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	[quote name="fabio"][quote name="Mischief Maker"] #6 Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin The best title in Nintendo’s premiere portable strategy series, but it tried its damndest to make you hate it. From a pure gameplay standpoint this is the most balanced AW has ever been. [/quote] The 2 balance improvements were getting rid of neotanks (though Dual Strike did that first) and making naval units better by reducing their costs and letting battleships move + shoot. Other than that it's the same game. [quote]The simple experience system for units encourages smart tactics over brainless tank spamming. [/quote] How so? Anti tank guns? Those things took the biggest problem with the series (turtling behind a bunch of ranged artillery) and exasperated it. The idea was to make infantry more useful, but they just don't do enough damage to anti-tank guns to really be called a "counter". Dual Strike was on to something with the sealth fighter unit. Ground based anti air was always too good. Choppers were nearly useless and bombers got one shot before getting shredded. The anti air gun was always just too good all around. It was cheap, decimated air units in one shot, fast enough to instantly respond to any air attack, shredded any non-tank ground unit, and didn't even do that badly against light tanks. [quote]Best of all the toned down COs riding a unit creates a nice “King” unit to mix up attack priorities.[/quote] The only truly broken COs in the old games were Grit and Colin. AW2 kind of alleviated this by setting up levels where they picked a fitting CO for you. Have you tried skirmish games? Picking COs is even more lopsided than the old games. Tabitha and Forsythe are the only viable choices, and Fortsythe is the better pick 90% of the time. <b>No one</b> picks anyone else in online matches. Pack Forsythe onto an infantry unit and just park him in the middle of your army. You now have a one star defense advantage on your opponent, which is decisive in the early infantry push to middle cities/factories. Even if you manage to break through and kill the CO, it's just 50% the cost of a cheap infantry unit to replace it. And that was always the trouble. They kept trying to push the multiplayer more and more when the game really, really wasn't designed for it. It was always a puzzle game where you tried to figure out how to beat an AI with a huge starting advantage. In evenly matched multiplayer games it was just an infantry rush to the middle. At most you'd see an artilley or tank or two. Whoever grabbed an extra city or base in the middle first was guaranteed to eventually win; it was just a slow snowballing grind after that. Maybe if you started with a bunch of money to buy a varied, full sized force right from the start, where the income from having a one city advantage on your opponent took time to manifest and make a difference, then multiplayer might be interesting. [quote]But Christ on a pogo stick, why did they have to take AW's bright, cheerful visuals and silly story and turn it into a SERIOUS LESSON presented in brown-o-vision? Was there some kind of public outcry that impressionable teens would turn to video games for moral guidance and start a world war because AW made it look like good clean fun? Sorry, video game developers, but when you write a character whose sole personality trait is that he tells bad jokes an incredibly inappropriate times like he's got some irritating strain of Tourettes, Tolstoy you ain’t.[/quote] I remember the campaign missions themselves being boring too. Nothing like the varied setups of AW2, and a boring linear campaign replacing the branching one of AW2 where you could skip some missions entirely. [/quote]