Selecting missions is done on a world map screen, with a satellite map. To be fair, it's not like a political map matters after the meteors. In contrast to the Wars World trilogy, previously completed maps can be replayed at the player's leisure. All the dialogue will still be in place too, I believe.
We can also see a preview of the map on the top screen while hovering over it. This is the exact artstyle used for the Wars World trilogy, and it's jarring seeing it applied to the vastly different environments of DoR.
Also, the difference between Wasteland and Woods on these screens is far less easy to pick out than I'd like.
Oh, if that title doesn't come off as the slightest bit concerning. I think we're a bit too early to be cashing in death flags yet, though- we've barely known our heroes long enough for them to have names.
Ah, that's the sort of location descriptor that strikes me as helpful. It's probably one of the only ones we'll see for quite a while.
Will has now been sufficiently fed to be capable of being allowed to do things, but Brenner still imposes reasonable limits- basically "don't make us rescue you a second time."
A fed and rested cadet is one that retains the potential to be useful later.
I don't think there's anywhere on this meteor-blasted continent that can be called "safe".
Good on Brenner for catching on to Will's slight worries, there. Leaving that sort of thing unnoticed can easily spiral out of control.
Kid's taking his time adjusting. Reasonable.
Just to make it explicit that's what's going on.
No, we're not discussing the biological implications of a lack of sunlight. It'll come up occasionally and it's a huge morale downer, but not having sunlight should really be far more killer than it's going to be. Which is fair enough, since the alternative is the story stops now, but there's only so much attention you can bring to the lack of sunlight before I'm thinking about it.
Well, our technology is highly decentralised, not many people are going to have the ability to turn on a giant, dust-clearing fan. Not that we had the technology to do this before the meteors.
...OK, Lash probably could've whipped something up, but Lash would never do anything like that.
These words are DoR's manifesto, and this is usually how Brenner expresses this sentiment.
And Will's going to latch onto it.
Brenner says this, and while on the surface it sounds like "it will just happen eventually", I think Brenner is aware of the fact that it will take real effort from people in order to accomplish that. And he's not afraid of that fact. Somebody's got to do the real effort, and they won't be doing that if they're dead.
Will, on the other hand, probably doesn't think there's good odds of something like that happening. A bit of a self-defeating view, really.
Brenner knows the basic building blocks of a good work ethic- never say never. There is only "what can be done today, and what takes time?"
Now begins the work for today- looking for more survivors.
Will is eager to pass on the favour.
The danger coming from The Beast and his like, I assume. There's not much in a post-apocalypse setting that is a present danger, given most of the usual predators all died out.
Right now, Brenner is treating Will as another civilian to look after and not a trained professional to do the looking after, and Will is chafing against that. As a cadet, he's in that awkward limbo between the two, and Brenner can hardly be shifting the scale to the latter end.
Brenner sees his enthusiasm, and shifts the notch slightly. Will can pitch in now, but Brenner is not yet ready to let him put his neck on the line.
I don't think one can ever be ready for that.
Will is happy to accept that much.
The idea of not succeeding, on the other hand, proves a tad too difficult.
This man is a generic soldier- our group is large enough that there are generic people to speak up, but only the people whose faces we've seen are going to be fleshed out. Well, for now. We've got a few more hangers-on waiting in the wings.
This line is a bit vague, possibly dependent on intonation- I can't tell whether this man is saying the sight of towns with no survivors is common, or that all the towns Brenner's men have visited today are extinct. These two thoughts change the context of the response quite severely.
Because Will sounds like he heard the former. There's a sense of urgency in his mind here, one that reflects his newfound urge to do as Brennan did.
An urgency that causes him to overlook the incoming hostiles.
And by "we", I assume he means "Will". He could probably handle himself.
Now, Brenner may be capable of handling himself far more ably, but still.
That's all well and good, but best to do the non-giving up thing when the raiders aren't around.
It is now our first mission where we know who our commander is for the whole mission, and we will now be using the standard musical arrangement Advance Wars has: During our turn, the song that will be playing is Brenner's theme. Unlike the Wars World trilogy, however, the CO themes have names, and Brenner's is, true to form, Hope Never Dies.
And yes, DoR COs have a lot more metal in their themes than the COs in the Wars World trilogy.
From a mechanical perspective, this map will be introducing us to a new unit, the artillery. Only we have one, so we'll see it in friendly hands first.
The artillery is one of a family of units known as "indirect attackers". An indirect attacker can't move and fire on the same turn, but makes up for this by having a powerful attacking score. Leave units in firing range of an indirect at your peril. Their weakness is, as one might expect, a relatively weaker armour rating compared to the tank.
As an aside, although the damage values listed for the cannons against Ships and Subs are listed as "weak", I remember artillery doing respectable numbers to naval units. This is where I admit I know the Wars World trilogy's numbers far better than DoR's.
