Dual Strike sucked monkey fuck as a game anyway. Bad story, bad campaign difficulty, I suppose the only thing of value it brought were the new units (more strategic depth), and some of the new COs.
I think Von Bolt COULD have been a menacing villian. I think they needed to introduce him earlier, with that they could show how CRUEL and brutal he is (contrast him with the more cartoony villiany of the other black hole COs) and then of course make him have better bonuses and a better final level. The probably is he is in like what 2 levels? and they arent hard? and he is weaker than sturm? What I think is especially egregious about this, is that the whole came is about tag battles, so why isnt the final level a tag battle?
@@alanhersch4617 The issue with Von Bolt is that your final showdown with him is a joke compared to Sturm from the first 2 AW games. Get a few Battle Copters south of your starting position and Von Bolt won't have any funds. Sturm in all his incarnations requires three COs to face on equal grounds and he always has a massive war chest and half of the Black Hole Army ready to grind you into space dust.
@@marcoasturias8520 You mean Recons. Litteral free infrantry harassers that won't even take damages back due to the free defense coupled to terrain bonuses. On a big map like this one, they cover so much it is ridiculous, they can't even be punished by tanks in the early game. They're probably even more disgusting in fog of war matches where they can just zoom in forests where normal recons would take many turns just to reach. And even if you spot them, i hope you have some firepower because again, defense is busted
@@disc06 yeah, recons are really reigned in by the fact that they have tires. you are supposed to see recons zoom across the map only where there are roads, and they are otherwise not THAT mobile elsewhere. sturm recons are bonkers, they can pop up anywhere.
25:40 Mechstorm didn't pop merchant unit yet because he wanted to damage his unit first, then combine them BEFORE the reduction of their price, basically he was trying to get extra income and he did so with the tanks but couldn't get damaged on the battle copter
On a big map Hachi could have an advantage, but Sturm's capture game is just too strong for him. Powered up infantry are hard to interrupt captures against, and unhindered recons to quickly pester the enemy infantry makes Hachi very sad. Deejus saw that grabbing an early income advantage was the way to go, and kept pressing that advantage until it was overwhelming.
If you think about it, this basically denied Hachi his advantage. His only advantage is basically more income. Sturm's capture game was so good that he was able to eventually get double Hachi's income. End game was Sturm vs a CO with no powers whatsoever.
I think that the map comm towers also made a significant difference. Sturm managed to get 3 vs 0 towers (not counting the 4 bonus ones) before the first Merchant Union.
AWBW Should allow for original, unchanged versions of each CO from each game to be played in custom games, so that people can do stuff like this without having to, well, bodge together the older stuff hahaha
Literally scrolled down to leave this exact comment - been saying this for years! There's also a simple creative license to create "Best-of" and "Worst-of" versions of COS which have had highly varied stats across the series. For instance, a "Best-of Sami" would have 130/120 soldiers, while a "Worst-of" Drake would be *laughable*.
If done properly, it should be fairly easy to add more COs and alt-version of COs, so hopefully they'd introduce alt-CO versions at least. Even custom CO creator mode could be a thing, just takes a bunch more effort for the UI/UX. The project is currently close source though, so who knows what's going on there.
Doesn't the mixed base map give Sturm an advantage here? It's like taking a huge map that might benefit Hatchi on paper and splitting it into multiple smaller ones, with opposing bases that are much closer together. And then because there's more fronts that's more options for switching between them that Hatchi doesn't have since he can't keep up.
Eh, I actually did a match against myself once on this map in a kanbei vs colin experimental matchup. Colin won that match as he was successfully able to get the snowball effect with his gold rushes after a while. Sturm's successes here are attributable to three things IMO. 1) sturm is a much faster CO and is far more aggressive. He was far more able to aggressively use recons to deny caps early on in ways that kanbei couldn't. 2) In addition to the movement, sturm has kanbei like units for normal cost. While kanbei for example could theoretically throw our recons against a colin player, a colin player could easily just use a tank to counter it as colin's tanks are rather cheap. 3) So Hachi got off his merchant union. Cool. Sturm got off his meteor strike and wrecked the one cluster of high value units hachi bought from that. So in other words, sturm has very fast, kanbei like units at normal cost that are not affected by terrain, and a nuke like super power that wrecked the one death ball hachi was able to muster. Like, in the kanbei vs colin match, kanbei did well early on too, but betwen the higher cost units, and not being able to basically break the game movement wise, the same strategies employed here would not work as well in that matchup. And while kanbei won the capture game, gold rushes did even out the effect for colin, and I was able to eventually snowball effect the gold rushes to the point i could afford endless waves of neos and bombers every turn. Here, sturm's advantages over even kanbei allowed him to just steamroll hachi where he never had a chance. Sturm is just easy mode here. I could see a matchup on another map working on hachi's favor, but eh...not mixed base. Not something where sturm could successfully deploy recons and get them to where hachi is capping properties so fast.
@@JonWood007 makes sense. On paper that sounds equivalent to Sturm vs Hatchi, but kanbei doesn't have the speed advantage that Sturm does. If anything it's flipped, as their units move the same but Colin can build stronger units faster and get them where they need to be sooner
I think you'd really have to make a map specifically to eliminate many of sturms advantages. Basically many buildings close to each other and a single battlefront with either no comm towers or a stupid amount of them (effectively so many that everyone is 1 hit kill against comparable units all the time) and the entire map would be roads to keep defense outside of buildings as low as possible and not harm mobility ..meaning the map wouldn't be interesting in anyway and it would exist solely to throw units into a meat grinder
This game was basically Hachi being constantly on a backfoot and getting bullied by Sturm and his insane day to day, who in turn slowly snowballed his income advantage. Then Hachi got a unit advantage for two whole turns thanks to his Merchant's union, only for it to be taken away those 2 turns later by Sturm's Meteor, and then Hachi went back to being bullied and Sturm snowballing his income, to the point where could keep up even with Hachi's superpower. I think for Hachi to have any chance of winning the map needs to heavily favor him, in an even match the difference in power feels too big to overcome.
I love this matchup so much. It's the Advance Wars equivalent of a kaiju film- two giant terrifying monsters trading enormous haymakers that would obliterate anything else.
Great to see you cast this match. I downloaded the replay the moment I saw it. Let's hope Deejus starts playing HF and starts putting out great HF content.
It’s harder to play Hachi effectively compared to Sturm. Operation Mechstorm really needed to capture the comm towers but Deejus took both of the main island ones. That 140/120 Sturm is impossible to beat with 100/100 Hachi units. It gets harder as the match goes on because every engagement is a loss.
@@panthekirb7561 you also have to realize that they're going for an original Sturm over the weaker offensive one you get from AW1. it's the only reason why they are there.
@@CallofDutyBlackOps28 No I mean the 2 neutral com towers. These are really easy for Sturm to capture (even a weaker player like me would easy grab them) and they end up making him too strong.
I disagree with this being definitive proof that Sturm > Hachi. My reasoning is that the match was played on a Mixed Base map, which tends to favor COs with movement bonuses. Had it been on a regular strong side - weak side map, I think it would have been much more balanced. But I don't think there's that many maps that have that sort of format and are big enough to favor Hachi either way.
Before even getting halfway through the video, this is reminding me a lot of Kanbei v Colin on steroids...Imagine dealing with 20/20 units that DON'T cost more to build and can zoom through terrain? Sturm's D2D is so insane I'll be surprised if Hachi will have enough properties, money, and power charge to tech up before Sturm can wipe him off the map! The on-map comm towers ended up being a huge boon to Sturm too. By the end he had 50/20 units and there was basically nothing Hachi could do about it. I'd like to see how much of a difference it would make if there were no comm towers except for the untouchable ones that bring Sturm up to 20/20? Because those comm towers helped to make Sturm a snowball CO to match!
Even *if* Hachi was the stronger CO, we all know who would win in terms of who has the cooler appearance, music and SCOP, right? *METEOR STRIKE ON ANYONE WHO DISAGREES*
If there's anything the Egg Cup has taught me, it's that Javier can potentially be even stronger than both of these if the map has 2 coom towers per side.
@@DrDrao but Javier also has a cheap CO power which will make him 150/150 for a turn, and he should get his power twice easily before Sturm gets his super.
