Naval Needs to Be More Exposed on Beach from Land Attack

Naval Needs to Be More Exposed on Beach from Land Attack

ok first a digression. Why bother? The original advanced-wars and panzer-general type game developers did not have virtually unlimited time to debate the ruleset like us. So it falls to us to check details and reinforce this amazing game genre. Ten years back, AW recieved tremendous acclaim from gamers and critical press reviewers for its easy to learn, but deep strategy, and addictive nature and fun graphics and characatures and storylines. An amazing concoction, attracting diverse range of people from kids to old fogey chess types.
I wonder if AW has become a kind of victim of its own success in a world needing constant economic and business activity and growth. There really is little room for improvement left in AW for developers to explore and later get paid decent money for. A bit like chess set makers. However we can still reappraise the ruleset specially when it makes the game easier and better and it makes sense.

So back to the original issue of this thread.
It seems clear that a landing craft and black-boat should be reasonably vulnerable to attack by land forces when either on beech or in port (or on land!?). At least they should take more damage than when at sea.
Tentative suggestion.. lander should have defence like something between apc or recon while beached.
BB may be somewhat better than lander defensively i suppose.. it is a special mystery unit.
For example on the map moats and black boats
http://awbw.amarriner.com/prevmaps.php?maps_id=49696
the BBs could nicely be vulnerable to persistent mech or tank attack. about 50percent damage would be reasonable imo.

I disagree - ships should take more damage out at sea since the ship's hull will flood with water, and fires will happen through out the ship causing much more damage, and personal injury than the actual attack. Ships in port have the fire department 2 minutes away to fight the fires, and the ship it's self will most likely not shipwreck, and if it does it'll be easily recovered by removing water from where it's docked - this would also be true for boats parked on a beach. Perhaps to make it more realistic for ships/boats ported they could make the cost lower, and/or make them repair quicker like it'd be in real life.

Modern ships don't park in the sand - they drop anchor 2 miles away, and have ferries move personal, and logistics(so it actually makes sense that they can't do it in this game).

I guess there is much lattitude in the interpretation of what AW units are, or try to represent. However i think generally the images and concensus is around world war 1 and WW2 type units with a few fancy bits thrown in the mix.  So i dont get your assumption about taking the most modern naval vessels as the normal examples?
This below is the AW lander which looks totally old fashioned and basic. Most AW images use early era stereotypes.



i think almost everyone playing AW really thinks this lander like most definitely comes onto the beach to let off the soldiers or tank. Suddenly to imagine it is 2 miles (3 kilometres out to sea) is not how most people see this game. Also if it doesnt come onto the beach then why does it in game appear on the beach blocking the passage of my tank. My tank or a mech should blast it to pieces.  If its not there then get out of the way. We dont need ghosts blocking the way.

Also the idea that naval on ports would be repaired , well that is already factored into the game. And certainly boats in ports should not benefit if the port belongs to enemy !?  First the port would need to be taken control of with ground soldiers to direct the workers etc, as is already built into AW.

It seems very clear a tank or mech should readily inflict proportionate damage on most naval vessels when tied up in port at a distance of a few hundred metres, whereas its clear that tanks on a hillside (no intervening beach) would have much greater trouble picking a target in the adjacent sea a couple of miles out (or maybe not? but thats another issue).

I think we need more opinions as to the AW universe concensus.  

Also my suggestion will make the game more intuitive and easy to play and also give a player more options and hence more ways to win. We need to try to understand the fighting problems we have .. especially how to avoid stand off stalemate situations. Having stupid boats on beaches blocking the way is fun to a point but just spoils the game if i cant at least respond and blast the hell out of them.

Also air units should be vulnerable to ground forces when they are on ground at airbases and fighters should be vulnerable to bombers when waiting for take off.  Yeah it goes on and on.

i think almost everyone playing AW really thinks this lander like most definitely comes onto the beach to let off the soldiers or tank. Suddenly to imagine it is 2 miles (3 kilometres out to sea) is not how most people see this game. Also if it doesnt come onto the beach then why does it in game appear on the beach blocking the passage of my tank. My tank or a mech should blast it to pieces. If its not there then get out of the way. We dont need ghosts blocking the way.

They do it the same way infantry block fighters.