That icon over our tank denotes that it is out of ammo. It can still use its machine guns, and its matchups are adjusted appropriately, but note that The Beast's tank is not as unfortunate.
Also notice that our tanks and The Beast's have different designs as well as colours. In the Wars World trilogy, each army was clearly based on a different real world country's military. There are, I am told, two designs in DoR, and I'm not sure which real world countries inspired which.
Quickly making a diversion to the War Room. I forgot to do this until the end of the turn, but all is well.
Lin off in her own little world with this line.
Pay attention to the woman. She's the one with her ducks in a row here.
A nice little primer on how to use artillery, albeit a basic one. Where practical, you should always put your artillery behind a chokepoint held by a tank. The tricky bit is figuring out where to place your chokepoints.
It would be a shame if you weren't actually soaking any of this in and died a quick death.
It's nice to have a relatively serious one while we're still getting introduced to Lin. She hasn't had much of a chance to speak yet, honestly.
In mechanical news, there is an event that happens if the infantry unit stands on this square. If you beat the map without doing this, the plot proceeds as normal, and they roll a few of the reveals into the ending cutscene, but it is intended gameplay, and Will's desire to find someone to save even as the conflict breaks out is telling you to look into it.
I think this is another of those maps where we're meant to interpret a specific unit, in this case this infantry, as representing Will personally.
Lin giving a nice little explanation of our unarmed tank. Fortunately, our tank's machine guns are no less effective on infantry.
In fact, tanks will always use machine guns on infantry, even if they have ammo to spare.
Yeah, our tank isn't crying too much about its ammo problems.
This tutorial was actually useful for me- clicking on a unit and seeing what squares it can fire on is a standard feature in both Fire Emblem and Advance Wars, I just needed a reminder on what button it was assigned to in DoR.
...I don't actually remember using the attack range button to show my own unit's range in other Advance Wars games. It's not a feature in Fire Emblem, that's for sure.
I should've shown off the attack range of those recons, since I'm using that in my strategy. At any rate, this infantry can shoot at the Will infantry if he stays in place or advances any closer to that square he wants to stand on.
So I decide to finish it off.
Exposes him to the recons, but with the defences afforded to him by the mountains, he can take one hit. And I want those recons to be exactly where they'll be if they decide to take the bait.
Lin being nice and explaining artillery...
The Beast gets his own theme, Wasteland Scourge. The composer understood the assignment perfectly.
Yes, despite the lack of name, The Beast is the same character each time we see him. Other translations give this character a name, but I'm fond of this one anyway.
The Beast takes the bait. As our first turn where The Beast shoots at us, we can also see that the army present on the bottom screen is the firing army.
Somewhat unfortunate, given that the information you're more interested in when an attack is fired is how much damage the defender takes no matter whose turn it is.
This message pops up to make Will's plan more explicit.
And the arrow's still there, too.
Well, Will has the spare movement to investigate, so might as well.
Also, one can notice that Will actually did a point of damage to that recon that shot at him. Round of applause for that kid.
The fact that a single "unit" of AW soldiers is represented by multiple people suggests that Will and this Rubinelle are both part of the infantry unit. Which kinda makes the fact that Will took damage just to make it to this square faster all the more in-character.
Will is in it to save a single life, and he is going to work as hard as possible to make sure it's saved.
Oh come on, you saw the state Will was in. She can hardly be that much worse off.
Mate, he's a kid. Of course he's serious.
Hopefully the corpse he's talking about isn't Will.
...Will really latched onto this line fast. I was expecting him to take a little more time to warm up to Brenner. I assume all that time passed between chapters.
At which point we get a sudden CG for our civilian. Looks like this one's going to be making it through after all.
(This character also happens to be the fourth character whose colours we can edit, and appears on the boxart, too.)
...And I'm not gonna lie, the camera angle we get focused on the bottom screen feels a mite unfortunate. I think it's just unfortunate, though- putting a character's face on the top screen kinda leads to that at this angle.
Well, hopefully we can get her back without the raiders shooting her.
Will being a lot more upfront about being with Brenner's Wolves than Brenner and Lin were.
...Also, saying "I'm with Brenner's Wolves" must be a lot more confusing when you don't know why that matters.
Unfortunately for Will, his new friend seems to have not come with a name pre-prepared.
Or... anything.
Will accepts her story at face value. I certainly wouldn't be asking too many questions until the fighting stopped anyway.
And that's the end of us talking to her, let's move back to Brenner's troop.
The artillery showing off that being a damaged unit actually reduces your defence somewhat. I believe the effect is more pronounced if you have defensive terrain, but it hardly seems to matter here. Whichever recon we shoot at is going to be destroyed.
Before we choose one, it's important to consider the longer-term consequences. Our tank can 2HKO a recon, but more importantly, destroying the unit in front of it invites it to be replaced by the Bike.