@@masterchief2622 I meant from his abilities. The 20 to atk cones from a com tower. In that sense it's 120/120 vs 140/120 if you want to be precise. That's not a minor difference, it's basically a better max vs a regular co. Also, his ability to negate terrain is pretty potent as well. I wouldn't say he overpowers javier, I think they're about the same tier, but Sturm would be the kindle of that tier where Javier would be the sonja Or grit of that tier.
Brought back so many memories with your intro - we used to pass the gameboy SP around class hiding it from the teachers taking turns playing 4P - glad I found your channel!
Great game but I think a mixed base map heavily favours Sturm. His recons can just harass so many areas at once and Hachi can't get enough tanks early on to deal with them. I would love to see this matchup again in another map maybe with even fog! More chaos!! Also I would love to see a Grit vs Javier or a Grit vs Colin match. I don't know if you remember or not but a long time ago I once challenged you to a game against Grit and you selected Javier. The game was very even and enjoyable. But it eventually ended in a draw because the day limit was 30 and we had equal properties lol. Also Grit vs Colin is a fun matchup to see as well. Colin's strategy is to out tech his opponent and roll over but Grit laughes at md and neo tanks, heck even mega tanks. His artilleries can 2 shot pretty much anything except a mega tank.
Yeah, mixed base favors Sturm because the bases are so close together and the com towers are contested. If they really wanted to mimic aw2 they would remove the com towers from the map except for the ones needed to mimic aw2 Sturm.
I play as Sturm on my AW2 cartridge here a lot and I will comfortably assert that Hachi was never ahead at any point in this match. Even at his strongest point, after the first Merchant Union, when he got the unit lead, Sturm was still comfortably ahead of him. Hachi was never actually truly winning at any point, or on any front. Even the time Mangs tried to point out that he thought Hachi was winning in the bottom-right section of the map, I knew at a glance that Sturm was still winning even there, he just had not advanced forward there yet. Sturm's value is deceptive due to his day to day strength, you cannot use Sturm's unit value or even his unit count as a direct indicator of his power at that moment, because of how strong his units are. You have to add 20-25% value/unit count to be more accurate, and even then it should probably be a higher amount than that. Sturm's d2d even makes his repairs better, because you gain more actual effective value out of them. It is a feeling I have gained when playing as Sturm as opposed to any other CO in AW2, that if you do not play Sturm you likely will not understand it. Sturm is always already ahead of any other CO, they must always play catch-up. Hachi would have needed to stay very close in funds per turn to even stand a chance, on top of his value bubbles with MU. Oh right, Sturm also has his tunneling perfect movement, and Meteor Strike on top of all that, too. So it gets worse. xD Sturm is the best, no question, in AW2.
I play the shit out of Sturm, and it's like he is always powered up. His superpower is near superfluous. I be feeling bad for all opps when I'm destroying them with Sturm. Kanbei is the only one that can Press him, and even then, he can't keep up with the Sturm's costs and movement. Sturm is Number 1, as he should be :D
A really interesting matchup would be Sensei vs Hachi with the highest possible unit cap. Both CO's have powers that flood the map with units, so it'd be super interesting to see if free infantry could beat 50% off better stuff.
Hachi would run over sensei once merchant union pops due to high value units reenforcing near the front lines, sensei needs to block with an infantry wall or else he’ll get destroyed by medium tanks and artillery
i've done this matchup a few times in AW2 and sturm almost always wins unless the kanbei player is a lot better his units are good enough to at least hold off kanbei's pretty much no matter what and meteor strike is great at countering samurai spirit since it doesn't care about defense boosts and striking units for 8HP basically nullifies their terrain bonuses
I love Sturm so much because, well for one it's fun being the Big Bad, but for two he just ignores an entire gameplay mechanic. Movement costs? Nah bro, I'm too badass for that to slow me down. I love it when a character just completely shifts the game by changing the rules a bit. That's something fundamental to the character. Add in that he has such massive attack/defense buffs at all times and you have something truly final boss worthy. There are maps that Hachi would be better at but they're ones where the terrain advantage doesn't really exist much. Maps that have larger distances between fronts and don't allow much front switching would also probably advantage Hachi.
Imo Hachi really needed to rush to get his com tower in the sea way earlier. That extra 10% would have been so helpful in dislodging stuff. Sturm literally ends the game here with a whopping total of three towers (ignoring the ones he started with) to Hachi's zero, effectively making every engagement a trade in favor of Sturm no matter what.
This was my first thought, I was wondering why he didn't rush to get that com tower ASAP as he has no day to day boosts. . . In other words, he was screwed from the pooch.
This match up felt like a massacre where one player was just behind all the time. Interesting to see how broken a CO can be, not an entertaining fight I thought because of how lopsided it felt. Maybe that's just the OP tier, where everything is truly broken. Also demonstrates, I think, the value of stats vs income and how far both can take you.
Sturm got nerfed for players for a good reason, but even with reduced firepower his mobility in the early game still makes it hard to deal with his capture game and his power serves as a nice wallbreaker for his low firepower units. It's a trump card that flips the table and shoots the other player. Loved Hachi back in the day and still do but Sturm can't be disrespected.
What an absolute epic battle! Theres something really fun about watching Grandmasters play the most powerful COs against each other. Sturm is just too powerful in his AW2 form though lol. Unhindered mobility, 20% extra firepower AND defence together is just too powerful overall. What use is affording expensive units cheaply if you cant lay a scratch on your opponent even with their assistance? Poor Hachi was forced to defend hard the entire match with no way to respond to Sturms brutal firepower at all. I think the honest only way Hachi could ever stand a chance against Sturm is to do this again on high funds and not mixed bases so Hachi can really put his Merchant Union to its full potential. Even then I still think Hachi would struggle very much to make returns on such a big early game advantage Sturm has with his capture game. Would love to see this done again someday on high funds on a non mixed base map.
11:00 interesting. unit value is taken into account ps. however if your units gain defense - they also lose less HP, and thus charge enemies less. (usually 20% ish
"He's coming in VERY HARD and VERY FAST." You can up the entertainment value of Mangs' casts by taking everything he says as innuendo or double entendres.
Ouch, well played to all contestants, that Meteor Strike was brutal, it is not just the 30k value but all the initiative lost, Hachi needed that force to recapture some properties. Also, getting no power charge for all that damage taken is devastating since his way back into the game is to spam merchant union. Maybe if he could have held his comm towers it might have been a bit more fair, the map having 2 comm towers each is also an advantage to Sturm since he has the map control to get his while denying them to Hachi.
25:40 He did that so he could join his tanks and (I think he hoped) his B copters together to get even more money. But yeah, Sturm's mobility really is the deciding factor here. It just allows him to build up such insane momentum in the early game via advance property captures that, by the time Hachi finally gets his first Merchant Union, Sturm's already built up a force that's virtually impossible to overcome. By then, Hachi's pretty much trying to play catch-up with a runaway train.
Epic game! This is a HF map, it's in the GL pool at the moment. I understand Deejus doesn't like HF but if they had played that it would have been much more fair towards Hachi, if not leaning in Hachi's favour a little bit.
That's what I was thinking. HF would have balanced this out a bit better. I still think Hachi would lose because of the terrain + mixed base though + sturm com tower cheese.
Skipped this initially cos i figured it would play out this way, but having watched it, it at least gave me some interesting thoughts. How many comm towers advantage would co x, y and z need to move up a tier or two. Adder with a handful of comm towers for example.
I enjoyed watching the matchup. Regarding the final question, I think the #1 problem for the cheap unit spam vs the stronger unit COs is how do you break through. We saw it with Kanbei, now we see it with Sturm. Its impossible to break through his lines. When even a megatank cant OHKO an infantry, its gonna be insanely difficult to hit the units that matter. And then you add no terrain cost and what do you do? As far as fun matchups, Id love to see Hachi vs Colin, Sensei vs Hachi, Flak vs Jugger (for the memes!), and maybe AW2 Kanbei vs AW2 Sturm (even though I think Sturm wins by far)
As someone who loves collin vs kanbei, I'm saying that game went down to Mechstorm not knowing how collin works. And here went down to there being those coom towers in contested land, on a strong-side weak-side map with backline coom towers, hachi crushes sturm without breaking a sweat. TBH I think without them this map would have been balanced (but I think deejus still would have won, no mater if he played sturm or hachi). Mechstorm also misplayed badly by not going for the ocean coom towers. instead of 120/120 vs 100/100, or 140/120 vs 120/100, both of which are significantly more playable, it was 150/120 vs 100/100, it makes the day to day completely and utterly one sided where Hachi can't even fight back. Hachi also teched up to megatanks instead of indirects, which are really what you need vs that stat difference. Those two megas could have been four rockets, which would have done way more with all the infantry Hachi can lob infront of them. His biggest misplay tho was the neo and mega in range of one meteor, which completely reset his snowball.
