Waylon Flies Again sucks

So Waylon Flies Again....more like Waylon Dies Again. Why is it awful? The short answer: the predeployed air force on a map with multiple mountain ranges. The long answer? Well, that's what I'm going to get into.

The first thing to note is the starting resources of each player. Waylon starts with 3 Fighters, 2 Dusters, 2 Battle Helicopters, and 1 Bomber. That's more air units than what the enemy starts with on *ANY* other Campaign map, including Lab Rats's 1 Fighter and 3 Bombers. But surely, your own starting forces are going to be competent enough too, right? Yeah, no. All you start with is infantry and a SINGLE Anti-Air Tank. You don't even get any preowned Factories on the spot to get more anti-air ordinance before you end up harassed. Lab Rats at least has the courtesy to provide an actually solid starting force for all intents and purposes.

The only reason this level becomes possible is because Waylon has only 1 Bomber at the start preventing him from bombing anything you can work with to dust. That just brings me to my next point: one of the first 2 deployment points you take is an Airport. With what few forces you have at the start, there is simply no way you can stop Waylon from flanking anything you build out of the Airport for a while, and his Fighters WILL 2HKO anything you build out of it. Even if you aren't concerned with casualties, you're still wasting so much money on any air unit you can even consider for a while. You're simply forced to build land units, and not even at a good speed.

You do have an AI ally, but unfortunately, all the AI has is Light Tanks and Anti-Air Tanks, as well as a couple of Anti-Air Missile Launchers. One of those units has the sense to stay on its HQ to prevent an unfair loss by the AI losing all of its units, but it happens to be one of the Anti-Air Missile Launchers, meaning less air coverage. It's just as well anyway when the AI has stupidity issues, even pulling cases of Stop Helping Me and also being arbitrarily selective about when to attack. You'd expect that the AI ally would either have some competent forces for Waylon's air force, or actually be under the player's control.

By the way, there is a positive in that Will gets a Crowning Moment Of Awesome on Waylon, telling Waylon about why helping even one person is enough justification for helping people even when Will himself could be hypocritical and overly self-important. I like telling Waylon why it's scum like him who is responsible for bad things happening and why it's scum like him who needs to be stopped. Unfortunately, even this one positive in the entire level is marred by mistiming, because it happens at the start of Day 3, when your forces are still in the freaking retreat phase. Yeeeeahhh....

So how this level plays out is that it degenerates into turtling even when Waylon doesn't feel like being a sadist with the AI, which unfortunately he did on my stream. If you think you could pull a decent offense when your forces start being competent, think again. There is a mountain range your land units have to move around to get to Waylon's side of the map. This means having to wait until units that not only aren't vulnerable to Anti-Air Tanks but won't get chewed apart so badly by the enemy air force can get to participate decently. Even better, Waylon will be happy to use Anti-Tanks to stagger your ground force anyway, forcing you to get Bombers, which at this point goes without saying.

The end result is that the whole battle becomes nothing more than a case of battle lines, and not helping is that the map's Height is 13 tiles. It doesn't seem as blatant as Lab Rats having a Height of 9, but air units are supposed to be prominent on this map. Heck, Rivals AC at least has a Height of 17. I bring this up when the game thinks to have the bright idea of stopping flanking from being done by units that are supposed to work with that. My God is that arbitrary, and for no benefit at that given that it just feeds the battle lines problem further. What happens when there's too many battle lines? Dragged out battles. Say what you will about the deathball in Battalion Wars, that it doesn't encourage strategic positioning, but at least it keeps gameplay kinetic.

You might suggest that I should consider lower tech units to get around this. Thing is, Waylon deploys a War Tank when I'm still setting up, and when I need to build Anti-Air Tanks as it is, that means having to devote funds to addressing Waylon's War Tank at the very first convenience, which further makes offense implausible. May I also point out that even skewing toward tech units, I end up approaching the 50 unit cap regardless. Because of that, the suggestion to use lower tech units is laughable when it falls apart in the long term.

But oh wait, all I need to do is get past the first mountain range, even though the north path has a bunch of rough terrain that makes any advance over it VERY slow, and there, done, now I can attack, all that complaining for noth-....oh wait. Guess what? THERE'S A SECOND MOUNTAIN RANGE TO DEAL WITH! Apparently, one wasn't enough on a map involving enemy air units. Now there's 3 locations to pass through with this one, including in the center of the mountain range, but here's the really obnoxious thing: ALL THREE POINTS INVOLVE MORE FREAKING ROUGH TERRAIN TO WADE THROUGH! Add to it that the Factories are naturally not good at supporting units past the first mountain range, and offense has become a nightmare.

It's likely at this point when checking the air units' ranges start catching up in being so fatigue inducing that you forget there are other unit types that can hit your air units. That's another thing: why should the air units be such a big threat that the land units feel incompetent? It's not even sound for the gameplay, because air units already have enough mobility. Why can't they be given competent Counter Play? God forbid using intel to stop them from pulling brain-dead kiting to effect could be considered a welcome idea for the game's balance. Instead, Waylon gets to have so many hard-hitting planes without enough problem because they have freaking 99 Fuel each. What next, the metagame will involve needing to learn how to fart better?

You see the summary of why this mess is a mess: freaking kiting being spoonfed.

Best part is, the likes of the Advance Wars subreddit will claim that I should just "git gud" and stop complaining about the bad design, ignoring that my video about Rivals AC exists. "Git gud" is not only shallow, it does NOTHING to change that bad design is just that: bad design. Good design makes player improvement actually fluid. Waylon Flies Again doesn't do this. All it does is encourage turtling out the rear. For that, it's a completely awful level that deserves every complaint it gets.