Hypothetical tweaks

What would you change about a game?

Personally, I don't like how the Advance Wars games have a paltry selection of infantry to choose from. I would have added Barracks to the game where you would produce infantry units that can be placed on mountains like mortar teams (indirect fire) and stinger squads (anti-air) and there would be a bunch of land, air, and sea units to counter them as well. I feel that these new units would fill a much-needed niche.

However, I fear that these would also make Sami and Grit even more OP than before. What do you think?

For Smash Bros I would like to see a mode where you could play as a different selected character if your current one got KO or have an mode where you can swap out at will. It's infuriating that modders got the former working in SSBB Project M while the Smash Wii U restricts it entirely to the final battle of that Smash Tour mode. It's odd to have a feature that could change the way people play the game and hide it away in one mode of the game that most people don't like.
Also for the 3DS version having access to Smash Run's final battle fight conditions at any time instead of just restricted to the randomness of Smash Run (killing the most enemies, climbing race, ground race, stamina battle, etc).


It's been a long time since I'm played Advance Wars. The mortar team infantry is an interesting idea while I'm not too sure about an anti-air infantry unit though. Weren't the anti-air and missile launcher vehicle units enough of a counter to air units?

You mean like a Tag Team?


Yeah, but, stingers can walk on mountains and they'd be cheaper…

more waifus

For the latter idea, that would be a better way to describe it (don't know how those words slipped my mind) and I know other fighting games have had that option before.

Good point.
On the topic of Advance Wars, allow for bridge terrian to not block navel units or at least two different types of bridges one that can block and one that can't.
A new terrain element I would like to see would be train tracks for a new train artillery unit or allowing piperunner units to be able to travel on train tracks. Train tracks would not function like the impassable barrier that normal pipes did or being destructible like pipe seams, the would be able to be traveled over by any unit and could provide a small defense bonus to infantry units on them.

You could just reskin artillery as mortarmen. Giving them infantry weaknesses and movement range would make them better balanced too. It's too easy to form choke points with artillery using terrain like mountains which infantry can cross more easily. However if you do this there will be less incentive to use air units like helicopters. Also Sami will be monstrously OP.

Missile launcher costs are prohibitive and their movement only makes them useful for defense. Anti-airs are a bit more risky since bombers can ohko them anyway and since they lose to most other land units, but they're fairly cheap for the amount of damage they can do monetarily.

We put it to a vote, and we're all in agreement: the mayor should be a playable character.

I absolutely agree. All those who dislike this proposition are no better than those bandits!

Put this idea into Days of Ruin and it feels like it will balance out much better. Since CO buffs are restricted to areas of effect you can have players decide to empower an infantry unit and move them around to spearhead attacks, or have infantry tag along with other (faster) units.

I like the idea of mortar/AA units but I feel like part of this could be solved by giving Mech units the ability to attack vehicles, and certain types of Air Units. Maybe keep them as a direct attack unit to balance this out since being able to initiate against Copters from range.

For Mortar Units I would say have them function like basic infantry by default, and when they want to attack from range they need to spend an action to "hunker down" into mortar mode. The idea is for Mortars to be reliant on using infantry mobility to get good positioning before an enemy approaches their range, But once they enter into the indirect attack stance they become vulnerable to other units moreso because they lack a retaliation attack.

If this is DoR the infantry choices would look like this.

...

There.

On the old NES, you know how you could quickly replenish your health in the original Zelda by visiting a fairy fountain? I wish that they implemented that regen feature in the original Metroid as well. Instead, I'm forced to grind for health drops everytime I die, breaking Metroid's forward momentum.

There's one thing I want in every single game I play. Unfortunately I seem to be in the minority.

How could they fuck up the Freelancer class so badly?

-Allow diagonal aiming to be mapped to buttons other than L and R.
-Remove point-of-no-return save in Tourian.
-Make Mother Brain less cinematic and more of a final boss.

By only giving it random weak abilities, a boost to ABP and Mimic while forgetting that it lacks usefulness once mastered.