@@sensha5470 you bring up some great points. I agree 100% the mega tanks were a mistake to build. I would have put in other combos instead (i.e. Neo + AA, AA + rocket + arty, Neo + arty, really anything.) Yes, rockets could have helped alot as well to hold the ground, but the meteor is still a deadly power to invalidate them.
@@Yearofthebows24 rockets or mass arty. I consider hachi is just a collin that can spam, plopping down 8 arty per front (barely an exaggeration) is a terrifying thing hachi can do.
@@sensha5470 I'm not sure why he build those megas myself and I'm even surprised he didn't throw in a fighter to discourage sturm from using any air units. He also needed quite a few med tanks during that first super to put on map pressure but it is what it is. He really should have rushed those com towers though.
@@Delimon007 Hachi's absurd strength is his numbers. Also he couldn't have rushed those coom towers. Sturm's most powerful at the beginning of the game, especially since hachi has basically no power till the first super. Insignificant D2D vs the third best D2D in the game. Hachi is also not a 'big boys' CO. You don't really wanna tech up to big units. You want so many of your 3k coin arty that you use them as infantry. Then you can just walk your ball around, let then kill like 3 arty, and blast them to oblivion on the next turn.
Looking at this match and the previous one (kanbei vs colin), it clearly hints the power of extra stats compared to discount on units. Maybe on really big maps things could be different, but when you manage to reach the point where your income is much higher, the extra power and defense are too good
true. even then though an infantry + artillery death ball with kanbeis 130% defence makes it just impossible for even megatanks to punch through the infantry in one hit. unless you have more firepower than 100%. meaning the artillery gets free shots on them. your absolutely right that too much defense is just far too strong, even if the opponent can afford teching up against you more lol.
Now with this idea, I want to see DS Jess go up against higher tiered COs with a permanent com tower to give her her DS stats. Unfortunately that would only be accurate on maps with no ports. Like others have said I wish there was more options on AWBW for alternative versions of the characters.
I remember playing advance wars 2 ain my teens and never beating the second to last map in the hard campaign. I was massively dissapointed when I retruned to it as an adult and finally unlocked the last map and it was easier than the final map of the normal campaign.
Yep lol. Only a -10% def/dmg difference to Kanbei. Which to be fair is still significant a difference at GM level. I would LOVE to see Kanbei vs Sturm tbh hehe. Battle of the powerhouses!
Dont know that unless we see it done by two GMs. Samurai Spirit grants a free turn. Sturm cant do much to him during it than retreat/wall up. Kanbei will also get to pop more Samurai Spirits than Sturm will Meteor Strikes. I think it will be tougher for Sturm than you think. Also do not forget that defence stacks better than attack. Higher defence = greater retaliating force + harder to wall break.
Great battle, well played both players. I think it would have been a better fight if those 2 com. towers in the middle section of the map were not there.
25:30 actually its not keeping it out of the way (well that's one aspect) but he's blocking cities, you can see he did it with the tanks as well up north. Very smart play to stop Hachi from having as forward of a presence as he otherwise could have. 25:50 the reason he takes those shots first (which you can see worked out on the tank) was that he wanted to merge his units to squeeze as much money out of his SCOP as he could, obviously having +10/+10 would make that less likely so he avoids it. That said, I'm not sure why he did the move with the copter when he could have just merged it with the other one right away instead, but that's my guess. 41:00 insult to injury he *doesn't* even manage to kill that bcopter lmao. Poor Hachi :( TBH I think even if he was 40 firepower weaker, Sturm would still beat Hachi. The nature of mixed base maps means that his ability to ignore terrain and have massively hard to dislodge infantry means that even if he's not crushing Hachi's units, he's still crippling them and capturing just as hard. And as Mangs said himself, Hachi doesn't really want to repair units, so his best bet is to merge them together for extra funds when he can which... Isn't exactly optimal either. as an aside, Sturm's theme is so good. Dude is OP in every single way imaginable, right down to the tunes...
Early game is Sturm AW2's biggest advantage against hachi. If Hachi can even the playing field, Hachi has a stronger late game after popping his power a few times getting better overall unit value and possibly unit count with Super. Unfortunately, MechStorm had to bunch his units up too much on the meteor strike and his capture game needed to be more aggressive.
I think the extra comm towers is what made the game so easy for sturm. I think he still would have won because deejus is, frankly, a better player, but those two inland comm towers making sturm EVEN MORE sturm than AW2 sturm was just too much. 20% sturm honestly wouldn't have been that hard to deal with. The 40, and later 50% day to day was just way, way, WAY too much of an advantage, so far beyond his usual +20% it was just absurd. He could make bad trades freely and win. Infact pretty much any aggressive CO, even in regular AWBW, would have an advantage vs a similarly powered snowball CO.
25:38 The tank engagement was unlikely to lead to hp loss and would be getting combined anyway and they hoped for the battlecopter to lose health to be able to combine into it to have even more funds for that -50% cost reduction. Seems obvious to me. What I'm confused on is why they didn't combine the 3 hp tank?
It’s funny, I did this matchup on Stalingrad with 4 Com towers and…Hachi’s too stronk. What made it bonkers was the MegaTank spam. I just didn’t have the funds to keep up with that
I have no idea why you even bothered having this match between the worst commanding officers in this game Flak and Jugger are clearly the best commanding officers in advance wars history
You know, I kind of understand why this happened. Before you started doing these matchups of absurd tier 0 CO comparisons, I actually did do some kanbei vs colin matchups vs myself by playing in 2 windows at once, and while i originally picked a small map like caustic finale where kanbei wrecked colin, i eventually switched to this specific map and colin actually won here. Why? Because he was able to snowball to the point that he could throw out 4 neos and 2 bombers every turn and just keep using gold rush to infinitely multiply his cash and get to a point where the gold rush was so insane that he couldn't spend it fast enough. At which point switching to power of money cause colin's units to disgustingly demolish kanbei's as colin had so much money he was doing like 2928382% against kanbei megatanks and crap. But...for a while, it was tough for colin to get anywhere, he started out very slowly here, and kanbei's units were so much better, every interaction was painful and it was really kanbei not being able to reliably throw out units on all fronts that ultimately gave colin the opening to snowball. If kanbei can end a match fast enough, before colin can snowball, he wins, if colin can snowball and starts infinitely producing neos and bombers every turn and can afford to just throw top tier units at kanbei until he's overwhelmed, then colin wins. I know you know this, you've discussed it in your previous match on that mountainy map like this. I replicated that one playing against myself btw as I felt that the colin player resigned too early. And yeah, it was close, but eventually kanbei won in my game too. I dont plan on replicating this one, but having done the colin/kanbei match up, i can point to two reasons why this went differently than my colin/kanbei one. First of all, sturm gets kanbei like units at normal cost. So sturm doesnt have kanbei's normal weaknesses here. Second of all, the movement. The recon play early on was smart, and it completely screwed up hachi's capture game. Inevitably kanbei is gonna beat colin in the capture game mostly, it just happens when your units are 130/130 and the others are 90/100, but here, sturm just stopped hachi from capping anything. He got his recons out so fast, and they were at key poitns before hachi's infantry can actually do anything, and that said, sturm got a massive unit lead and was aggressive enough to stop hachi before he got off the ground. Also, meteor strike. So three reasons. Hachi got one merchant union off, and then sturm just nuked all those expensive units. So even though it did vaguely resemble my own matchup on here between kanbei and colin, yeah, sturm is just far more broken than kanbei is between his speed, normal cost units, and meteor strike. EDIT: Atrueboss makes a good point too that this is a high funds map. I think my kanbei colin matchup was high funds as well. So normal funds could've swung things a bit too far toward sturm here too.
