[report-to-trees]

What do you mean by infinite variations here?

[skadamat]

I'm guessing they mean with some type of procedural generation or another randomization approach in mind that creates a bunch of new maps, bosses, vehicles even!

Advance Wars, if I recall correctly, has a hand-crafted set of maps and battles structured in a campaign story. So once you're done, you're done. Replay-ability is a bit limited.

I absolutely loved Advance Wars and my brother and I played the heck out of it growing up!

[SkyBelow]

Advance Wars has a map creator and the AI can play on it. In theory one could get an AI to generate maps given the rules of the map creator and then users can implement them. Per my memory, no way to share, so it'll be a bit harder to setup and you can't do things like give the enemy units whose location you don't know, but it achieves a near infinite replay value. With some more work and one could have a new AI interface with an emulator and play the game instead of using the built in AI, if one finds it is no longer challenging. Thought that is probably reaching the scale where remaking the game from scratch would give one more freedom and control (and ability to monetize).

[ninjin]

Advance Wars Returns [1] is allegedly good and on my list of things to play.

[1]: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6012

[__loam]

Replayability is overrated imo. The old advance wars games on gba and ds took hours to beat and had excellent map design. There's also something cool about the no strings attached development model of old cartridge games where the game had to be perfect on release that is very endearing.

[report-to-trees]

Interesting, yeah I guess that makes sense.

I always thought those strategy games were missing a competitive community and better PvP experience but I could also see how more replayability would make them more popular.