Admiral Wars BeyondFour-Layer Grid Tactics

Game overview

Admiral Wars Beyond takes the turn-based tactics of Advance Wars, almost one to one in how it looks and plays, and lifts it off its single flat map. A battle runs on up to four stacked layers of the same place, orbit, air, surface and underground or underwater, with units on each layer able to strike the ones above and below, and to travel between them.

Around the battles is a persistent universe that nobody scripted. A context-aware generator reads a passively simulated universe and offers you a handful of missions; what happens in each battle changes the places, factions and people you meet next. You play an admiral who chooses the next fight and the loadout to take, never a bureaucrat managing an empire.

It grows out of binge-playing Advance Wars 2 and Dual Strike, and borrows from a long shelf of others: Command & Conquer's base building and superweapons, Into the Breach's tile tactics, XCOM's living campaign, Fire Emblem's characters and Shadow of Mordor's rivals.

Controls and interface

It plays like Advance Wars: move a cursor over a square grid, pick a unit, pick where it goes, pick what it does. The menus are context-sensitive, so a unit only ever shows the actions it can actually take from where it's standing. The layout below is a suggestion; mouse and gamepad work the same way.

Layers that have no units in a battle simply aren't shown. Most battles use one or two; the stacked view shows how the active ones line up, tile above tile, so you can see which submarine sits under which destroyer.

Game layers

1. 01 · Moment-to-moment

   A turn on the grid

   

   Deploy, move, attack, capture, build: the Advance Wars rhythm. Terrain decides how far a unit moves, how far it sees and how well it holds, and every unit is good on some ground and bad on other.

   On top of that, the layers: a bomber over the forest is on a different layer from the tank in it, so neither blocks the other, and the fighter above both can see what's coming from orbit.

2. 02 · Low metagame

   A mission

   

   From the overworld map you choose among a few generated missions: take a region, hold one you took before, rescue someone, escort a convoy, clean out a nest of hostile robots, or a peaceful job with no fighting at all.

   A mission is one battle of twenty to fifty minutes, with its own map, conditions and goal. Some arrive with a twist: a timer, reinforcements on the way, a base about to be destroyed.

3. 03 · High metagame

   A universe that keeps going

   

   The universe runs a passive simulation, and the mission generator reads from it, so no mission is prewritten and none is random either. Win a region and its neighbors react; lose one and you may be called back to it later. Old places come back as new situations.

   You never manage the empire, only watch it, through an overview that's feedback on what your battles changed. The universe has no final mission and no reset: it's an endless adventure with automatic structure, pacing and surprise, there whenever you boot it up.

4. 04 · Practical game flow

   One battle, or an afternoon in the garage

   

   Boot the game, look at the map, pick a mission and play one battle of twenty to fifty minutes. The battle is the whole time commitment.

   Between battles, spend as long as you like tuning loadouts and the mothership, or none at all. It's turn-based, so it saves after every turn and you can stop mid-battle without losing a thing.

Game modes

There's one mode: the universe, after the opening campaign on the first planet. Every battle sits somewhere inside it:

It's a singleplayer game at its core, and competitive play against other people is deliberately left out. If more players ever join in, it would be cooperative: players against the universe together, or visiting each other's universes and sending gifts.

Features and mechanics

1. The heart of it

   Battles in layers

   Advance Wars puts submarines, jets and tanks on one map, so a bomber can't fly past a tile with a parked transport on it. Here the battle map is a vertical slice of the world, split into stacked layers that each have their own terrain, weather and fog of war. Units interact directly with the layers above and below them.

   Battlefield	Layers	How they work
   Celestial	Orbit, air, surface, underground or underwater	Planets, moons, gas giants, stars and big megastructures. Most units live on one or two layers and can't go where their machine can't
   Space	Local space and the outskirts	Belts, gas clouds, debris fields and stations. Any unit can hop between the two, at the cost of a full move
   Deep underground	One, running vertically	Crust, mantle, outer and inner core, fought downward

   Usually only one or two layers are in use, so a typical battle keeps the fast pace of a normal Advance Wars match. The layers multiply the possibilities without multiplying the work.

   

2. Up and down

   Crossing between layers

   

   Units deploy on the surface and move to the layer they belong on: aircraft climb into the sky, satellites rise into orbit on mass drivers or heavy rockets and can come back down through re-entry. Amphibious units cross between sea and land, diggers tunnel down, submarines dive, and transforming machines hop between air and ground.