Perhaps I should have asked why instead.

I would make Mortar shots the equivalent of Missile boats. Single shot before needing to resupply that weapon, and continuing off of my thoughts . Mortars are unable to capture buildings while in mortar mode.

Stinger units are just Mechs with another type of unit to attack. They are still very vulnerable on counter attack and can only be used to attack light aerial units like Copters and Dusters.

Scrap base infantry altogether and just add an extra 100-250 to the regular cost and you have the Infantry + Mortar unit. Because it takes a turn to setup and disassemble your mortar stance you have to place them in position in advance of enemy approach, or have enough time to get to position without getting shot up by the enemy air/Indirect/or other infantry units.

All you could really do to "fix" FE4 is make some parts less tedious. It's not gonna get balanced, in a way it's not supposed to be.

I think a better discussion would be on how to make infantry less overpowered.

Do you not know how infantry are already overpowered as fuck in the earlier AW games? You place a single artillery behind a wall of $1000 cheap units and they are untouchable by anything that costs slightly more than them, like a recon for example.
If you even dare to use an A-A, you gimped yourself economically despite the advantage of instantly removing a single infantry from the line, which by the time that happens the enemy will likely have two or more Arties behind their death blob. It literally becomes a stalemate that you possibly can't lose if you spam infantry and artillery, and now you want to make super cheap artillery that can also go through mountains?

You should try Dai Senryaku VIII Exceed for the PS2. It's more of a military simulation type game so it plays like a more complicated version of AW without COs. With hexes. Modern setting, different countries have different units (with different strengths). It has all the kinds of infantry you're looking for and more. Just make sure you figure out how the different height tiers work and how to cycle through the vision ranges.

Just make Fog of War standard for all maps and then have Wargame-tier unit typings.

They could condense the maps into and give players a regroup function after capturing maps. Splitting up the maps into multiple chapters would not change gameplay much at all since after you capture an area it becomes irrelevant.

Skippable cutscenes even when they claim you can't skip due to 'loading' they aren't really loading the game. In an ideal world you'd rework the game to remove the cinematic bullshit entirely but that goes far beyond just a tweak.
Adopt a Mount and Blade style system of using mouse direction to decide on what attack you use instead of having to physically move your character. If I'm allowed two tweaks then make demon mode actually useful.
Remove the infinite respawns thing but add in some other mechanic for healing downed players/characters (perhaps they automatically get up if at least one player/character survives a gunfigt).
Since the patch already fixes the race I'd just slightly tone down the driving in the early missions. Some of it needs to stay for plot reasons though: you have to start out small and all.
Disable infinitely respawning guards, up the number of guards in a level to keep the difficulty. It was a dumb addition over 1 that the devs only stuck in because people clearing entire levels of guards in what was essentially a stealth game triggered them.

Actually playtest the missions to iron out some of the retarded difficulty spikes, most of them just need a minute or so longer to complete certain objectives or better checkpointing.
Make it so units told to hide themselves on the world map don't decide to unhide automatically after a few minutes, micromanaging them is a pain in the arse.
Give server owners the ability to set everyone to having all equipment unlocked, put player cap back to 64 since the maps are easily large enough to handle it.
Add in a higher difficulty setting, make ammo pickups for the more interesting guns a bit more common.
Remove the critical-hit system and the weird wallhack effect on the AI.

Just remove the voice system entirely, you can already turn it off but people focussed on it too much and didn't bother looking at what the game did well.
Make hard mode (enemies hit harder, enemies don't get a floating marker above their head telling you when to block so you've got to watch animations instead) the default. Now the games that copy the combat system which actually sort of originates with ASSCREED rather than just Bamham will be mildly less shit. Obviously it'll still be easy for anyone with half a brain but whatever.
Call it Insurgency 2 so faggots stop confusing it with the original mod: they don't really play similarly anyway. Better yet call it something else entirely.
Fix the diplomacy, two-handed weapon and pikemen bugs. Make sure the fix for the pikemen doesn't render them OP as all fuck like they are in most mods.
Fix the fucking swamp rope jump, and fire the man responsible for it.