Or the tank. Fortunately, the tank is unable to fill the space in front of ours today, so we can ignore this outcome.
I blow up the rear recon and damage the one in front.
No extra hit point, sadly, but it'll probably go down next turn to the tank.
On The Beast's turn, the tank moves into artillery range. Like a goddamn idiot. I think I engineered this outcome by choosing to destroy the rear recon, but there is no way I can claim credit for this- the only way this works like I think it does is if The Beast tries to charge his tank in as soon as possible, which is an absolutely dumb plan.
Will continuing to talk to the amnesiac girl like she should know what these words mean.
...On the other hand, apparently she does.
In a lot more detail than Will does.
Well, that's hardly the most encouraging thing to hear about the country we're a part of.
And that is certainly an alarming statistic. For comparison's sake, the United States only invested 4.4% of its GDP into the military in the year 2008, and only approached 10% during the height of the Cold War. The only country who often approaches a military-spending/GDP ratio of over 10% in recent-as-of-2008 figures is Eritrea, an African country with a GDP of a billion dollars.
The only takeaways we can take from a 10% investment is either that Rubinelle is a poor country or Rubinelle is highly militarised, and the military strength figure of "Excellent", combined with the fact we have tanks that survived meteor strikes, does not make it sound as if the former is all that probable.
Good question. I can't imagine that's how the subject is taught in Rubinelle's textbooks.
Even Will's suspension of disbelief is being strained by that one.
Hopefully Lin has a better idea of what to do with the weird amnesiac girl with the special interest in Rubinelle's military receipts.
...Well, when she's done tutorialising terrain. Why now? There's hardly any terrain here for most units to be benefiting from.
The artillery begins by making sure that tank doesn't attack mine. That is probably the most dangerous thing that can happen all map.
Will has the option of emerging from the back and shooting at the bike. This is far more likely to end in losing him, so we're going to hang out in the mountains for now.
The tank finishes up the recon. There's not much that The Beast can do to me from this position.
Although for some reason, he tried. Idiot.
Another random time for a tutorial, a quick mention of the fuel mechanic. A unit may only move a set number of squares before it runs out of gas and is forced to stop wherever it finds itself. The amount of gas each unit has is normally far too high to ever reasonably meet, the main use of the mechanic seems to have been discouraging cheating in Fog of War. In Advance Wars DS, some COs were able to deal damage directly to the opponent's fuel lines, but a unit is going to become useless by running out of HP or Ammo far sooner than it will by running out of fuel.
The bike didn't take his chances with the tank, but remained in artillery range. Nature took its course.
Not putting their units in artillery range.
Oh, you haven't even been up against Lin yet, seems a bit early for that.
Another healthy S Rank, with a free 150 points in Technique and a pretty solid 120 Speed for a tutorial map. I don't like how much lower Power is, but while it's still above 100, I'm hardly complaining.
What few we found, anyway.
This is our first mission where we can see our own side having taken some hits to our loss value. One HP to our tank is worth 700, and four HP to an inf is 600- oddly high, given that the cost used to be 400 in the Wars World trilogy. Something to keep in mind when loss value starts to matter.
Anyway, time to go back to camp and report on our success.
Good question. One that isn't particularly obvious by looking at her.
Brenner seems happy enough to applaud the success to Will's face.
Something I never noticed until right now, but take another look at that CG of her waking up in Will's arms. That jacket is new. And it is identical to Will's.
The fact Will's still wearing his own raises certain questions about how many spares Will has, but one does kind of have to assume that, artstyle notwithstanding, the one ??? is wearing now is the same one Will put on this morning.
Unfortunately, Brenner is no more readily able to extract ???'s name than Will was.
...With that approach, hardly surprising. We should really have shown her to Lin first.
Brenner is in no hurry to entertain this line of thought, but Will hurriedly gives him a fade-to-black explanation of his own interrogation.
Brenner accepts the trauma theory at face value as well. I can only wonder what sights Brenner wants to forget- which ones happened before and after the meteors.
Lin has apparently already been appraised of ???'s random outburst of Rubinelle's military expenditure, and is happy to start getting suspicious of which people ??? would have to be hanging around in order to absorb that information.
Brenner instantly declares that ??? is to be treated as a civilian first, with any questions raised by this whole business to be dealt with when ??? is ready to be more cooperative.
Lin, for her part, is happy to accept that much. I'm certainly in no hurry to say ??? is the hostile party in this situation, but I would definitely be keeping my eye open for anyone she might have known in the past.
Brenner then turns to Will and tells him to follow up on his "saving her" thing with the postrequisite "keep her in good condition" follow-up. If Will is going to be a member of Brenner's group, he is going to need to bring the accompanying healthy attitude to civilians with him.
Next time: We meet some civilians who make that challenging.
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