their full distance before attacking, and so on. Figuring out how to maneuver your units to set up criticals is a big part of breaking through deadlocks
- Instead of COs with passive abilities, you have commanders, who exist as fairly powerful units in-game. If they die, you lose, but they gain active abilities (called Grooves) by performing kills. One can heal units in a given radius, one spawns pillars that can blockade enemy units, etc.These are comparable in some ways to the lord characters in Fire Emblem.
- The campaign missions frequently have mid-mission events that shift the scope or objectives in some way
- Unlike AW, the game auto-saves after each move, a la Fire Emblem. There may be manual saves added in future updates, however.
6-2 fucking me up. Nuru keeps getting sniped. Just gonna put all 3 COs on the southern track and fucking steamroll through the bottom while merfolk and turtles tear it up above. Shit's redonk.
Also, I just want to say the artificial difficulty of just arbitrarily giving the enemy double income earning without physical representation via properties is fucking horseshit. Or, have properties that are towns so there are villages and towns and towns are worth double income. That could be a good gameplay wrinkle for fighting for economic properties.
/rant.
Also, I totally made an idea come to life in the editor. Pretty cool if I have an idea for a gimmick on a map it can happen. Was making this grotto in the mountains with merfolk that protect this healing caldera in the middle of the map. had several triggers in place that when they died they dropped defensive crystals and if they tried to leave the grotto they turned into vine tiles. Will work on it later when I have more ideas to make the map fun, but can totally see incorporating it into a campaign down the line.
Also, I just want to say the artificial difficulty of just arbitrarily giving the enemy double income earning without physical representation via properties is fucking horseshit. Or, have properties that are towns so there are villages and towns and towns are worth double income. That could be a good gameplay wrinkle for fighting for economic properties.
/rant.
Also, I totally made an idea come to life in the editor. Pretty cool if I have an idea for a gimmick on a map it can happen. Was making this grotto in the mountains with merfolk that protect this healing caldera in the middle of the map. had several triggers in place that when they died they dropped defensive crystals and if they tried to leave the grotto they turned into vine tiles. Will work on it later when I have more ideas to make the map fun, but can totally see incorporating it into a campaign down the line.
I'm still working through the campaign (just got to 6-2) but I finished my first arcade run (as Sedge) and, man, the AI really does not seem to handle itself well on an equal playing field. Its capture phase tactics are pretty awful - my last two maps in a row, it basically ceded the sea to me for the first few turns, which let me go ahead and claim all the water villages. Meanwhile its steadfast refusal to build Wagons meant I'd always be capturing faster on land and drive it into a corner.
This one map was a very vertical map, all land and air, where your bases were on opposite sides of a wall, and not only did a Wagon let me quickly contest the villages/bases directly south of us, I was able to send swordsmen to capture the entire other half of the map, which the AI ignored.
Still really enjoying the game, but arcade mode's lost a lot of luster if the AI is going to keep making super basic missteps. (Then again, given the restart-if-you-die nature of Arcade, maybe I shouldn't be complaining...)
Also on the final map (spoilers for campaign/final arcade):
This one map was a very vertical map, all land and air, where your bases were on opposite sides of a wall, and not only did a Wagon let me quickly contest the villages/bases directly south of us, I was able to send swordsmen to capture the entire other half of the map, which the AI ignored.
Still really enjoying the game, but arcade mode's lost a lot of luster if the AI is going to keep making super basic missteps. (Then again, given the restart-if-you-die nature of Arcade, maybe I shouldn't be complaining...)
Also on the final map (spoilers for campaign/final arcade):
Elodie had her groove and just... didn't use it? And let my bloom dragon go ahead and finish her off? It was very weird.
Yeah it's just "AI gets double income", right? I don't think I'm about that life.
Just fly them up to where Sedge's army is and have them roast any anti air units (Mages, Ballistas) or find a gap and have them attack Sedge in order to win. I beat that mission on my second try and found a way to pin Sedge down in order to KO him in 2 turns.
Yeah. I keep making myself angry by trying. Want stars to use for the art gallery, but just end up seeing stars in a fury
Oh wait I think it's 6-2 then. That one was easy. This one is against a commander-less seaside town.
Just get dragons and head up top while doing bare minimum to hold forces at bay below.
After Finally managing to clear Sigrid's side mission, finally beat the campaing
Also, altho i love that the game is doing its own thing, i really miss AW styled "mix and match your Commanders" missions.
Well, except the epilogue.
That Elodie fight is pretty cool, changes entirely the paradigm of the game into basically a lite SRPG.
With the story done i feel like Empress Tenri was, like, missing from the game entirely, like she got less development than Ryota, Green Finger and even Sedge.
That Elodie fight is pretty cool, changes entirely the paradigm of the game into basically a lite SRPG.
With the story done i feel like Empress Tenri was, like, missing from the game entirely, like she got less development than Ryota, Green Finger and even Sedge.
Also, altho i love that the game is doing its own thing, i really miss AW styled "mix and match your Commanders" missions.
? It was just an ordinary Floran dragon I recruited from a tower.
Truth be told, I might just drop this game. Got to 3-3, failed and have to restart and I'm not looking forward to repeating all those turns. The levels are too long for my liking, and I doubt the difficulty eases up. I'm not a fan of the campaign missions right now, despite enjoying some of the underlying mechanics, artstyle and so on. It's a bit of a slog.
The upcoming patch introduces tuned difficulty settings and mid match save points so if you're feeling overwhelmed right now, wait until the patch drops and see if that helps improve your enjoyment.
Not the cycle. Just who gets attacked by the minions. Can't get things lined up for mercia to build groove so it's really frustrating.
Just beat the last mission (before the epilogue). First try with an S rank. That was fun, that battle felt more like Fire Emblem then AW. I almost got killed in one of the first turns the first time that enemy groove happened lol, but it was manageable once you know what to expect. Now to grind the last 7 stars I need to unlock the epilogue. Guess I'll try out arcade.
According to this reddit post from Chucklefish, the date is still TBC.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wargroove/comments/aqzqcw/upcoming_qolcommunity_feedback_patch_livestream/
There's other details on what to expect from the patch here, if you're interested.