Hello Chucklefish! Wargroove has a ton of potential and I'm happy that somebody decided to make a game similar to Advance Wars, when Intelligent Systems has been neglating the series for around 10 years now. But, as an Advance Wars fan, I'd like to give you a couple of suggestions, some things I really wanted to see in the game and made me somewhat dissapointed when I noticed they were absent. So, here we go: 1. Add an option to set things in non-campaign maps In Advance Wars, there was this "free play" section or whatever it was called, that included lots of ready-made maps. Wargroove seems to have some in the Multiplayer section (and I can obviously download more user-made maps), but my problem with this is that I have no control over anything. Why can't I choose settings for the maps, such as if I want to play with CPU, what commanders if any the CPU's have, what is the weather like, what kind of AI does the CPU have, what is the starting amount of money and income, etc? I think you guys should really include some kind of menu for me to set things up before I start playing. Map editor does have options for these, and I do understand if some map creators want to limit these things, but why not just have a drop-down option for "user preference" or something like that in the map editor, which would let the player decide some things before they start playing - and only if the map creator wants to give them the option to? 2. What's up with the races and commanders not having almost nothing unique about them? I mean all commanders do have their unique grooves for sure, but it makes little to no difference in the end. All the races are the same to play as. My suggestions is that you could add passive abilities to commanders (I'm sure you've thought about this, but I'm not quite sure why you haven't implemented it). Wouldn't it make a lot of sense that Sigrid for instance gave boost to vampires? How about Ceasar and some boost for dog units? I'm just throwing stuff in the air here, but you get the point. It would make choosing your commander/race much more interesting of a choise, right now it really doesn't matter that much besides the grooves. The races themselves could also have something different to them that isn't dependant on the commander per-se. I don't quite understand why you went through all the trouble to design different looking races and writing lore for each of them seperately, then to just decide that the races are all the same gameplay-wise? Isn't this a lot of development time wasted for something that doesn't affect gameplay experience in any meaningful way? Oh and don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that the races do look different, cudos to the artists especially, it must've been a ton of work! It does make the game more lively. But regardless, it kinda breaks the feel that there even are different races when all the units are basically just clones of each other. Just some minor changes in races would do, it doesn't have to be anything huge, just enough for players to feel some difference at least. Which brings me to the next things I'm missing... 2.5 Customisation options for commanders In Advance Wars: Dual Strike, players were given options to further expand the skills their commanders had by giving them various passive abilities. This whole system gave the game some progression and a reason to play as various commanders to level them up, it was fun and it was part of the whole strategy in the game. I know as a developer that making a system like this is A LOT of work and it's a balancing nightmare, and I can understand if you never end up making anything like this. But I'm sure you had this in mind at some point, and let me tell you, it would've been so awesome if you took the extra time to make this happen. 3. In-game achievments and statistics Part of the fun in Advance Wars was that I could see various statistics about how many units of all kinds I had produces/destroyed, how much damage I had caused in terms of money, etc. and getting small badges for achieving milestones. It may sound rather pointless, but to me it had something nice about it. I guess I'm just an achiever who wants the meaningless badges, lol. A system like this wouldn't even be that hard to design. I guess as develelopers you also know that simply saving a bunch of variables, displaying them in a menu, comparing them to the goal amounts and giving badges when a goal is reached is pretty simple. Of course designing the menus and what statistics to record and actually implementing them would take some time. But from my view, the effort you'd have to put on this would certainly be worth it. 4. Simple custom character editor I have to give you a big applause for what you've pulled off with the map editor and the infrastructure to share and download user made maps, it's simply amazing and light-years ahead of what Advance Wars ever could offer. But with options, people start missing other options. One of those options is a character sprite editor. You can create extensive campaings, deep stories, cutscenes, events, etc, but the selection of characters is limited to your own roster. This is going to cripple people who want to create their own adventures. For a simple character editor I'd suggest that you simply create some premade faces, hairs, clothes and accessories. Then you let players simply match them together and pick their own colors. You don't need a complicated sprite editor (because it would be crazy for you to develop it and it would also be too hard to use from user standpoint, it has to be simple and user-friendly). Making this would definitely be some serious effort, but creating a system for overlaying sprites on top of each other isn't really all that hard - at least in principle. 5. Some would-be-nice-to-have-things I wish you'd add more more buildings to the game down the road. Something similar to Command Tower that boosts the power of your units (or defence, or just have both), or how about a radar building for fog of war maps? I'm sure you can come up with some awesome ideas for buildings if you get into it! I also wish you could fix the user-made map list. It's tediously slow (at least it is on Nintendo Switch) to go from a page to another, and to add salt to the injury the game throws me back to page 1 every time I download something. This is very irrating. I guess that's about it. I'm sorry for the wall of text and for many comparisons to Advance Wars, but why invent the wheel again if something just works? Anyways, keep up with the great work!