Sturm gets really powerful really quick when there are ways to increase his damage. Meteor strike and missile silos in his hands are OP because Sturm can choose when to use these global damages. That said, comm towers that are neutral for all to grab need to be delicately handled because of the terrain ignore Sturm has. Hachi could realistically go for a tower cap in about 6 turns, Sturm can walk it in 3. Hachi needs APCs and TCopters to traverse footsoldiers, Sturm can just walk it. Mountains? Walk it. River? Walk it. Forests? Walk it. Only time Sturm builds transports is over oceans, period. Other COs need transports to remotely catch up to Sturm. Hachi however, has an ace up the sleeve, sack units constantly to build Merchant Union to sack more units to get another union. It's a scummy stalemate mentality but it is no different than Drake or Olaf in really big maps
39:35 You could also argue that Stum is worse on mixe base maps because sturms aircraft can't benefit from the movement cost. Sturms groundunits can outrun other cos but his aircraft can't.
I agree with many of the others here that this choice of map heavily favors Sturm for several reasons. The biggest is the mixed base scenario where early capture game is mixed with a lot of early fights. This gives maximum advantage to both Sturm's superior d2d stats and his terrain ignoring. The other reason being the presence of comm towers. I believe there's a decent number of wallbreaking interactions that start to pop up more at 140 and there's 2 comm towers per player, not counting Sturm's added ones. Not that this map remotely gives Hachi the opportunity to gum up the position and begin to snowball but I think that the extra comm towers being present will always help Sturm more than Hachi, especially when there's 2+ towers (but not some silly number of them). I think this would be a much more interesting matchup when choosing a more balanced map. Sturm is basically always going to win contested comm towers and even if he couldn't take Hachi's, Sturm benefits from extra attack more. Sturm wants the game to be over before the merchant union. Hachi wants everything to slow down.
I think this map was too much in favor of Sturm, it doesn't look like it initially but there's a lot of mountains in the way and there's no way to cap the com towers. The com towers just also make Sturm impossible to beat here. BTW If I recall correctly, isn't this a High Funds map and not a Standard map? That may have evened it out a bit more but being mixed base + mountainous terrain put it too much in Sturm's favor.
this matchup feels like sensi vs colin. Sturm's units are hard to kill so he can keep them around much longer. Hatchi is very reliant on numbers to win, but over the match, he could not get a surplus, as Sturm's units just will not die. AW2 Sturm for the win
Considering Sturm's units get a 30% defense boost during his power instead of just the 10% defense for that in this and he still won says a lot since that's a notable nerf.
Not your highschool friend but I really thought Hachi was going to eventually smack Sturm to a pulp, especially after that first Merchant union. Sturm had nothing on the top front!
cool stuff! it'd be neat to see a reverse match too where mechstorm had sturm ard deejus played hachi. seeing this matchup on other maps or with the awbw changes to sturm would be fun to see too! i'm also wondering if hachi should have a slightly bigger power bar since although it didn't do a ton in this game, the way you described how powerful that super can be despite its low cost might warrant a nerf like that. i've heard about the different tiers of CO and i'm curious about what aw could be like if everyone was buffed up to tier 1-2 or maybe even 0
As someone who was playing AWBW way back when it was new, when Sturm was added to the game (Not all COs were added at once) the consensus was AW2 Sturm would be too absurdly OP, even more so than Hachi (who was already broken) so a lot of people were concerned, so the main dev (amarriner or such? idk it's been like 15 years) made a post explaining he settled on AW1 vs. mode Sturm for D2D and took liberties with the CO powers since AW1 Sturm didn't have a SCOP, so gave Sturm the AW1 power for normal and doubled the damage for a super version. Also to think, the Sturm in this video is actually weaker than AW2 Sturm due to the lack of +20% firepower and defense on the SCOP, and Hachi is stronger due to the +10% firepower bonus on his.
I think being mixed base kills Hachi here: we were 18 minutes into the video before Hachi got any kind of advantage whereas Sturm was at Hachi's doorstep with his 20/20 units and perfect movement ready to take Hachi's cities by minute 5.
The Com towers are here to emulate AW2 Sturm day2day, where he has 120/120 offense and Defense, in AWBW Sturm is nerfed to 80/120 Offense/Defense, and this match is to see in a top level game, who wins, AW2 Sturm or Hachi.
Hey @mangs, would you offer these 2 players the same match but changing roles? The one who played hachi, plays Sturm? Might be that one player is better than the other?
Lmao I was like 30mins in before I realised the other player was mechstorm. I kept wondering why Mangs talks about mech storm like why would you build mechs here in vast numbers 😂
I was thinking sturm, and sturm it was. Everything about hachi is countered to some degree by sturms day to day. Cheap unit's? Strong unit's. Snowballing? Capture game snowballing. Lot of unit's? Fast units. High tech unit's? Nuke button. Hachi might be favoured on some maps, but i think the majority of the time Sturm be the winner.
I am currenty playing Black Hole Rising in my Freetime. Does anyone know If I can skip Campaign Mission to unlock Sturm or do I have to S-Rank Every Single available Mission?
Skipping as many missions as possible is a viable way to S-rank the campaign. I'm pretty sure it just gives you the average ranking of all missions you complete. This means you only have to play 4 out of the 7 missions on each continent, so play the ones that are easiest to get 300 points.
Now I want to see a video on the opposite end of the power spectrum: Grimm or Flak vs. no CO (played by Andy who never uses CO power). Flak and Grimm are widely considered to have crippling flaws, but are they so bad it would be better to play no CO at all?
Sturm's theme really makes you feel his power. A worthy final boss, unlike the old man in a chair.
Dual Strike sucked monkey fuck as a game anyway. Bad story, bad campaign difficulty, I suppose the only thing of value it brought were the new units (more strategic depth), and some of the new COs.
Man that final mission in Dual Strike was laughable.
It’s a shame that you could unlock aw 1 and 2 maps with the DS putting the cartridges but not Sturm.
I think Von Bolt COULD have been a menacing villian. I think they needed to introduce him earlier, with that they could show how CRUEL and brutal he is (contrast him with the more cartoony villiany of the other black hole COs) and then of course make him have better bonuses and a better final level. The probably is he is in like what 2 levels? and they arent hard? and he is weaker than sturm?
What I think is especially egregious about this, is that the whole came is about tag battles, so why isnt the final level a tag battle?
@@alanhersch4617 The issue with Von Bolt is that your final showdown with him is a joke compared to Sturm from the first 2 AW games. Get a few Battle Copters south of your starting position and Von Bolt won't have any funds.
Sturm in all his incarnations requires three COs to face on equal grounds and he always has a massive war chest and half of the Black Hole Army ready to grind you into space dust.
Sturm has always been the most busted. With his terrain-ignoring ability, he's playing chess while everyone else has checkers.
And here I thought Hachi's powers would save him. Perhaps on a high funds match?
@@derkatwork33 those mega tanks running like it's nobody's business...
@@marcoasturias8520 You mean Recons. Litteral free infrantry harassers that won't even take damages back due to the free defense coupled to terrain bonuses.
On a big map like this one, they cover so much it is ridiculous, they can't even be punished by tanks in the early game.
They're probably even more disgusting in fog of war matches where they can just zoom in forests where normal recons would take many turns just to reach.
And even if you spot them, i hope you have some firepower because again, defense is busted
@@disc06 yeah, recons are really reigned in by the fact that they have tires. you are supposed to see recons zoom across the map only where there are roads, and they are otherwise not THAT mobile elsewhere.
sturm recons are bonkers, they can pop up anywhere.
@@disc06 what I tried to say is that high funds would benefit Sturm more
25:40 Mechstorm didn't pop merchant unit yet because he wanted to damage his unit first, then combine them BEFORE the reduction of their price, basically he was trying to get extra income and he did so with the tanks but couldn't get damaged on the battle copter
38:34 What an optional resign. Sacking the Mega tank to get enough charge to use barter for a pipe runner
On a big map Hachi could have an advantage, but Sturm's capture game is just too strong for him. Powered up infantry are hard to interrupt captures against, and unhindered recons to quickly pester the enemy infantry makes Hachi very sad. Deejus saw that grabbing an early income advantage was the way to go, and kept pressing that advantage until it was overwhelming.
If you think about it, this basically denied Hachi his advantage. His only advantage is basically more income. Sturm's capture game was so good that he was able to eventually get double Hachi's income. End game was Sturm vs a CO with no powers whatsoever.
@@lancelindlelee7256 "Fear is all you have left" - Sturm upon just straight-up denying an enemy CO of their powers.
I think that the map comm towers also made a significant difference. Sturm managed to get 3 vs 0 towers (not counting the 4 bonus ones) before the first Merchant Union.
True, but his mobility and defence were factors in how he got those com towers.