   Landing follows the ground underneath. A plane sets down safely on an airfield, takes some damage landing on plains, and is lost if it tries a mountain or a forest. Engineers can lay temporary airfields and ports near the front, so aircraft and ships can repair without a long trip home.

3. Not a static board

   Maps that change

   

   Terrain changes during a battle, through weather, events, destruction and construction, which makes the game part Command & Conquer and part Into the Breach. Bridges fall, forests burn, new structures go up, and capturable tech buildings and superweapons sit on some maps.

   The environment acts on weapons too: a huge wave washing over the field can stop beam weapons working for a turn. Hazards like toxic gas can be answered with protective gear, at a cost: gas masks keep a squad going but cut its vision.

4. Foundations first

   Damage from standards, not a chart

   Advance Wars balances every unit against every other unit with a giant damage table, and every new unit means filling in a new row and column. That makes adding content harder the more of it there is.

   Here weapons, hulls and armor, sizes and advanced technologies are standard types, and each unit works out the damage it takes from those types alone, without knowing who's shooting it. A new unit only has to be built from the standards, and it already fights correctly against everything else in the game, including content that doesn't exist yet. That's what lets the arsenal grow without end.

5. An all-stars arsenal

   Tiers of technology

   The units come in tiers, and which ones you can field depends on the situation: what you own, what you've captured, what tech is on hand and what the mission's resources allow. It's the circumstances of each battle, not an unlock tree.

   Tier	What it looks like
   Standard	The familiar army of infantry, tanks, artillery, jets, ships and submarines
   Scavenger	Low-tech raider gear, improvised and cheap
   High tech	Future weapons, drones, satellites, orbital strikes
   Ultra tech	Mechs, combinable and transforming units, carrier megabases bristling with guns
   God tech	Hyperweapons and superweapons, with nukes and the defenses against them

   Weapons can fill several tiles at once (beams, barrages, rings, lingering clouds), mounts can be swapped between units the way Super Robot Wars swaps weapons, and there are mobile cities, aerial fortresses, underwater bases and giant land crawlers.

6. People on the field

   Admirals, heroes and rivals

   Admirals are the commanding officers. As in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, an admiral can board a unit to make it a veteran and project a radius of their own bonuses; fighting inside that radius charges their power, which spreads the bonus over the whole map for a turn. Rare artifacts called super cores can rewrite an admiral's stats or powers.

   Officers and heroes fight as units with their own abilities. Admirals and heroes on every side are generated, with faces built from parts and personalities of their own, and they can fall for good. Rival admirals remember you, the way Shadow of Mordor's captains do, and between battles visual-novel scenes build friendships, rivalries, alliances and romances, Fire Emblem-style.

7. Nothing prewritten

   A generator that reads the universe

   Missions come from a heuristics-driven generator, not a dice roll. It looks at the region's state, who holds it, who's nearby, what happened there last time, what it's made of, and builds a battle that fits: the map's layers and terrain, the opponent, the resources, the goal, any twists.

   Maps are assembled from small pieces of terrain and checked to be playable. Resources follow the mission too: steady income every turn as in Advance Wars, harvesting as in Command & Conquer, or only what you deployed with. So two battles in the same region a hundred missions apart can play nothing alike, and both make sense.

8. Not every mission is a war

   Civilian, science and rescue units

   

   The same grid tactics work for jobs with no fighting at all. Civilian, industrial, science and rescue units have their own moves and their own terrain strengths, for peacetime missions that build up your headquarters and the federation's cities, and for missions about people: escorting, rescuing, finding or supporting someone you've met.

   They give the universe room to breathe between wars, and give you a reason to care about what the wars are protecting.

9. Deep, but never in the way

   The garage and the easy battlefield

   Between battles there's a huge library: units, equipment and items to organize in a browser with categories, search and favorites, loadouts to build for your mothership and mobile headquarters, items to carry like Super Mario Bros. 3's inventory. Spend hours there, Armored Core or BattleTech style, or skip it.

   On the battlefield everything stays small: a cap on units in the field, a limited inventory, one resource, inactive layers hidden, and automation for chores Advance Wars made you do by hand, like keeping long supply lines topped up. Most of the extra features can be ignored and the game still plays as plain, fast Advance Wars.