That would make the game unbalanced. Air units aren't cheap and are already extremely weak to anything that can actually touch it. For the most part you will never encounter huge mountain ranges which anti air missiles couldn't reach.

Add some sort of car mechanic so you can actually build things in more remote bits of the island. Don't make it like 3, 4 and 5 where cars remove any difficulty.
Remove Thieves' Guild/make it an optional level loaded by console command like Blooper Reel. Add in a console command that lets you load the original version of Lost City if you want to play it.
Buff shotguns.
Fix the bug that means maximum completion without abusing a different bug is 99.99%.
Either don't make it Vista-exclusive (i.e. offer a DX9 mode) or delay the release until Win7 is a thing.
I might have a bit of the old autism.

No more regenerating health in multiplayer

Not that the game wouldn't still be shit its far beyond that point but I think that had the series stuck with cod 4- bo 1 combat and map structure it would have been a good move to make things more competitive and stop problems such as camping.

A Khazar civ so I can subjugate all the goyim.

Depends on the game. In Battlefield for sure. getting whittled down on health slowly and being stuck one health from death because you have no medics or refuse to use the medkits is some of the most infuriating shit.

More than anything, units that are returning to base absolutely need to return to base. I've had moments where there were 3 super agents on the island, and one of them I had to capture like 5 times in a row. When they wanted to return, they would see a scientist wandering around outside and go into attack mode, starting the whole process over again. That's damn near impossible to juggle even with cheap tricks like Lord Kane's special or social minion spam.

This too. The game as a whole needs little QoL tweaks to avoid niggling annoyances. For example being able to assign a minion to an end-of-tree role without having to micro him through each step or even just being able to set %s of total minions in each role and having them automatically train themselves in appropriate facilities would be nice. You end up having a lot of boring micromanagement between base expansions or missions when you're retraining faggots or messing with the world map and it really hurts the game.

Also with minions you have to keep lower tier minions around to do things like extinguish fires and repair machinery; basically by late game you've got to manually walk up to 100 faggots in 12 different roles every time you take casualties (you will take casualties doing a lot of missions and the way the game is structured means a period of missions followed by rebuilding is optimal), often needing to take them through 2-3 steps. This goes as far down as hiring them initially too. You've got to organise the moments of fun you have with world map micromanagement then pay for it with base/training micromanagement.

Looking at it, it's exactly like some wargames I own already (I tend to pick them up at flea markets and such). I can't claim to be great at wargames and AW was more my speed since it has far less complexity to consider but I enjoy finding stuff for my PS2 and this looks fun if a bit tedious.

I never thought that Infantry in AW needed anything until I got my hands on DoR and saw the Bike units. Infantry with Recon mobility and slightly higher armor is a neat idea. Then I read OP and started thinking about changing base infantry more. I know people complain about Infantry in previous installments but I thought that they were fine in DoR with a lack of abilities to just instantly field mass units.

never played the game, does it have health drops or you use medkit restored your health?

Nope. Mostly due to being bogged down by lazy developers that can't map anything decent or interesting without literally copying boring IRL scenarios, casual audiences that can't bother to pay attention to the very locale they're inhabiting and consoles having shittier controls which prevent the precise inputs required to have the player avoid getting hit by shitscanners in every single engagement. There is no healthpack placement in any CoD game after CoD3.

Advanced Daisenryaku stars Axis campaigns, there's fan-translations for the WW2 PS2 ones as well.

Condensing the maps and Splitting everything into chapters would take away from the narrative.

How would it? It's just cutscenes interspersed on a huge ass map.

Because your supposed to be conquering entire country's in huge battles spanning the continent, the maps reflect this with how huge they are.

There were healthpacks in CoDs after the first one and its expansion pack?

Not as far as I know, unless maybe he's counting the console games.