Advance Wars 1+2 Gba

[Alexandrin Chaples]

Picowarsis a turn-based strategy game where the objective is to build up an army from your bases in order to capture more properties on the map and eventually capture the opposing player's headquarters.

This is one of your bases. This is where you build your army, and it's the first thing you want to select when the game begins. Move your cursor over it and click Z to open up the build menu. There you can build any unit that you can afford with your current gold.

This is a neutral city. Right now it's not doing anything for anyone, but if you move an infantry or mech onto this tile and capture it, it'll change to your team's colors and provide 1 gold for you per turn. Every property you own, including bases and your HQ generate 1 gold per turn, so the more you have the better.

A property has 20 capture points. Each turn you can capture once, and the amount of capture points that is deducted is equal to the amount of hp the capturing unit has. Each unit starts out with 10hp, so optimally it'll take 2 turns to capture a property. If a unit has 1hp, it'll take 20 turns. Yeesh.

And these guys? These are the most basic units of your army. Infantry and Mechs. They don't always do as much damage as the bigger boys, but they have the special ability of being the only units that can capture properties.

This is where you can see information about the selected tile. Each tile has a defense rating that you can see by the number of stars next to the tile. This base has 3 stars next to it so it's a pretty beefy defensive posture. If your unit is attacked from this tile, they'll take less damage.

Of note, only infantry and mechs can traverse rivers and mountains, and they're slowed quite a bit from it! All terrain types affect units differently. It's up to you to figure out which units are affected by terrain and by how much.

These units are special. Rockets and Artillery. They can't attack up close, as they're ranged units. They attack from multiple tiles away from their target. They also cannot move and attack in the same turn, so place them strategically where you expect the enemy to walk into their range.

About the memory management. This is actually a not-fully-baked concoction put together exclusively for Splore, so the full game isn't all here yet. The full version will have multiple carts talking to each other, which is not allowed in Splore/bbs as far as I know.

In the full yet-to-be-released version there's a second cart called "loader.p8". For the splore version I ripped out most references in the code to loader.p8 but lazily missed one. In the full non-splore version loader.p8 loads first and passes in all unit data, commander data, dialogue, and some map data to picowars.p8. However in this version the map, commander, and unit data is instead loaded from a section of the spritesheet's memory starting at 0x1000

Artillery and Rockets are ranged and can only attack from a distance. They also can't move and attack in the same turn. If you press X on an artillery or rocket(yours or the enemy's) you will see the spots that unit can attack from a distance.

Though on a fair, mirrored map the AI performs well enough to beat any nooby. It plays like someone who understands the game, and how to take advantage of terrain in a strategic manner, but it can be outperformed by a smart human that takes advantage of chokes.

Lambdanaut: FYI BBS carts can use 'load' for chain-loading, with a param to send some info. Jam launcher carts work that way. I have been told that the lua memory is not cleared on load (the 2 MB of live objects, not the pico8 addressable memory space), and also that 'cstore' is allowed on the BSS. What is not possible is multi-cart meaning 'reload' to copy data from other carts into the current cart.

-Long Island crashed for me halfway

-When the units attack each other, it would be cool to show a cutscene of them attacking and defending

-Im still a lil confused on how my units heal, maybe im just dum lol

Such a great version of Advance Wars, it's unreal how well this works on Pico-8. The sprite work is brilliant, perfectly captures the look and feel of the original. Even more impressive that you managed to squeeze some AI in there to allow for Human vs CPU battles.

Heya, this looks amazing!

I'd love to play this on my handheld. It has a wrapper for the native Pico-8 app as well as splore. Do I understand correctly that there's no way to play the full game on such a system? I believe e.g. UnDUNE II can be downloaded (on itch.io) as the full game, using 12 single cart files. Wouldn't that be possible with this game?

First the American version gets released a day before 9/11

Then the Japanese version gets released in the same week as Dragon Quest VIII

And then the release of Re-Boot Camp got delayed because of the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Holy shit Advance wars is really unlucky, huh?

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