AWBW Should allow for original, unchanged versions of each CO from each game to be played in custom games, so that people can do stuff like this without having to, well, bodge together the older stuff hahaha
Literally scrolled down to leave this exact comment - been saying this for years!
There's also a simple creative license to create "Best-of" and "Worst-of" versions of COS which have had highly varied stats across the series. For instance, a "Best-of Sami" would have 130/120 soldiers, while a "Worst-of" Drake would be *laughable*.
If done properly, it should be fairly easy to add more COs and alt-version of COs, so hopefully they'd introduce alt-CO versions at least. Even custom CO creator mode could be a thing, just takes a bunch more effort for the UI/UX.
The project is currently close source though, so who knows what's going on there.
@Ixymyxl same goes with DS Olaf, right? Didn’t his portrait change?
I think there should be a balance option like smash bros ultimate or dusl strike to make the cos whatever you want
I also prefer aw1 Sturm design honestly.
Doesn't the mixed base map give Sturm an advantage here? It's like taking a huge map that might benefit Hatchi on paper and splitting it into multiple smaller ones, with opposing bases that are much closer together. And then because there's more fronts that's more options for switching between them that Hatchi doesn't have since he can't keep up.
Eh, I actually did a match against myself once on this map in a kanbei vs colin experimental matchup. Colin won that match as he was successfully able to get the snowball effect with his gold rushes after a while. Sturm's successes here are attributable to three things IMO.
1) sturm is a much faster CO and is far more aggressive. He was far more able to aggressively use recons to deny caps early on in ways that kanbei couldn't.
2) In addition to the movement, sturm has kanbei like units for normal cost. While kanbei for example could theoretically throw our recons against a colin player, a colin player could easily just use a tank to counter it as colin's tanks are rather cheap.
3) So Hachi got off his merchant union. Cool. Sturm got off his meteor strike and wrecked the one cluster of high value units hachi bought from that.
So in other words, sturm has very fast, kanbei like units at normal cost that are not affected by terrain, and a nuke like super power that wrecked the one death ball hachi was able to muster.
Like, in the kanbei vs colin match, kanbei did well early on too, but betwen the higher cost units, and not being able to basically break the game movement wise, the same strategies employed here would not work as well in that matchup. And while kanbei won the capture game, gold rushes did even out the effect for colin, and I was able to eventually snowball effect the gold rushes to the point i could afford endless waves of neos and bombers every turn.
Here, sturm's advantages over even kanbei allowed him to just steamroll hachi where he never had a chance. Sturm is just easy mode here.
I could see a matchup on another map working on hachi's favor, but eh...not mixed base. Not something where sturm could successfully deploy recons and get them to where hachi is capping properties so fast.
@@JonWood007 makes sense. On paper that sounds equivalent to Sturm vs Hatchi, but kanbei doesn't have the speed advantage that Sturm does. If anything it's flipped, as their units move the same but Colin can build stronger units faster and get them where they need to be sooner
I think you'd really have to make a map specifically to eliminate many of sturms advantages. Basically many buildings close to each other and a single battlefront with either no comm towers or a stupid amount of them (effectively so many that everyone is 1 hit kill against comparable units all the time) and the entire map would be roads to keep defense outside of buildings as low as possible and not harm mobility
..meaning the map wouldn't be interesting in anyway and it would exist solely to throw units into a meat grinder
@Matthew Shuck And it doesn't test out very much. At that point the map beat Sturm, not Hachi.
Yeah that's what I was thinking.
in the matchup of Power vs Money, its currently 2 for Power, and 0 For Money.
it doesn't matter to have more units if the enemy's dont die.
19:28 Recon on Recon violence, bad.
Recon on B-copter violence, Chad.
This game was basically Hachi being constantly on a backfoot and getting bullied by Sturm and his insane day to day, who in turn slowly snowballed his income advantage. Then Hachi got a unit advantage for two whole turns thanks to his Merchant's union, only for it to be taken away those 2 turns later by Sturm's Meteor, and then Hachi went back to being bullied and Sturm snowballing his income, to the point where could keep up even with Hachi's superpower.
I think for Hachi to have any chance of winning the map needs to heavily favor him, in an even match the difference in power feels too big to overcome.
I love this matchup so much. It's the Advance Wars equivalent of a kaiju film- two giant terrifying monsters trading enormous haymakers that would obliterate anything else.
Great to see you cast this match. I downloaded the replay the moment I saw it. Let's hope Deejus starts playing HF and starts putting out great HF content.
It’s harder to play Hachi effectively compared to Sturm. Operation Mechstorm really needed to capture the comm towers but Deejus took both of the main island ones. That 140/120 Sturm is impossible to beat with 100/100 Hachi units. It gets harder as the match goes on because every engagement is a loss.
Honestly those comtowers shouldnt be there. Its too easy for Sturm to get them early on.
@@panthekirb7561 you also have to realize that they're going for an original Sturm over the weaker offensive one you get from AW1. it's the only reason why they are there.
@@CallofDutyBlackOps28 No I mean the 2 neutral com towers. These are really easy for Sturm to capture (even a weaker player like me would easy grab them) and they end up making him too strong.
@@panthekirb7561 I agree honestly I would love to see them do this again but without the natural con towers but sturm can still have 4
@@bloodydiamonds1000 was thinking the same
I disagree with this being definitive proof that Sturm > Hachi. My reasoning is that the match was played on a Mixed Base map, which tends to favor COs with movement bonuses. Had it been on a regular strong side - weak side map, I think it would have been much more balanced. But I don't think there's that many maps that have that sort of format and are big enough to favor Hachi either way.
I'd love to see a rematch of this, but not on a mixed base map.
Before even getting halfway through the video, this is reminding me a lot of Kanbei v Colin on steroids...Imagine dealing with 20/20 units that DON'T cost more to build and can zoom through terrain? Sturm's D2D is so insane I'll be surprised if Hachi will have enough properties, money, and power charge to tech up before Sturm can wipe him off the map!
The on-map comm towers ended up being a huge boon to Sturm too. By the end he had 50/20 units and there was basically nothing Hachi could do about it. I'd like to see how much of a difference it would make if there were no comm towers except for the untouchable ones that bring Sturm up to 20/20? Because those comm towers helped to make Sturm a snowball CO to match!
Even *if* Hachi was the stronger CO, we all know who would win in terms of who has the cooler appearance, music and SCOP, right?
*METEOR STRIKE ON ANYONE WHO DISAGREES*
We all agree that Sturm has the coolest design in advance wars
If there's anything the Egg Cup has taught me, it's that Javier can potentially be even stronger than both of these if the map has 2 coom towers per side.
At 2 coms javier is 100/120. Sturm is 120/120 at base.
@@DrDrao but Javier also has a cheap CO power which will make him 150/150 for a turn, and he should get his power twice easily before Sturm gets his super.
@@DrDrao also, at two towers, Javier is 120/120, not 100/120.
@@masterchief2622 I meant from his abilities. The 20 to atk cones from a com tower. In that sense it's 120/120 vs 140/120 if you want to be precise. That's not a minor difference, it's basically a better max vs a regular co.
Also, his ability to negate terrain is pretty potent as well. I wouldn't say he overpowers javier, I think they're about the same tier, but Sturm would be the kindle of that tier where Javier would be the sonja Or grit of that tier.
@@DrDrao140atk vs 120def is much worse than 120 vs 100, +40 atk barely counters +10 defense and +50 defense on Jav COP is basically invincibility
Brought back so many memories with your intro - we used to pass the gameboy SP around class hiding it from the teachers taking turns playing 4P - glad I found your channel!
Sturm: *Plays Bury the Light* "I am the Sturm that is approaching!"
Great game but I think a mixed base map heavily favours Sturm. His recons can just harass so many areas at once and Hachi can't get enough tanks early on to deal with them. I would love to see this matchup again in another map maybe with even fog! More chaos!!
Also I would love to see a Grit vs Javier or a Grit vs Colin match. I don't know if you remember or not but a long time ago I once challenged you to a game against Grit and you selected Javier. The game was very even and enjoyable. But it eventually ended in a draw because the day limit was 30 and we had equal properties lol.
Also Grit vs Colin is a fun matchup to see as well. Colin's strategy is to out tech his opponent and roll over but Grit laughes at md and neo tanks, heck even mega tanks. His artilleries can 2 shot pretty much anything except a mega tank.
