Bethany Plays: AW:DoR Chapter 17: Mum Says It's MY Turn With The Guns

Today's map has only one HQ, a weird bit in the middle there, and it looks like our opponent is black, not yellow. Seems we're going to be taking a break from Greyfield.

The Creeper, meanwhile... is a bit of an odd title, come to think of it. There is very definitely exactly one thing that it is referring to... but it's not relevant to the story of the current chapter, and feels more like cliffhanger material. Kinda jumped the gun on that one.

...Still "Brenner's Wolves", huh? Given what Fire Emblem was doing at the time, I don't think we're too surprised to see this lot cribbing notes from the Greil Mercs.

Will is being debriefed. It may look like he's being let in on the important details, but note that, if he was really in charge, he'd actually have had a say in whether or not they were to move in that direction in the first place.

Lin knows it's the sort of place liable to trade supplies.

We kinda need them, so here's hoping things go well.

Things did not go well.

Well, whatever it is, one thing's for sure- we're not getting those supplies.

Are you sure splitting up is wise? This feels like prime real estate for a trap.

Although it looks like Isabella's slotted in to Will's shoes just fine.

Despite being a change in background, this is all covered under "Outpost" in the location pop up.

Well, that just sounds swell. So much for a friendly port of call.

Whatever reasons they had, they don't seem to have left a survivor to tell the tale.

Lin always knows the most hilarious thing to say in times like these.

Well, hilarious to us. It's reality for these guys.

Meanwhile, back in a part of the Outpost we haven't searched yet, we can find this spoiled lady. If you've been paying attention, you've heard her name already, although I find it funny that they tell us her name when they weren't so forthcoming with her sister for an entire map.

Tabitha works for none other than Caulder, and was the person who pulled the trigger and killed Captain Brenner. At no point do the Wolves really realise she played a key part in that event, keeping their blame for that on Greyfield himself.

We haven't bumped into them, but they know we're here.

And Caulder decides the best thing to do about that is to have Tabitha fight us. With fancy weapons, of course, why on earth would he ever deign to fight us with normal units?

Tabitha has no problem with this. Or rather, she has the opposite of a problem with this.

You can fault Caulder on a lot of things, but you can't say he's a lacking father. His note on grammar is consistent with the academic consensus, although I hesitate to say it is correct. The "can vs may" in regards to permission is more of a prescriptivist view rather than a descriptivist one.

Caulder's sole condition for anything he lets Tabitha do is that he gets to watch and write down the results. He clearly subscribes to the view that the difference between goofing around and science is writing it down.

As long as Tabitha gets to have her fun, she's happy to let him get on with it.

So yeah, remember us splitting up? It seems the group that ran into Tabitha wasn't Will.

Apparently Will's bad at responding to being called "Commander" still. Perhaps I should start calling him that.

Attempted murder being considered the third worst kind of human interaction, beneath catcalling and putting words into their mouths.

Tasha is actually going to be our CO this mission! Honestly kind of surprised they're already throwing the Lazurian COs at us.

Tasha decides right before getting into a firefight is a good time to have a heart-to-heart chat with Will.

I mean, given the immediately preceding map, this is the right time for this reflection narratively, but this is certainly not the right time for it narratively in this map.

Will was less offended by the insulting tone and more sort of vaguely annoyed Tasha wasn't taking Brenner at his word when it would have benefitted her.

That same side being "surviving". Because an alarming number of people have issue with that.

Glad to know that Tasha hasn't really healed so much as found a more productive use of her anger. While she now uses the logo of the Wolves instead of her old Lazurian coat of arms (a bit of a downer, since the GBA games usually made friendly COs of different factions keep their old colours, but Dual Strike did go for consistency in its campaign), she maintains her theme Goddess of Revenge.

At any rate, before we begin, our attention is drawn to this terrain feature in the middle of the map. In the absence of an enemy HQ, this will be the source of our wincon.

It's bad news, but it's not particularly obvious what kind. And to us, it actually looks pretty harmless.

Isabella seems a bit better informed. And also more willing to speak on the subject of IDS compared to last time.

Apparently it's Lazuria's turn to get some skeletons out of the closet. Compared to Rubinelle, though, this doesn't look as bad for Lazuria's government- it's a fairly bog-standard "can we try this?" "no, too expensive", "well, too expensive to clean it up later". Most countries have projects like this lying around, although admittedly, very few will actively attempt to kill passersby.

She just does that sometimes, Tasha. I've been assuming autistic hyperfixation on military state secrets up until now.

Which raises further questions, yeah, but somehow, I don't think her knowledge is her fault.

Someday we'll figure out where she did learn it.

Here's the terrain window for the Talon Gun. We can also see our CO Tasha and the enemy CO Tabitha listed. Yes, Tabitha does have the same national symbol as Penny.

Our map. A lot of mountains and airports on our side, hinting that we'll be getting to play with planes.

