Base Capture

Cities provide 3 stars of defense and cost 1 movement point for all land and air units. This is the highest defensive modifier available to non-infantry and non-mech units outside of HQs, making cities extremely important strategic locations to secure with your units.

That’s not the only reason cities are important, though. They can be captured by infantry and mechs, as we’re doing now. Capturing a city provides three benefits: funds, supply for ground units, and recovery for ground units. Nell will explain these in more detail later.

Ironically, speed is also very important in Advance Wars missions, and capturing a city takes an infantry unit two turns. So in predeployed missions, unless you need the city for its income or other benefits, it’s often better to keep pushing forward instead of stopping to capture it.

Remember, cities still provide 3 stars of defense even when they are neutral or enemy-controlled, so they remain valuable defensive positions regardless of who owns them.

One last thing to note: you don’t always capture cities at the same rate. We’ll go into how capturing works in more detail later.

Tanks have a movement range of 6, which is pretty good for a land unit. In fact, the only other land unit with higher movement is the Recon, and tanks destroy Recons. This makes tanks one of the most likely units to gain the first-hit advantage.

They also deal decent damage against most other ground units, with the main exception being Medium Tanks, making them extremely cost-effective. And what is the cost of a tank, you ask? A mere 7,000G! This means they can be mass-produced relatively easily. In fact, that’s why tanks tend to be the most commonly produced unit in competitive games.

Now, back to the situation at hand. If it weren’t for the terrain, all four tanks would likely get the first-hit advantage against our mechs and infantry, potentially destroying them before they even get a chance to fight back. That would secure Olaf the victory, just as he claimed.

However, as Nell and I mentioned earlier, tanks cannot travel on mountains, which means they can’t engage us there. They also can’t cross rivers, which is another important limitation.

These terrain restrictions significantly limit the tanks’ ability to reach us—and that gives us hope of winning this mission!

River is similar to Mountain in terms of obstruction and movement cost. However, rivers provide absolutely no defense bonus. They’re arguably the worst terrain to be in. Thus, they should be avoided unless crossing the river is vital to the mission. Typically, this is to allow infantry to take a shorter path to a city or some other objective. All other ground units must navigate around the river.

Cities, bases, airports, seaports, and HQs can be captured by infantry and mech units, and all of them require 20 points to capture.

The number of points a capturing unit removes each day is equal to its current HP. For example, a full-health infantry unit with 10 HP will capture 10 points per day, while a damaged infantry unit with 5 HP will only capture 5 points per day. This means that it takes two days for a full-health infantry unit to capture a base, while it would take four days for a damaged infantry unit with 5 HP.

If a unit is moved away from a base before it is fully captured, the capture progress will reset to zero. The same is true if the capturing unit is destroyed. Therefore, it is important to protect units that are in the process of capturing a base.

There is one CO that breaks this rule, and that is Sami. But we’ll talk about that when we introduce Sami in a future chapter.

In a standard battle, there are two victory conditions: wipe out all enemy units, or capture the enemy HQ. In the two battles so far, there were no HQs, so we had to wipe out their units. On this map, however, there is both our HQ and Blue Moon’s HQ, so that’s the second win condition.

Campaign missions may have additional victory conditions, such as capturing a certain number of bases or surviving for a certain number of days. Be sure to read the mission briefing carefully to understand the specific objectives for each mission.

On the other hand, if you lose all of your units, let your HQ be captured, or fail to meet the mission objectives, you will lose the mission. It’s important to keep an eye on your units’ health and make strategic decisions to ensure victory.

If you’ve been observant, you may have noticed two distinctive buildings at the left and right edges of the map. Those are HQs, and they are arguably the most important properties in Advance Wars.

The HQ serves several roles at once. Like a city, it generates funds every day, recovers damaged land units, and resupplies units with fuel and ammunition. On top of that, it provides a 4-star defense bonus—the highest in the game, tied only with mountains. Unlike mountains, however, HQs can be occupied by tire and tread units, making them one of the toughest positions on the map to attack directly.

More importantly, the HQ is one of the two primary victory conditions in Advance Wars. If you capture the enemy’s HQ, you win the mission immediately, regardless of how many units or properties remain on the map. On the other hand, if the enemy captures your HQ, you lose instantly. Because of this, protecting your HQ is just as important as launching an attack on your opponent’s.

In many missions throughout this guide, our strategy will revolve around capturing the enemy HQ for the quickest and most decisive victory.

One final detail: every nation has its own unique HQ sprite, both on the map and in the Intel screen. The HQ shown above belongs to Blue Moon. As for the other nations’ HQ designs… I’ll leave those for you to discover as you play the game.

We’ll capture the cities and set up a defense against the incoming enemy infantry and mechs. This should provide sufficient defense and recovery to allow us to withstand the enemy attack. In the meantime, we’ll send a single squad of infantry south through the narrow path to attempt to capture the enemy HQ. If there is time, as a bonus objective, we’ll also attempt to take on the enemy tanks to showcase their firepower as well as ways to fight them.

Blue represents the enemy’s movement range, while red represents their attack range. That means we’ll make contact tomorrow. Right now, the contact points are my units capturing the cities. We’ll be able to capture the cities today, allowing us to recover, so I’m not too worried. In fact, this is a reverse first strike!

Now, even though the covert infantry squad in the south is currently capturing a city, I’m going to have it advance instead. This will save us a day on our eventual attempt to capture the enemy HQ. Speed is key!

I’m also not going to have the mech capture the city. If it does, it won’t be in position to engage the incoming enemies. We don’t really need that city anyway, so I’ll move the mech forward and position it just outside the enemy’s movement range. That way, it can counterattack tomorrow if the enemy advances.