Yeah, mixed base favors Sturm because the bases are so close together and the com towers are contested. If they really wanted to mimic aw2 they would remove the com towers from the map except for the ones needed to mimic aw2 Sturm.
honestly this has to be the best battle to see, two super giants fighting each other.
I play as Sturm on my AW2 cartridge here a lot and I will comfortably assert that Hachi was never ahead at any point in this match. Even at his strongest point, after the first Merchant Union, when he got the unit lead, Sturm was still comfortably ahead of him. Hachi was never actually truly winning at any point, or on any front. Even the time Mangs tried to point out that he thought Hachi was winning in the bottom-right section of the map, I knew at a glance that Sturm was still winning even there, he just had not advanced forward there yet.
Sturm's value is deceptive due to his day to day strength, you cannot use Sturm's unit value or even his unit count as a direct indicator of his power at that moment, because of how strong his units are. You have to add 20-25% value/unit count to be more accurate, and even then it should probably be a higher amount than that. Sturm's d2d even makes his repairs better, because you gain more actual effective value out of them.
It is a feeling I have gained when playing as Sturm as opposed to any other CO in AW2, that if you do not play Sturm you likely will not understand it. Sturm is always already ahead of any other CO, they must always play catch-up. Hachi would have needed to stay very close in funds per turn to even stand a chance, on top of his value bubbles with MU.
Oh right, Sturm also has his tunneling perfect movement, and Meteor Strike on top of all that, too. So it gets worse. xD
Sturm is the best, no question, in AW2.
I play the shit out of Sturm, and it's like he is always powered up. His superpower is near superfluous. I be feeling bad for all opps when I'm destroying them with Sturm. Kanbei is the only one that can Press him, and even then, he can't keep up with the Sturm's costs and movement. Sturm is Number 1, as he should be :D
sturm is tier -1
or tier 00
Is this basically Colin vs Kanbei but turned up to 11?
A really interesting matchup would be Sensei vs Hachi with the highest possible unit cap.
Both CO's have powers that flood the map with units, so it'd be super interesting to see if free infantry could beat 50% off better stuff.
colin v sensei would be fun too
Hachi would run over sensei once merchant union pops due to high value units reenforcing near the front lines, sensei needs to block with an infantry wall or else he’ll get destroyed by medium tanks and artillery
Play the match on 4th of July and call it "Ultimate stuffed turkey (map) match"
I've done it. It's a nightmare.
I would love to see a Match between Kanbei and Sturm.
Sturm wins! It’s not even close
Sturm has all the advantages of kanbei and none of the weakness plus his ridiculous movement is not a good match
It went poorly for me when I played Sturm. Just did almost no damage to any of Kanbei’s units
@@ryanallen6325 Because AWBW Sturm got -20% firepower, while AW2 Sturm got +20%
Il this game sturm got 4 com tower to mimic aw2 sturm
i've done this matchup a few times in AW2 and sturm almost always wins unless the kanbei player is a lot better
his units are good enough to at least hold off kanbei's pretty much no matter what and meteor strike is great at countering samurai spirit since it doesn't care about defense boosts and striking units for 8HP basically nullifies their terrain bonuses
I would love to see more match ups like this. 2 broken Co's fighting each other because these matchups are hype as hell.
I love Sturm so much because, well for one it's fun being the Big Bad, but for two he just ignores an entire gameplay mechanic. Movement costs? Nah bro, I'm too badass for that to slow me down. I love it when a character just completely shifts the game by changing the rules a bit. That's something fundamental to the character. Add in that he has such massive attack/defense buffs at all times and you have something truly final boss worthy.
There are maps that Hachi would be better at but they're ones where the terrain advantage doesn't really exist much. Maps that have larger distances between fronts and don't allow much front switching would also probably advantage Hachi.
Who would win? An Alien Overlord with cataclysmic powers... or one merchant boi
Humanity received a grim reminder that day...
@@blazingswordchad3384 A Grimm reminder
Imo Hachi really needed to rush to get his com tower in the sea way earlier. That extra 10% would have been so helpful in dislodging stuff. Sturm literally ends the game here with a whopping total of three towers (ignoring the ones he started with) to Hachi's zero, effectively making every engagement a trade in favor of Sturm no matter what.
This was my first thought, I was wondering why he didn't rush to get that com tower ASAP as he has no day to day boosts. . . In other words, he was screwed from the pooch.
This match up felt like a massacre where one player was just behind all the time. Interesting to see how broken a CO can be, not an entertaining fight I thought because of how lopsided it felt. Maybe that's just the OP tier, where everything is truly broken. Also demonstrates, I think, the value of stats vs income and how far both can take you.
I didn’t realize you guys take multiple days to finish matches, like walking away from a chess board to think about it.
I love watching your commentary of competitive AWBW matches, never gets boring
Sturm got nerfed for players for a good reason, but even with reduced firepower his mobility in the early game still makes it hard to deal with his capture game and his power serves as a nice wallbreaker for his low firepower units. It's a trump card that flips the table and shoots the other player. Loved Hachi back in the day and still do but Sturm can't be disrespected.
still too much. if he had average firepower sure I go for that. but beyond that. yeqh. their is balance and their is over balance
What an absolute epic battle! Theres something really fun about watching Grandmasters play the most powerful COs against each other. Sturm is just too powerful in his AW2 form though lol. Unhindered mobility, 20% extra firepower AND defence together is just too powerful overall. What use is affording expensive units cheaply if you cant lay a scratch on your opponent even with their assistance? Poor Hachi was forced to defend hard the entire match with no way to respond to Sturms brutal firepower at all. I think the honest only way Hachi could ever stand a chance against Sturm is to do this again on high funds and not mixed bases so Hachi can really put his Merchant Union to its full potential. Even then I still think Hachi would struggle very much to make returns on such a big early game advantage Sturm has with his capture game. Would love to see this done again someday on high funds on a non mixed base map.
That was an insanely fun match to watch,the ability to move ignoring terrain is so strong,add the bonus attack and defence and ufff
11:00 interesting. unit value is taken into account
ps. however if your units gain defense - they also lose less HP, and thus charge enemies less. (usually 20% ish
Is everything OK, Mangs?
"He's coming in VERY HARD and VERY FAST." You can up the entertainment value of Mangs' casts by taking everything he says as innuendo or double entendres.
Ouch, well played to all contestants, that Meteor Strike was brutal, it is not just the 30k value but all the initiative lost, Hachi needed that force to recapture some properties.
Also, getting no power charge for all that damage taken is devastating since his way back into the game is to spam merchant union. Maybe if he could have held his comm towers it might have been a bit more fair, the map having 2 comm towers each is also an advantage to Sturm since he has the map control to get his while denying them to Hachi.
Dark sugar daddy Sturm has nothing on wholesome grandpa hatchi who sneaks you money and free infantry.
Spoke too soon brother. Sturm roflstomped gramps.
grimm vs grimm has to be a journey worth of a vegan cyclist on cid's avenue
25:40 He did that so he could join his tanks and (I think he hoped) his B copters together to get even more money.
But yeah, Sturm's mobility really is the deciding factor here. It just allows him to build up such insane momentum in the early game via advance property captures that, by the time Hachi finally gets his first Merchant Union, Sturm's already built up a force that's virtually impossible to overcome. By then, Hachi's pretty much trying to play catch-up with a runaway train.
Epic game! This is a HF map, it's in the GL pool at the moment. I understand Deejus doesn't like HF but if they had played that it would have been much more fair towards Hachi, if not leaning in Hachi's favour a little bit.
That's what I was thinking. HF would have balanced this out a bit better. I still think Hachi would lose because of the terrain + mixed base though + sturm com tower cheese.
'' Fight the enemy where they arent '' - Sun Tzu
*Sturms Units* '' Tear up the map, ok, got it. ''
Skipped this initially cos i figured it would play out this way, but having watched it, it at least gave me some interesting thoughts.
How many comm towers advantage would co x, y and z need to move up a tier or two.
Adder with a handful of comm towers for example.
Please another match. Sturm gets the four com-towers at start. But please no other comtowers on the map.
I enjoyed watching the matchup. Regarding the final question, I think the #1 problem for the cheap unit spam vs the stronger unit COs is how do you break through. We saw it with Kanbei, now we see it with Sturm. Its impossible to break through his lines. When even a megatank cant OHKO an infantry, its gonna be insanely difficult to hit the units that matter. And then you add no terrain cost and what do you do?