...Tabitha, this is the first time you're appearing in the flesh in this story. You've only been namedropped once before.

...Not today. You just missed it, though.

Not that Will recognises the irony.

You're not making a strong case for yourself being any better. Get some evidence, or at least a thesaurus.

Well... she means well, I think?

Never mind. This girl has no idea what standards the rest of us are using, not that we can say the same in reserve.

...Hey, on the subject of "this woman does not have our standards"- from whom is she shopping from? This society, or lack thereof, has had little use for money for any reason except Funds in battle, and that's a gameplay/story segregation we've been ignoring since its introduction on its own.

Will preferred his slightly weird blue-haired girls when they nerded out about the Rubinelle military.

This is a valid tactic- we are given natural mountain chokepoints and are expected to use them.

This? Not so much. It's backed up by Tabitha's AI in the battle, but she just doesn't have the funds to build enough air units to justify spending that much money on anti-air.

This is how you are expected to win, though. The problem being that we are trying to keep the bombers safe from Tabitha's own AA and Missiles, not her Fighters and Dusters.

Will, accepting her advice at face value, claims it to be of use. And to be fair to him, it is good advice if Tabitha would actually build a fleet of planes worth shooting down.

Never provide a service unless you are certain you have received, or arranged, the pro quo.

...Waffles precluding the option of eating them in bed?

I'm with you. Probably best to tune her out when she talks. Anyway, let's go take a peek at our COs.

Tasha continuing to obfuscate the need for hiding these CO menus so long by having a description that wouldn't be too out of place in her role as an antagonist. Now, to be fair, she only introduced the plot point of her brother's death during her final battle, so that part would be a bit spoilery, but at this point in the story, her desire for revenge has taken a back seat to more idealistic drives.

So, remember how I said Will lost Max's air unit buff to make the air-themed CO of DoR feel more unique? Meet DoR's equivalent to Eagle. DoR can't really maintain Eagle's unique strengths as an air CO because of the lack of passive buffs, so decided to go all in on Tasha being a blitzkrieg CO. Her powerful, surgical strikes, backed up by Sonic Boom being more powerful than Rally Cry because air unit mobility, is balanced by a smaller CO Zone making it harder for her to build her power. This matches her reckless nature and also the way air units themselves are balanced- high in power, but very fragile if exposed to the business end of the wrong unit type's cannons.

Meanwhile, Tabitha is actually going to attempt to deploy, so let's take a look at her bios. This is our first time meeting Tabitha, so we haven't seen some of this personality yet, but it does strike me that Tabitha's particular brand of destructiveness is more sheltered cluelessness than genuine personal cruelty. She does mean ill, but it wouldn't surprise me if Tabitha has no idea of the mental consequences on the Wolves her killing of Brenner have imposed. Even if she's not quite as oblivious to what she's done as Penny seemed to be.

Wow that's a lot of numbers

Tabitha is a little weird on the subject of directly comparing COs between the Wars World games and DoR, mostly because the most obvious inspiration was himself a little mechanically weird, and also it's just a weird choice- Sturm. In AW2, Sturm had high Atk and Def buffs with no drawback, and Tabitha's CO Power Firestorm behaves the same way in that she will strike a targeted area with massive field damage. However, with her CO Zone of 0, I would honestly argue that Tabitha is the closest DoR can come to adapting Kanbei- another CO with high Atk and Def buffs, balanced by higher deployment costs. Tabitha can't be forced to pay more for deployment, but the fact that she can't build her CO Power with any unit other than her CO Unit has a similar effect of making it harder for her to build a cadre of powerful units with high buffs. Unlike Kanbei, who was kind of unbalanced because his higher deployment costs were easily swallowed in the face of his numbers, Tabitha is actually kind of balanced by her CO Zone being so small- which is why she can show up in random maps like this without the game feeling obliged to handicap her.

Also, the game doesn't really textually consider the matter, but I consider it pretty likely that Firestorm uses the weapon Caulder uses to kill Brenner. The fact that it's a nonlethal attack kinda contradicts that, but that's just how field damage works in Advance Wars- a unit can only be destroyed by shooting at it directly.

Well, we need to get a foothold in the north, and these two footsoldiers seem to be our ticket to doing so.

These footsoldiers have their eyes on the south front.

The pre-deployed units are going to go south, because they have no route north.

Tabitha's theme is Cruel Rose, which is probably the coolest enemy CO theme in the series. Most of the enemy COs in Wars World have the sort of "alarm, danger" vibes associated with FE Enemy Phase themes, but this one's a bop.

Yeah, show us what you got.

Tabitha mostly captures properites for her first few turns. She needs her own income to do anything like build planes.

Gage has spent his time assessing the cannon, and has pinpointed what we need to do to get it to stop shooting at us.

