| ||||||||||||||||||
Nectaris Advance? One of my fondest memories of the PCEngine was a game called Nectaris (called Military Madness in the US) made in 1989. The first strategy game I remember playing to death. While Advance Wars is actually the sequel to GameBoy Wars and GameBoy Wars 2, the similarity those two have to Nectaris is there.
Nintendo has taken the Nectaris formula, and run with it. The game itself is quite simple; use your units to destroy your enemy's and attain your mission objective. Your objectives are usually a straightforward "destroy all units", or "capture enemy HQ" types about 90% of the time, but there are some other intersting ones, such as: Capture 15 cities first, or Protect such-and-such unit for 15 days. It gets more interesting if the map you're playing on uses "Fog of War" rules. This is a truly challenging mode. In here, your sight of the map is limited to the area just surrounding your own units. This presents much more difficulty, as enemy units can be just outside your viewpoint, and you have no idea. Another intriguing factor is the ability to hide any of your units in forests or reefs. When one is placed on such a location it becomes invisible from enemy sight, even if it falls within their view. The only way to discover a hidden enemy unit is if one of your own is directly adjacent. Even then, once a unit of yours discovers a hidden one, the discovering unit's turn ends and they are left helpless. Quite challenging indeed. When checking out possible hiding places, it's always good to travel in packs. That way if a unit is uncovered, your following unit can use it's turn to attack it. Something else Nintendo added to this interesting style of battle is the ability to place an infantry unit on a mountain, and increase their visual range by about 4 times. Make good sentries.
Something Nectaris didn't let you do was build your own army, or have water units. This is because Necatris takes place on the moon (no water), and there is no way to make money with which to buy anything. In Nectaris, the only way to get new units was to capture a base that had units inside. AW gives you land, air and sea units, factories, airports, sea ports, money, and you don't just fight a faceless army. Every team you face is lead by it's own Commanding Officer (CO), and depending on the CO their units can have enhanced attributes such as greater range for long range weapons, superior strength for air units, sea units, or greater movement. On top of all this, every CO (including the ones at your disposal) have a special power that can be used during the course of battle. Attacking, defending, capturing, everything you do increases a gauge under the CO's portrait. Once filled, you can activate that CO's special power. These can range from repairing your units, causing a snow storm, to attacking the field with a meteor.
Attacking is a bit different than in Nectaris. A big part of Nectaris' strategy was to surround your enemy. Doing so would greatly decrease their defense statistics before the battle. In AW, there is no such advantage to surrounding, but instead the attacking unit gets the first strike. In a case of two units of the same type attacking eachother, the attacking one would come out the winner by sometimes a large margin, whereas in Nectaris there was a bit of randomness to each battle, and because the units would attack eachother at the same time, the results were not always known. (the attacker would sometime lose a battle in some cases when fighting the exact same unit) There are ways to increase the odds in your favor in terms of defense. Some such ways depend on the type of terrain the unit is on, or the number of battles the unit has survived. These methods should not be heavily relied upon unless you're dealing with very basic tank/infantry units, as later in the game you'll get units that are specially made to destroy certain others, and carefully manuvering those should be your key interest.
So Nectaris fans, rejoice. This was my favorite game in 2001.
 |
 |