As far as fun matchups, Id love to see Hachi vs Colin, Sensei vs Hachi, Flak vs Jugger (for the memes!), and maybe AW2 Kanbei vs AW2 Sturm (even though I think Sturm wins by far)
As someone who loves collin vs kanbei, I'm saying that game went down to Mechstorm not knowing how collin works.
And here went down to there being those coom towers in contested land, on a strong-side weak-side map with backline coom towers, hachi crushes sturm without breaking a sweat. TBH I think without them this map would have been balanced (but I think deejus still would have won, no mater if he played sturm or hachi). Mechstorm also misplayed badly by not going for the ocean coom towers. instead of 120/120 vs 100/100, or 140/120 vs 120/100, both of which are significantly more playable, it was 150/120 vs 100/100, it makes the day to day completely and utterly one sided where Hachi can't even fight back. Hachi also teched up to megatanks instead of indirects, which are really what you need vs that stat difference. Those two megas could have been four rockets, which would have done way more with all the infantry Hachi can lob infront of them. His biggest misplay tho was the neo and mega in range of one meteor, which completely reset his snowball.
@@sensha5470 you bring up some great points. I agree 100% the mega tanks were a mistake to build. I would have put in other combos instead (i.e. Neo + AA, AA + rocket + arty, Neo + arty, really anything.) Yes, rockets could have helped alot as well to hold the ground, but the meteor is still a deadly power to invalidate them.
@@Yearofthebows24 rockets or mass arty. I consider hachi is just a collin that can spam, plopping down 8 arty per front (barely an exaggeration) is a terrifying thing hachi can do.
@@sensha5470
I'm not sure why he build those megas myself and I'm even surprised he didn't throw in a fighter to discourage sturm from using any air units. He also needed quite a few med tanks during that first super to put on map pressure but it is what it is. He really should have rushed those com towers though.
@@Delimon007 Hachi's absurd strength is his numbers.
Also he couldn't have rushed those coom towers. Sturm's most powerful at the beginning of the game, especially since hachi has basically no power till the first super. Insignificant D2D vs the third best D2D in the game.
Hachi is also not a 'big boys' CO. You don't really wanna tech up to big units. You want so many of your 3k coin arty that you use them as infantry. Then you can just walk your ball around, let then kill like 3 arty, and blast them to oblivion on the next turn.
your the reason i got into advance wars thank you
The extra com towers really hurt Hachi on this map as he was never going to get them.
Looking at this match and the previous one (kanbei vs colin), it clearly hints the power of extra stats compared to discount on units. Maybe on really big maps things could be different, but when you manage to reach the point where your income is much higher, the extra power and defense are too good
true. even then though an infantry + artillery death ball with kanbeis 130% defence makes it just impossible for even megatanks to punch through the infantry in one hit. unless you have more firepower than 100%. meaning the artillery gets free shots on them. your absolutely right that too much defense is just far too strong, even if the opponent can afford teching up against you more lol.
Now with this idea, I want to see DS Jess go up against higher tiered COs with a permanent com tower to give her her DS stats. Unfortunately that would only be accurate on maps with no ports. Like others have said I wish there was more options on AWBW for alternative versions of the characters.
It's important to remember that Sturm is an Isekai Protagonist. And it's also Rachel.
I remember playing advance wars 2 ain my teens and never beating the second to last map in the hard campaign. I was massively dissapointed when I retruned to it as an adult and finally unlocked the last map and it was easier than the final map of the normal campaign.
120/120 Sturm is basically Kanbei but with better movement and no extra cost for units. (Ignoring CO powers)
Yep lol. Only a -10% def/dmg difference to Kanbei. Which to be fair is still significant a difference at GM level. I would LOVE to see Kanbei vs Sturm tbh hehe. Battle of the powerhouses!
@@Jamieboi1989
kanbei loses. . . just do the calcs on unit value for the cost.
Dont know that unless we see it done by two GMs. Samurai Spirit grants a free turn. Sturm cant do much to him during it than retreat/wall up. Kanbei will also get to pop more Samurai Spirits than Sturm will Meteor Strikes. I think it will be tougher for Sturm than you think. Also do not forget that defence stacks better than attack. Higher defence = greater retaliating force + harder to wall break.
I would love to see a version of this in which fighting wasn't divided into 3 fronts. Hatchi relies on snowballing which you can't do on 3 fronts.
Can you make a Sturm vs Caulder?, Tiny Wars Experimental has the CO's of Trilogy and DoR mixed together.
Great battle, well played both players. I think it would have been a better fight if those 2 com. towers in the middle section of the map were not there.
This video started out the same way every online recipe does.
Anyone else noticed the four comm towers Sturm starts with? 😂
Man advance wars game were a thing in that time, I played a lot with my friends. Love your channel.
I'd like to see Sensei vs Kanbei and AW1 Max against one of the broken COs, not sure which one would be a more fair challenge.
25:30 actually its not keeping it out of the way (well that's one aspect) but he's blocking cities, you can see he did it with the tanks as well up north. Very smart play to stop Hachi from having as forward of a presence as he otherwise could have.
25:50 the reason he takes those shots first (which you can see worked out on the tank) was that he wanted to merge his units to squeeze as much money out of his SCOP as he could, obviously having +10/+10 would make that less likely so he avoids it. That said, I'm not sure why he did the move with the copter when he could have just merged it with the other one right away instead, but that's my guess.
41:00 insult to injury he *doesn't* even manage to kill that bcopter lmao. Poor Hachi :(
TBH I think even if he was 40 firepower weaker, Sturm would still beat Hachi. The nature of mixed base maps means that his ability to ignore terrain and have massively hard to dislodge infantry means that even if he's not crushing Hachi's units, he's still crippling them and capturing just as hard. And as Mangs said himself, Hachi doesn't really want to repair units, so his best bet is to merge them together for extra funds when he can which... Isn't exactly optimal either.
as an aside, Sturm's theme is so good. Dude is OP in every single way imaginable, right down to the tunes...
Yeah this only reaffirms my dislike of megatanks.
Matchup idea: Some super high ELO player with a bottom tier CO versus a newbie with a top tier CO.
Try this matchup on a more Hachi favored map. Something like SCYE or AHF would be much more reasonable for him
Fun fact:Hachi's power also halves the cost you pay when you repair with black boats.
Just pointing out that Malachite Trail is a HF map, and is in the HF map pool
19:47 ignoring powers it's basically the same battle just without the weaknesses
Man, I wish I had friends in high school that played this as well. Would of been fun back then
Early game is Sturm AW2's biggest advantage against hachi. If Hachi can even the playing field, Hachi has a stronger late game after popping his power a few times getting better overall unit value and possibly unit count with Super. Unfortunately, MechStorm had to bunch his units up too much on the meteor strike and his capture game needed to be more aggressive.
I think the extra comm towers is what made the game so easy for sturm. I think he still would have won because deejus is, frankly, a better player, but those two inland comm towers making sturm EVEN MORE sturm than AW2 sturm was just too much.
20% sturm honestly wouldn't have been that hard to deal with. The 40, and later 50% day to day was just way, way, WAY too much of an advantage, so far beyond his usual +20% it was just absurd. He could make bad trades freely and win. Infact pretty much any aggressive CO, even in regular AWBW, would have an advantage vs a similarly powered snowball CO.
25:38
The tank engagement was unlikely to lead to hp loss and would be getting combined anyway and they hoped for the battlecopter to lose health to be able to combine into it to have even more funds for that -50% cost reduction. Seems obvious to me. What I'm confused on is why they didn't combine the 3 hp tank?
It’s funny, I did this matchup on Stalingrad with 4 Com towers and…Hachi’s too stronk.
What made it bonkers was the MegaTank spam. I just didn’t have the funds to keep up with that
I have no idea why you even bothered having this match between the worst commanding officers in this game Flak and Jugger are clearly the best commanding officers in advance wars history
"This is disgusting"
-Mangs
You know, I kind of understand why this happened.
Before you started doing these matchups of absurd tier 0 CO comparisons, I actually did do some kanbei vs colin matchups vs myself by playing in 2 windows at once, and while i originally picked a small map like caustic finale where kanbei wrecked colin, i eventually switched to this specific map and colin actually won here. Why? Because he was able to snowball to the point that he could throw out 4 neos and 2 bombers every turn and just keep using gold rush to infinitely multiply his cash and get to a point where the gold rush was so insane that he couldn't spend it fast enough. At which point switching to power of money cause colin's units to disgustingly demolish kanbei's as colin had so much money he was doing like 2928382% against kanbei megatanks and crap.