This is ADVANCE wars, not panzer general, or some other ww2 simulator. The US navy logistic ships look different than the one in AW, but check out this dutch one:


It's pretty much identical to the AW lander, and for some reason I can't see it just driving right into the beach mostly because it's too big and will hit sand long before it reaches the beach. It'll have to park right in a port just like any other modern ship.

The only unit that makes sense being able to drive right into the beach is the blackboat, because as the name suggests it is a boat, and much smaller than the ships in the game. It also doesn't even make sense either to destroy/not be able to walk around this unit since it doesn't attack, and presumably doesn't have a force, or a big force - you should be able to just capture the unit, imo.

IMO, if we wanted a war game with sense we wouldn't be playing a minimalistic cartoon one, but a massive grand strategy game like europa universalis 4.

I should also mention the reason that ship's can take more damage than tanks, and such. A modern ship has layers upon layers of compartments that isolate every attack. Blowing up a compartment on a ship does nothing(assuming there aren't any dirtbags, and gundecks), because the next layer of the ship protects all the others.

Hey nice images iordor. interesting stuff.

But anyhow there are WW2 landers like on private ryan





and nowadays there are also iordors modern landers,,, which very few people know anything about imo.
Surely most players would imagine old style landers, (and probably the designers of AW too?)
We can only resolve that with a survey. of how all the thousands of players perceive ,or percieved (:,  this.

Also, its illogical how they block the beach if they are out to sea (like walker says with infantry blocking airborne stuff, that too obviously needs correcting at some future point for this game to be taken more seriously) We must at least recognise that is counter-intuitive. Making it more intuitive was part of the reasoning for proposing this. And without introducing any complexities.

We could do with wider opinions on this.  How do other players see landers? like ww2 style or modern?

Checkmate! A close inspection shows the ship's cabin being in the front of the AW landers, unlike the ones in ww2.

Jokes aside, I've always seen this game as modernist/futurist. Back in the 1940's the best tank would be a 'tank', not the MD tanks, much less the neo, and megatank! Try imagining those things back in ww2, though hitler did have his pipe dream of a 'mega tank'. Furthermore there's the modern stealth fighters, and regular fighters - they didn't have f-22's back then.

It is stupid that inf can block fighters, but that's the downfall in TBS games. I'd honestly rather have that happen than a super complicated battlefield where tons of units are stacked together, and for the sake of simplicity I think most people would agree with me here. How do you propose a TBS game should do with this dilemma, blanci?

Yeah good point. However also theres different types like this with forward bridge/cabin which clearly land on beach




though many others old and new do have bridge at rear. I was wondering also if some landers might reverse when going ashore so they could be pointy going forward in open sea then reverse the square back end to off load.
Dont know if theres any info anywhere on the AW game designer / artists conceptions? Even then this can differ from how we all imagine it in our minds.  So its gonna be quite tricky to prove anything .

About the unrealistic blocking of air by land problem, surely this was treated before in old forum? I ll check later .  I dont see this as any more complex than what is already inherent in AW. There are a couple of issues here.

First, Air could be permitted to overfly enemy ground units (and other units as appropriate) with proviso that you can only fly the unit onto an unoccupied square. /also ground could pass under air similarly). This is a simple and easy concession and evidently more realistic than nothing.
(in non fog and non stealth/no hidden sub games--the usual situation-- this would be trivial solution)

Secondly, in In fog or with hidden units and sub if you try and locate your air unit on an enemy unit not previously visble then the system could just instead automatically position the unit onto the nearest available unoccupied square.  Occasionally this scenario may not work totally perfectly without a little more coding than we have already. But even in the basic form in most cases it would work quite well especially for maps which are not overcrowded with units. Perhaps more thought here could make it better (without the need for extra layers as occurs with panzer general which otherwise has almost identical game mechanics). Already in fog/hidden unit situation, the AW system  needs to modify the players chosen destination tile and relocate a unit onto an unoccupied square. This would be little more in simplest form.

I think increasing air functionality would make winning easier and games more fun and realistic. Already AW is quite realistic and that is an important element because it is then simple. A simple AW system/gamemechanics is totally important.

Aaaargh. I cant believe i previously overlooked a simple argument/ fact.
Iordors "logistic ship" presumably is just that, its surely not called a lander! Because obviously it doesnt land! It is not a lander according to US navy dictionary nor anyone else. Yes, i see now iordor was playing devil advocate and trying to pull the wool over our eyes. He he