Finally, I’m going to move an infantry squad from the northern cities forward to intercept the incoming enemy infantry.

At the northern front, I will use the infantry on the city to engage the enemy infantry, and then attack him again with a second infantry from the mountain. Why do I want to engage from 3-star defense terrain instead of 4-star? Well, remember how cities can recover the HP of a unit? Doing it this way allows me to maximize unit recovery, so even though I take more damage now, I end up with healthier units than if I attacked with the infantry moving onto the mountain first.

I’m also not going to engage the mech on the mountain with the spare infantry. This is because the mech has an advantage in both firepower and terrain there, so I’m not going to win the trade. This is the reverse first strike we talked about before. It’s better to wait for them to come to us. Sometimes, the best option for a unit is to do nothing.

The southern front is pretty straightforward. I will attack the enemy infantry with the mech on the city and then clean it up with the second mech. The capturing infantry will continue forward toward the enemy HQ. This puts the capturing infantry in range of the enemy mech, so it could backfire on us if the mech attacked the infantry en route to capture. However, given what we observed in the past, I’m willing to take the risk and bet on the fact that Olaf’s mech will not attack.

Not much planning needed today. We will annihilate Olaf’s advancing infantry and mechs in our defense line, and keep advancing with our covert infantry squad. Just need to ensure we attack with our units on the cities first.

We want to minimize the number of tanks we engage at once, so our primary goal is to bait out Olaf’s tanks and defeat them one at a time. This means we want to engage the tanks on the southern side.

So here’s the plan. We’ll use the mountain to create a favorable contact point, using our infantry squad to lure the enemy tanks over one at a time.

Once they commit, we’ll eliminate each tank squad with our mechs by leveraging the attacker’s advantage and concentration of force. We’ll also benefit from the mountain’s strong defensive bonus.

Even if things go south, we can retreat behind the safety of the mountains. We’re well-positioned to either advance or fall back depending on how the battle unfolds.

By taking advantage of timing, geographical advantages, and positioning, we will come out victorious!

The first step is to set up the bait. This means we want to look for a location where only a single tank can engage our infantry. We also want a high defense bonus for our infantry. This narrows our engagement points to the following five locations:

The bottom two mountains are too far away, so they’re out of the question. Of the three mountains closest to our infantry, the top mountain is also too far from our mechs, so that one is out as well.

That leaves us with the final two mountains. Of those, the bottom mountain provides better protection for our mechs when they engage the enemy tanks, so that’s where we’ll set up our bait.

There’s actually another reason — space — but that won’t become relevant until later.

Unfortunately, this means only the 9-HP infantry can reach the position. However, with the mountain’s defensive bonus, they should be able to withstand one round of tank fire.

So that’s the plan. Sometimes, a little sacrifice is necessary for the greater good.

The 9-HP infantry will position itself as bait, while the rest of the army follows close behind, ready to spring the trap once the enemy takes the bait.

The covert squad will continue to advance toward the enemy HQ. Remember, our goal is still to capture the HQ; every tank we kill is just a bonus.

It would be rather foolish to engage our mechs on mountains with tanks. Even Olaf knows that! So instead, we need to expose another infantry unit as a target for Olaf to happily take the bait on.

Even if Olaf does fire on the mech, it’s still okay for us. We’ve already confirmed that a full-HP tank can’t defeat a 9-HP infantry on a mountain. It certainly won’t be able to defeat a 10-HP mech on a mountain, so we can safely pull back if that happens.

This is also where the space reasoning from our Day 6 planning comes into play.

This tank can only attack the mountain two tiles above our mechs. So, if I move an infantry forward onto the mountain one tile north of our mechs, it can only be reached by the tank west of the river.

This means we’ll once again be able to engage only one tank at a time. And this is exactly why having space to maneuver matters!

Another detail I want to call out is I engaged with the southern mech first. Looking at the terrain, we’ll need to shift north to engage the next tank. The northern mech will remain on a mountain, while the southern mech will have to move onto the plains.

Remember how we said we want to attack with the higher-HP unit first to maximize our damage? If the northern mech attacked first today, it would be at 9 HP while the southern mech remained at 10 HP. However, when we move north to engage the next tank, the southern mech will be fighting from the plains, where it has less defense.

To maximize our terrain advantage, we therefore let the southern mech attack first. This allows the northern mech to remain at 10 HP and, more importantly, remain on the mountain when it engages the next tank.

We expose one infantry unit to one tank and move up another infantry unit to get ready for the next trap tomorrow.

We can just rinse and repeat and set up the same trap.

This is even safer since the tank by the bridge can only reach the infantry and the last tank can’t reach anything.

One other thing I want to call out is I’m not going to use the 6-HP infantry to capture the city just yet. If you remember, cities have 20 capture points, and the number of capture points an infantry can remove each day is equal to its current HP.

So, a 6-HP infantry would need 4 days to capture the city. However, if the infantry spends today recovering 2 HP on our own city, it will have 8 HP tomorrow. An 8-HP infantry can capture the city in 3 days, meaning we still capture the city in 4 days total, but end up with an 8-HP infantry instead of a 6-HP one.

In fact, we can take this a step further and wait another day to fully recover to 10 HP. A 10-HP infantry only needs 2 days to capture the city. Combined with the 2 days spent healing, we still capture the city in 4 days total.

So there’s really no reason to start capturing now. It’s better to take the time to heal up first and get a stronger infantry out of the deal.

Finally, the covert infantry squad can start capturing the enemy HQ, and Olaf can’t do anything about it.