CWT's Wargroove post response

Thank you. I should mention that did get your offer message from 2 months ago on Discord, and hadn't responded before because I had lost hope that we could get a Spiritual Successor to Advance Wars that would nail everything well enough and wouldn't get gimped by PR issues.

Looking through this post, however, as soon as you mentioned "Dragged out battles" in Bold and Underline, I knew I was in for a treat. Calling out Commanders being bland was just icing on the cake. And I also welcome the call out against Days of Ruin's meta. I'm for calling out Wargroove anyway, and I would have liked to help balance it, but oh look at that, people wanted to shove politics down my throat, because surely it would help to claim that the only appropriate response to anything bad happening to me is "good" even when my parents' house had been a mess even before the maggot-filled toilet that started 25 years back and got as much highlighted. At least now people are paying for keeping me from doing ANYTHING about it, directly OR indirectly.

Wargroove could have been faster if, indeed, the healing was better. Not just nerf the building restrictions either, although those don't help and obviously don't stop the swarming abuse you call out from happening. I'm also talking about the Mage's Heal Spell and Sky Rider's Hex Spell both costing 300G, when 150G would have been better to encourage tempo units. I point out as much here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthgWPi7GSY

Why don't we take a look at healing in the other games:
*Advance Wars - City healing only costs money, and thankfully not a ridiculous amount. I'll also give Game Boy Wars 3 its own bullet point.
*Game Boy Wars 3 - Work Cars can have properties heal by 3 HPs per Day, in addition to the income boost. If you make a good gambit on a frontal property being kept secure enough to have a 5 Movement Power unit with a God awful Movement Type and subpar combat ability momentarily move on top of it without issue, you can end games significantly faster by giving armor units a good setup point, and remember how GBW3 already has the Anti-Air Tank 1HKOing Work Cars on significant terrain.
*Battalion Wars - defeated enemy units drop healing items: Medipacks (infantry healing) from infantry and vehicle crews, and Jerry Cans (vehicle healing) from vehicles. These healing items only stay around for a limited time, so being closer to targets can be preferable to collect their spoils.
*Lost Frontier - Doctor, Chuck Wagon, and Engineer provide mobile healing that is free of monetary charge per use, at the cost of any offensive capability for the former two and any defensive capability for the last one. Also worth noting is that the Living Legends have some sense of adaptability, with Doc Valentine being the best example with his "Pistol, Stat" trait, which warrants its own mini-point.
**"Pistol, Stat" - this lets Doc Valentine take an extra turn after either attacking or healing, but the extra turn won't allow Doc to use whichever he went with and the other won't provide another extra turn. This lets Doc do short range hit-and-runs on viable targets (he's effectively a Gunslinger with Doctor defenses for reference) ending with healing an ally, do healing-based jumps to get moving faster through controlled territory or snipe off a key target, things like that.
*Shattered Throne - I'll let this explain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtAvoLeT0s8

The underlying importance about healing is when it allows for mitigating the consequences of minor skirmishes as long as you don't lose units. More importantly, the healing in those other games is set up to demand gambits and organization to use it efficiently in the first place, so it avoids being brain-dead. It's good to have healing be competent because push-forward combat is desirable to encourage map control and we want it to have a sense of maintenance as well. If Wargroove is worried about burst healing, then just add GRADUAL healing options. ...oh wait. Wargroove doesn't have status changes for units anyway. Just...why?

As for commanders, thank you for pointing out that they encourage swarming outright. Swarming was already an issue in Advance Wars, and that it's even worse in Wargroove when the price gaps are smaller is telling, made even more aggravating when swarming is already brain-dead and uncaring. I do, however, have to defend the idea of the lynchpin commander, having recently played through Secret of Evermore and also currently playing through Lost Magic. For starters, this concept is meant to provide a sense of immersion when you'd have to understand what your avatar goes through. Of course, this is what makes swarming being too optimal even more of a problem: that it promotes shallow behavior from an excessive premium on the player/avatar's own life. The solution is that when the player wants to keep their units alive more actively instead as the game should be promoting actively enough, their King has their weakness become redundant. And yes, the analogy works for both Secret of Evermore AND Lost Magic, exhibits A, B, and C:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA2c0O12GJg&list=PLO2o0_k4kOrwyc46vJ98GxaKJIGzw4HUj&index=9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSXndXJGGas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ0e7nBMSwc&list=PLO2o0_k4kOryA4oSa8pbs15jqP_01bXa5&index=4&t=19m40s

I can say about the Commander system in Wargroove that the problem ISN'T the lynchpin aspect in and of itself. No, the problem is the tools the lynchpin gets in the first place.

See, what allows SoE Boy and Lost Magic's Isaac work is that they can cast a variety of spells, and the former also can use his weapons in sophisticated manners. I can also point to Lost Frontier's Living Legend working off of Perks to manage a multitude of benefits that generally provide them some actual maneuverability, direct or indirect. That's the important factor: that the SOE Boy, Lost Magic's Isaac, and Lost Frontier's Living Legends got the tools to work with for handling their own personal combat even when it would be clear you'd still want to have your other units around. Wargroove's ideas of "tools" is giving one of the Commanders an unconditional 1HKO that works on ANY unit that isn't the Commander, and the fact that THAT is somehow low tier for no reason just speaks volumes about how OTT swarming becomes. At least Crazy Jake in Lost Frontier is clearly an Engineer and he still only 1HKOs Steam Tanks with extreme luck and also when they are on Roads with no defense boosts anyway.

Wargroove's Commander is probably meant to be a heavy infantryman, but THAT isn't even handled well either due to their power being practically based on being an enemy phase monster, which is what had people turned off from Days of Ruin over the Tabitank mess. I have a post exceeding 10K words on what makes Clubs in Kid Icarus Uprising work out quite nicely:
https://warriorsuprising.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/clubs-in-kid-icarus-uprising-vs-heavies-in-smash-bros/
This was even made before the point that not using the Power system right away involves a rewarded sense of bravery. However, the important point is the provision of options even in dead time. What's the Wargroove Commander's options? Move, attack, and use occasional activation, with only that last one having varying effectiveness between characters. There's your summary of why the Trebuchet unit becomes so busted: that thing has unmitigated range power and has innate matchup advantage over against the believe me relatively mobile keystone unit that is not given decent tools beyond excessive enemy phase friendliness.

Oh, and by the way, the community thinks a good balance idea is to keep Giants from being able to move onto Mountains. Apparently, having them and Mages have 4 Movement Power instead, with Mages getting boosted attack power including against Giants, would have made too much sense. Why do I say that having Giants unable to move onto Mountains is stupid? Well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthgWPi7GSY

When all is said and done, I will say that Wargroove still has decent ideas, definitely the Mage and Sky Rider special abilities at least fitting the bill, but developer arrogance gets in the way of any chance of competence and we even get results like having the Dog buff be price reduction, rather than some form of tempo support possibly including some demoralization debuff.