This is our first offensive structure (they were called Black Hole structures in the Wars World games, but I can't imagine the term applies here- IDS structures?), so we need to be tutorialised on the fact their attack ranges can be checked the same as any other unit's.

Will failing at indexing the basics. Lin, meanwhile, apparently has this textbook memorised.

Apparently.

Lin and Will try and fail to convince everyone that Will has his ducks in a row and is not a bad choice in Commander. I'm sure nobody will begrudge this.

In a moment of either "the devs missed the chance to be really clever" or "Lin doesn't have the textbook nearly as memorised as she thinks", you will find the tutorial for checking attack ranges on page 12 of your tutorial list.

This is the range of attack of the Talon gun. Five squares in any direction from the central square. These facts won't be tutorialised, but the Talon gun will shoot at all red units in range whenever it fires, and it will ignore black units.

Factories first. I want to establish a ground foothold before I get some airtime.

Tank sets up on this city. This is about where I expect my chokepoint to stay.

That war tank doesn't seem to be in much hurry to approach.

I build another Mech for capturing duties.

And my first Bomber. Good to start having a plan for deleting problem units.

Hello! Did you notice the Rockets?

On Turn 3, Isabella adds one more notice about the Talon Gun- we have a weak point to destroy it! Offensive structures usually have only one tile where they are vulnerable, and with 3x3 ones like this, it's usually one like this.

Offensive structures have 99 HP and obey similar, if not identical, damage rules to meteors. In the Wars World games, Pipe seams and Black Hole structures were textually developed by the same people and used the same defensive technology, but IDS was certainly not responsible for meteors here.

Yeah, this tank isn't going back. Those rockets coming up might be more interesting.

Tank retreats for repairs.

AA finishes off the tank. There'll be plenty of time until we need armour again.

And we can always build other armour.

Tasha boards up. The thing about CO Zones is that air units don't need to be the ones to charge them up.

More footsoldiers up here in the mountains for capture. Not sure which ones are going first.

Tabitha's just doing more capturing. It's gonna be a while before she sends anything worth writing home about.

There's some armour for this front. That's what the factory up here is for.

I figure I might have a chance to give those rockets a bloody nose, or at least keep it away from my capturing efforts.

I don't send one of the infantry to capture the south airport. I... probably should've noticed that.

Speaking of things I notice, the missile here is going to be the biggest problem of the map. And those units covering it are no slouches, either. At least a bombing run is in the missile's range shadow.

Tasha parks just outside range and waits for the bombing run.

The rockets will be moving in closer.

An infantry to capture the airport, and an artillery for a real chokepoint management solution.

And another mech for continued footsoldier harassment. An important part of a mountain campaign.

Tabitha's getting really good at milling around behind the Talon Gun. There's not exactly much room for me to bypass that, with all these mountains and the missiles stopping me flying over.

More airports will certainly help, though.

I decide to harass this infantry, because of a lack of real units around. I am also taking the chance to let that Talon Gun shoot, so we can see what it does.

Mildly wishing I had captured the airport sooner, but oh well.

Not like this missile is letting us get on with things.

Well, if this side is going to chokepoint, it needs its indirects.

This is me also putting a T-Copter in range for demonstration purposes.

And I give myself another Bomber.

The Talon Gun opens, and it spins around rapidly, spraying bullets everywhere and dealing 5 damage to both red units in range. New feature to this game: When an area gets hit by field damage, the grass turns brown permanently.

Tabitha has also loaded a footsoldier to a T Copter and is making a bid for my HQ. I should probably do something about that.

For now, I assemble a chokepoint, taking note of that Duster that's finally ready.

I get cheeky and start capturing a city near the Talon Gun. I'm not actually in range, but there's nothing nearby.

I also get this airport on the side of the battlefield that wants the airplanes.

And make a start on these frontal cities.

Yes, this square is out of range of that AA, why do you ask?

The artillery goes for revenge on anything that gets any funny ideas.

Misclick, I'm going to take that back next turn.

Tabitha has boarded her Duster. For some reason, AI Tabitha loves deploying in air units. It would honestly make more sense for her to deploy in tanks, given her stats, and I'm of half a mind to say this AI quirk is actually her subtle nerf for use as an AI opponent.

The thing about infantry is that, as terrible as they are at doing damage, they're also terrible at dying. You need serious firepower to oneshot an infantry, and that's kind of a waste of whatever is doing the shooting.

Tabitha flies in close. This is going to get awkward.

And that T Copter whizzes by. I'm getting there, I'm getting there...

First thing's first, getting rid of you.

...I'm not sure that was the smart play. I guess I wanted to keep my AA pristine.

It also has the benefit of keeping this Duster out of my airports.

Dodge this, Tabitha.

Rocket gets to work unwinding that anti-tank for a bombing run. Note how it's standing next to Tasha, so I get a point in CO Power.

