Part 94: Let's Commentate Advance Wars by Web! - Part 3

Let's Commentate Advance Wars By Web (or "whoops") - Part 3

Sorrry about the delay, it's been a busy few weeks. Let's see what we can -



... whoops.

So yeah, AWBW deletes its replays and logs a while after a game's been completed, and turns out that just as I was about to have some free time, the server decided that it was time to delete them for this game. As a result, I can't give full commentary on this. But we have a few bits of info to go on. First of all, how did it end?



This is Day 53 - and at this point, having been forced back with a 23 to 17 property deficit, Roonespism resigns. Hmm. How did we get there from



here? This is going to take some major reconstruction work... but I do I vaguely remember some bits of all this.



It's no real surprise, but Kenny is the first to go. Roonespism shuts down and captures his bridge cities, western bases and airport, leaving him with pretty much 3000G a turn. At some point, Kenny accidentally suicides his last unit and is routed. One side-effect of this is that Roone can't set up an HQ capture, so has to manually capture the remaining cities. This doesn't come up in single-player Campaign, but in a game with more than two players, defeating a player with an HQ capture is better than a Rout - with an HQ Capture win, you automatically gain all the properties that were controlled by the vanquished player.



In many ways, Slur provides as much opposition as Kenny does when it comes to Roonespism's conflicts in the south-east. But Slur's own grinding advance against kooky is a pretty slow process. With Kenny all but subdued, Roone can send forces in to attack kooky as well, to try and steal a march on Slur. It works pretty well, and eventually kooky finds himself in as bad a position as Kenny was.

Roonespism also manages to grab all four central cities, and at this point controls over half the properties on the board. So where did it all go wrong?



Firstly we have a very well-timed Black Wave from Slur that prevents Roonespism from capturing kooky's HQ, as well as slowing down his attempts to take the neutral cities left behind after kooky is routed. In fact, Slur manages to muscle Roone out in the north-west and gain a hold of the territory up there...



... and you eventually end up something a bit like this. With the assaults on Kenny and kooky, Roonespism had to spread himself pretty thin, which meant that his control of the centre cities was mostly left up to infantry. If you've got good infantry, then that's fine. Jess does not have good infantry. Slur's able to wrestle control of the north-west while gradually taking the centre, giving him parity...



... and eventually, dominance, leading to the resignation we started out with.

There's a few things to consider: was this Roonespism's game to lose, and did he mess up? Maybe. If nothing else, he ultimately had to deal with the fact that he was using Jess, who just isn't a very good CO in AWBW. Imagine Rain of Fire with a human-controlled Hawke (and, well, no volcano I guess. Also air units) and you have an idea of the problems Roonespism faced. When it comes to day-to-day power, Jess' best units are the same power as all of Hawke's units, and she has a key problem with that most vital of units: infantry. With Roone forced to split his resources to a lot of different fronts, infantry became even more important, and ceding those central cities to Slur meant Roone lost his funding advantage. Speaking of funding, Black Wave came through at just the right moment for Slur to slow Roonespism's capturing of kooky's stuff, letting him roll in instead.

Sorry I lost the opportunity to actually commentate fully on this stuff, guys, but if I want to be brutally honest? It may have been a blessing in disguise. 53 days, this game lasted for, and that's pretty indicative of how multiplayer Advance Wars can turn out when you're dealing with actual people who are considerably cleverer and more stubborn than the AI. I could have been looking at four or five parts to the commentary (and probably have reached for Douglas Adams' description of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy of "a trilogy in five parts"). I certainly don't think I'd've had the time or energy to commentate the rest of the battle with as much depth as I did part 2 . Still, hopefully this sketch is enough to give you an idea of how things turned out.

Anyway, moving on. I need to poke Sockerbagarn about Battle Mystery! AC as Sami. Haven't had much time to think about the LP for a while, but let's get this thing back on the rails. I've had a bit of a reminder about the mortality of Internet thingies here, after all...