If you don't care about my signature enthusiastic yapping, you can scroll down past the text to get to the art/character sheets quickly. You just might not understand the text on the sheets.
I've been a fan of the core Advance Wars series (not Days of Ruin) for a long time by now. I was digging through my old files looking for some writing inspiration when I found something I made a while back: my ideas of the Season 1 BFDI contestants if they were COs in the series.
If you don't know what the series is about, here's a highly compressed and probably inaccurate summary of the Advance Wars series. The games take place in a world that I think is analogous to the 1940s or '60s or somewhere around there and focus on five different factions. Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet (or Gold Comet or whatever it is now), and Green Earth—long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony (except they really didn't because apparently Orange Star and Blue Moon were at war for God knows how long). Then, everything changed when the Black Hole Army attacked. Black Hole was a nation(?) of alien space invaders, your typical classic "We wanna take over the world" stuff. Of course, the four nations decide that they're not having that shit, and together, they unite to kick Black Hole's shit in—three wars in a row, on three different continents (Cosmo Land, Macro Land, and Omega Land).
If you're interested in the lore/story, you can play the games for yourself on an emulator. But long story short, the Advance Wars games are a turn-based strategy series. It's loosely kinda like Fire Emblem.
Except instead of using the power of friendship to defeat your enemies, you use the power of guns. Lots and lots of guns.
Your army is made up of different unit types, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The basic Infantry unit is cheap, quick, and dirty, and it's one of the only two units in the game that can capture properties, but it's awful in combat against everything except other Infantry (and the giant slime). The B copter (battle copter)'s missiles are effective against pretty much every ground unit (except the giant slime), but AA units (anti-air) and most naval units eat them for breakfast. Artillery units can attack indirectly from range without fear of being counterattacked, but they can't defend themselves in direct combat. Rocket units and Battleships are absolute beasts at a distance and have the highest indirect range of their respective terrain class, but any enemy within breathing distance can blow them up pretty quickly. APCs and T copters (transport copters) can get the slow-moving Infantry and Mech units across the map in a hurry, but they're about as useful in combat as a wet 72-ounce steak (that is to say, literally just a meat shield). Even the giant slime, which literally one-shots everything, takes forever to get anywhere and is easily taken down by four Infantry.
Maps are also made up of tiles, which can either be terrain or properties. "Flat" terrains, like Plains and Roads, are easier to move across but offer little to no defense, while terrains like Mountains and Woods slow units down but offer more protection. Properties offer the best of both, and most of them generate income for your army and/or give you several other benefits, like troop production, firepower boosts, and the ability to heal/repair certain units depending on the property. Naturally, this means that properties are some of the most contested tiles on the map.
There are 2 main ways to win a round: 1) Capture the enemy's HQ, or 2) Kill everything (formally referred to as a "rout").
Like your typical RTS or 4X game, games start with each faction producing units and/or moving them to crucial points of the map. Some maps are "pre-deployed" with some units already on the map at the beginning of the game, meaning that there aren't any production facilities (factories, airports, or ports for land, air, and naval units respectively) on the map and the troops you start with are all you get. Others are...well, not, meaning you get to use your funds to purchase units and deploy them at production facilities at your discretion.