This is going to be a bombing sweep once I get an opening.

...Not entirely sure why I'm sending a footsoldier there, although I suppose it is wanted.

Tasha backs up to make sure she doesn't crash.

And another bomber. Sometimes I think I have a problem.

Behold: HQ defence.

The Mech that blew up the tank was in range of the Talon Gun.

Tabitha flees from the Fighter, and an infantry goes for the damaged Mech.

Also I now have an infantry on my HQ. Shoo.

Fighter built. I'm gonna want that gone as soon as possible.

Well, this is a happy round number.

At some point I had to take that.

I almost went for the kill, but it's not worth getting my AA Talon Gunned.

Mech backs up and joins with a reinforcement.

So I shoot to destroy this before getting Tasha in range. That's 2 points in power lost. Worst part is, I forgot this was a thing.

Tabitha's range. I'm not sure where she's going, and that's a problem.

Again, I call this HQ defence?

Fighter goes down here. Mostly because Tabitha will do the most damage down here.

And I can always build a spare up here.

Mech that did the cheeky capture goes into the T. Copter. Not sure where I want to put it, though.

OK, now I'm just getting cheeky with some of these indirects.

At least it's not attacking me.

...How are those rockets almost out of fuel? That's a bit of a scary formation, though.

Start with some power score bullying this poor infantry...

And doing some damage to the war tank. This time with Tasha in range again.

Making sure to keep a close eye on those ranges...

And I think a missile truck will discourage Tabitha from talking to my rockets.

There's a part of me that almost wonders if the map will still be going when this infantry is done capturing.

Moving perilously closer, but not in Talon Gun range.

Or this guy's, either. But still in mine.

This is just the principle of the thing.

The AAs and the Md. Tank retreat. And you call me a weakling.

The Fighter and Tabitha's Duster also retreat to just outside AA range. What kind of AI do you call this?

Oh well, blowing this up for some Tasha CO Power.

The time has come for the bombing run. Tasha in a bomber is a delete button.

And any bomber near her gets the same powers.

....So hey, destroying those two units was enough to beef up Tasha's CO Zone, and now the square next to the Talon Gun's weak point is in range of Tasha's CO Zone. This was no accident.

As a neat little demonstration, this tank is getting an Atk Up from being in Tasha's CO Zone. I attack from the south anyway, though.

I want the KO for some more Power score.

In the Wars World games, Bombers vs Black Hole structures was set at 95 damage- just enough that a) most COs couldn't do this and b) any CO with an attack buff to bombers (Max, Eagle, Kanbei, Andy under SCOP) could. I'm not sure what the numbers are for a Bomber vs. Meteor/IDS structure in this game, but it seems they haven't changed point b) at all.

The IDS generic units use a pretty similar portrait to the Rubinelle ones, but there's also a surprisingly different (and far less bulky) uniform.

They also try to throw in some characterisation of Tabitha as being stab-happy here.

Tabitha doesn't seem to be too upset at the IDS's failures in this battle. (I wouldn't, either, given Tabitha was spending a lot of time camping outside of range herself).

Tabitha decides to take out her frustrations on Tasha instead.

Caulder calls the "experiment" to a halt. Not that we're too interested in chasing him, but still, hell of an assumption.

If you wanted to crush me like a fly, at least shoot at me.

Another happy, comfy S Rank. Kinda surprised my Technique took the biggest beating, but I suppose there were some units I built I never really needed...

Tasha, I don't know how we ever did without you.

Numbers. You know, seeing I built nearly twice as much material as Tabitha, I can see where that knock to Technique comes from. I wonder if field damage counts for Loss value, though...

With whatever it is we're doing here other than being shot at done, it's time to figure out our next step.

Dr. Morris hasn't had much to do lately. Which is honestly a good thing, given what his specialties are.

I wonder which clause Lin is agreeing with.

...Uh oh. Dr. Morris has found himself something to be doing in the narrative. See above about that being a bad sign.

Honestly, Isabella, when Dr. Morris says to do something in a panicked tone, you don't ask questions and do it. He's second to ordnance technician in that regard.

...Your guys standards are too low. When has Dr. Morris ever done this for a joke? His jokes are dad pun bad, not horribly planned.

...At least we always find the pictures and not the actual bodies themselves.

I was wondering where that plot point had gone.

Dr. Morris continues his virus metaphor, but he's gotten very suspicious. With that said, there was a year-odd timeskip since the last time we dealt with Creeping Derangea. Are you accounting for that?

...Oh, this is something else. And yeah, this would pose a problem here.

This is indeed a genuine issue with viruses. The fact that many outbreaks of disease aren't deadly is by natural design- any virus that infects a human with a disease has a natural prerogative to not kill the human it's infecting. The plagues that are deadly are always diseases that jump from animal to human, since the virus doesn't realise the differences it needs to make to its symptoms to keep its new host alive.