But...for a while, it was tough for colin to get anywhere, he started out very slowly here, and kanbei's units were so much better, every interaction was painful and it was really kanbei not being able to reliably throw out units on all fronts that ultimately gave colin the opening to snowball. If kanbei can end a match fast enough, before colin can snowball, he wins, if colin can snowball and starts infinitely producing neos and bombers every turn and can afford to just throw top tier units at kanbei until he's overwhelmed, then colin wins.
I know you know this, you've discussed it in your previous match on that mountainy map like this. I replicated that one playing against myself btw as I felt that the colin player resigned too early. And yeah, it was close, but eventually kanbei won in my game too.
I dont plan on replicating this one, but having done the colin/kanbei match up, i can point to two reasons why this went differently than my colin/kanbei one. First of all, sturm gets kanbei like units at normal cost. So sturm doesnt have kanbei's normal weaknesses here. Second of all, the movement. The recon play early on was smart, and it completely screwed up hachi's capture game. Inevitably kanbei is gonna beat colin in the capture game mostly, it just happens when your units are 130/130 and the others are 90/100, but here, sturm just stopped hachi from capping anything. He got his recons out so fast, and they were at key poitns before hachi's infantry can actually do anything, and that said, sturm got a massive unit lead and was aggressive enough to stop hachi before he got off the ground. Also, meteor strike. So three reasons. Hachi got one merchant union off, and then sturm just nuked all those expensive units.
So even though it did vaguely resemble my own matchup on here between kanbei and colin, yeah, sturm is just far more broken than kanbei is between his speed, normal cost units, and meteor strike.
EDIT: Atrueboss makes a good point too that this is a high funds map. I think my kanbei colin matchup was high funds as well. So normal funds could've swung things a bit too far toward sturm here too.
Sturm gets really powerful really quick when there are ways to increase his damage. Meteor strike and missile silos in his hands are OP because Sturm can choose when to use these global damages. That said, comm towers that are neutral for all to grab need to be delicately handled because of the terrain ignore Sturm has. Hachi could realistically go for a tower cap in about 6 turns, Sturm can walk it in 3. Hachi needs APCs and TCopters to traverse footsoldiers, Sturm can just walk it. Mountains? Walk it. River? Walk it. Forests? Walk it. Only time Sturm builds transports is over oceans, period. Other COs need transports to remotely catch up to Sturm. Hachi however, has an ace up the sleeve, sack units constantly to build Merchant Union to sack more units to get another union. It's a scummy stalemate mentality but it is no different than Drake or Olaf in really big maps
Seems that an overwhelming early game advantage trumps snowball potential in the mid and late game.
A power that lets you buy half price units isn't going to win you the game when your opponent has twice your income.
39:35
You could also argue that Stum is worse on mixe base maps because sturms aircraft can't benefit from the movement cost.
Sturms groundunits can outrun other cos but his aircraft can't.
I agree with many of the others here that this choice of map heavily favors Sturm for several reasons. The biggest is the mixed base scenario where early capture game is mixed with a lot of early fights. This gives maximum advantage to both Sturm's superior d2d stats and his terrain ignoring. The other reason being the presence of comm towers. I believe there's a decent number of wallbreaking interactions that start to pop up more at 140 and there's 2 comm towers per player, not counting Sturm's added ones. Not that this map remotely gives Hachi the opportunity to gum up the position and begin to snowball but I think that the extra comm towers being present will always help Sturm more than Hachi, especially when there's 2+ towers (but not some silly number of them). I think this would be a much more interesting matchup when choosing a more balanced map. Sturm is basically always going to win contested comm towers and even if he couldn't take Hachi's, Sturm benefits from extra attack more. Sturm wants the game to be over before the merchant union. Hachi wants everything to slow down.
I think this map was too much in favor of Sturm, it doesn't look like it initially but there's a lot of mountains in the way and there's no way to cap the com towers. The com towers just also make Sturm impossible to beat here. BTW If I recall correctly, isn't this a High Funds map and not a Standard map? That may have evened it out a bit more but being mixed base + mountainous terrain put it too much in Sturm's favor.
Honestly it would be cool if AWBW had both their sturm and broken sturm
25:32 he moved it to the city to block it from producing a unit
this matchup feels like sensi vs colin. Sturm's units are hard to kill so he can keep them around much longer. Hatchi is very reliant on numbers to win, but over the match, he could not get a surplus, as Sturm's units just will not die. AW2 Sturm for the win
Considering Sturm's units get a 30% defense boost during his power instead of just the 10% defense for that in this and he still won says a lot since that's a notable nerf.
Not your highschool friend but I really thought Hachi was going to eventually smack Sturm to a pulp, especially after that first Merchant union. Sturm had nothing on the top front!
cool stuff!
it'd be neat to see a reverse match too where mechstorm had sturm ard deejus played hachi. seeing this matchup on other maps or with the awbw changes to sturm would be fun to see too!
i'm also wondering if hachi should have a slightly bigger power bar since although it didn't do a ton in this game, the way you described how powerful that super can be despite its low cost might warrant a nerf like that. i've heard about the different tiers of CO and i'm curious about what aw could be like if everyone was buffed up to tier 1-2 or maybe even 0
There is something hilarious about “builds a piperunner!” :D “and resigns the match.” D:
As someone who was playing AWBW way back when it was new, when Sturm was added to the game (Not all COs were added at once) the consensus was AW2 Sturm would be too absurdly OP, even more so than Hachi (who was already broken) so a lot of people were concerned, so the main dev (amarriner or such? idk it's been like 15 years) made a post explaining he settled on AW1 vs. mode Sturm for D2D and took liberties with the CO powers since AW1 Sturm didn't have a SCOP, so gave Sturm the AW1 power for normal and doubled the damage for a super version.
Also to think, the Sturm in this video is actually weaker than AW2 Sturm due to the lack of +20% firepower and defense on the SCOP, and Hachi is stronger due to the +10% firepower bonus on his.
I think being mixed base kills Hachi here: we were 18 minutes into the video before Hachi got any kind of advantage whereas Sturm was at Hachi's doorstep with his 20/20 units and perfect movement ready to take Hachi's cities by minute 5.
Anyone know why Deejus is starting with 4 comm towers? does mangs cover this? I didn't notice him say anything about it.
The Com towers are here to emulate AW2 Sturm day2day, where he has 120/120 offense and Defense, in AWBW Sturm is nerfed to 80/120 Offense/Defense, and this match is to see in a top level game, who wins, AW2 Sturm or Hachi.
@@mauricesteel4995 Gotcha! Thank you. I didn't know if it was some sort of overlay to pretty up the edges of the video or something.
Somehow the piperunner is both a flex and a surrender symbol at the same time.
its so useless its basically an in-game emote.
Hey @mangs, would you offer these 2 players the same match but changing roles? The one who played hachi, plays Sturm? Might be that one player is better than the other?
Thanks for the great content Mangs! more pro games casting please!
Lmao I was like 30mins in before I realised the other player was mechstorm. I kept wondering why Mangs talks about mech storm like why would you build mechs here in vast numbers 😂
I was thinking sturm, and sturm it was.
Everything about hachi is countered to some degree by sturms day to day. Cheap unit's? Strong unit's. Snowballing? Capture game snowballing. Lot of unit's? Fast units. High tech unit's? Nuke button.
Hachi might be favoured on some maps, but i think the majority of the time Sturm be the winner.
I remember that with the GBA you could play up to 4 players even with a single cartridge, it was like a basic version but still it was awsome.
I am currenty playing Black Hole Rising in my Freetime. Does anyone know If I can skip Campaign Mission to unlock Sturm or do I have to S-Rank Every Single available Mission?
Skipping as many missions as possible is a viable way to S-rank the campaign. I'm pretty sure it just gives you the average ranking of all missions you complete. This means you only have to play 4 out of the 7 missions on each continent, so play the ones that are easiest to get 300 points.
@@Mangs1337Thank you for the help. That makes it a lot easier. Have a Great Day Mangs and thank you for your awesome content!
Now I want to see a video on the opposite end of the power spectrum: Grimm or Flak vs. no CO (played by Andy who never uses CO power). Flak and Grimm are widely considered to have crippling flaws, but are they so bad it would be better to play no CO at all?
damn, the first merchant union had me thinking hachi could turn this around