Editing Advance Wars (section)

==Units==

Your army. They all have distinct roles, and depending on which CO you select, will appear as a certain faction. They're all identical (sans color and Infantry units) on the non-battle-animation map.

===Foot soldiers===

Foot soldiers are very important because you need them to capture properties and get gold. Or you can just [[Tarpit|spam them to jam the heck out of chokepoints]].

* '''Infantry:''' Infantry are the weakest- and yet most important- unit in the game. They move slowly (3 tiles a turn), countered by their ability to cross mountains and rivers slowly, and free movement through woods. Their firepower is VERY low, since they only have rifles; at best an Infantry unit will finish off a 1 hp Tank. Though they are plenty effective against other infantry and mech units. Their main draw is their ability to capture shit; they'll take cities, bases, airports, and other properties for you, at a speed dictated by their health. Most of the time they will be critical to your operations. They're commonly used at high tiers for their excellent spamming capability; as meat-shields they excel.
* '''Mech:''' Anti-tank infantry units. Moves only 2 spaces a turn, but can cross mountains and rivers without penalty, and carry a bazooka that lets them engage light armor such as tanks and recon jeeps. They're another useful unit- while their mobility leaves a lot to be desired for, they can be spammed in obscenely large numbers if one does not care about winning QUICKLY. They stand a chance against armor, though their defense is still low, meaning you generally have to attack first. Also has a slight firepower bonus with their rifles over regular Infantry, but that really doesn't matter. Surprisingly potent up through mid-game: they're realistically as powerful as a regular tank, and while they're much slower sticking them in an APC gives them the option to either ride quickly or march through difficult/impassible terrain like mountains.
* '''Bikes:''' Added in DoR.  High-speed infantry unit.  Though they slow down significantly when crossing non-road terrain, bikes let you get a head start on capturing distant cities and bases before your enemy can.  Though they're vulnerable to anything that kills infantry (read: pretty much anything), bikes extend your reach and income quickly, and can beat down regular infantry with slightly more powerful guns.

===Direct-attack vehicles===

* '''Recon:''' It's basically a jeep with a heavy machine gun mounted; fastest moving ground unit in the game, but suffers mobility penalties on literally anything that isn't a road. Can rape infantry units (but must be cautious against mechs). Has a huge vision radius, making them critical on Fog of War maps.
* '''AA Gun/Anti-Air:''' SPAAG vehicles with low anti-armor firepower, but their 40mm autocannons can one-hit kill footsoldiers in certain terrain, and they tend to one-hit kill (or at least very severely debilitate) any air units. Defense is also good, meaning that they can slowly beat Recons to death without much problem. If the enemy is shitting waves of footsoldiers at you, this is probably your best bet.
* '''Tank:''' A set of light tanks, your bread and butter. Can fuck up Infantry and Mechs bad with their turret MG, and can also engage light armor with a tank cannon. Since they're so cheap, they can be spammed in mass amounts as a generalist tank. Though their firepower is low against heavy armor. They have high mobility, at 6 spaces, and also don't have as severe terrain penalties as tire-using Recons, meaning they are excellent flankers and versatile attackers capable of driving through the shattered bodies of a broken frontline to tear up the exposed artillery or rockets.
* '''Medium Tank:''' Heavyweight bruisers that will smash up most other units while taking little damage in return.  If your opponent went mostly for light-medium units like bikes, tanks, and anti-airs a few medium tanks will push them around without sacrificing too much in terms of speed or flexibility.  The predators to watch out for are artillery, rockets, and bombers, though enough mech infantry can whittle down a medium tank's hp. Almost worthless in AW2 and DS, because of its bigger cousins, unless you really couldn't afford more than 16000 G.
* '''Neotank:''' Added in AW2, removed from DoR. A monster of a tank which overpowers the Medium Tank in pretty much every way, packing slightly higher attack & defense and the same movement speed as a regular Tank. Same strengths and weaknesses as other tank classes, just bigger and better.
* '''Megatank/War Tank:''' Added in DS and somewhat modified for DoR. Superheavy seige-breakers with superior combat ability but huge drawbacks in cost, mobility, and supply. This tank is so big that rather than being shown as a squad in battle animations like most land units, it's just one giant tank. Seriously impractical in most cases, but if you see your enemy fielding a heavily armored column, just one war tank with some support can flatten a path to victory (one war tank can happily kill two medium tanks or almost a half-dozen regular tanks given decent terrain and ammunition). 
* '''Oozium:''' An extremely rare special land unit that only appears in Dual Strike. Oozium cannot be constructed, so the only way it can be used is by playing on a map that has some at the start. These are extremely resilient giant slime monsters (yes really) with the ability to instakill any unit it attacks with no risk of being damaged by a counterattack. However in addition to being irreplaceable if present at all, damage done to Oozium is permanent, and it cannot counterattack. It also has the worst mobility out of any unit in the series, able to move at most one space per turn. It can somehow attack air units, however, making ranged attacks its only major weakness. If that's not an option, throwing enough non-ranged units at it, while expensive, will eventually kill it.

===Indirect attack vehicles===

Indirect attack vehicles can target squares which they aren't adjacent to. They usually can't move and fire, most of them have a minimum range, and they are usually sitting ducks when attacked directly.

* '''[[Basilisk Artillery Gun|Artillery]]:''' Dirt cheap indirect attack unit with a range of 2-3 spaces. That might sound like shit, but at a blocked-up chokepoint it is the difference between spending 5 turns shooting the same 2 infantry cycling back and forth, and breaking through to your objective. Also reasonably powerful even against stronger units like Medium Tanks, giving them a good use even in the late game.  To decide whether you need artillery, just look at the map: Are there choke points, mountains, or dense forests?  If so, buy you some basilisks.  Is the map dominated by water, aircraft, or wide-open roads and plains?  If so, ... don't.
* '''Rockets:''' Expensive, longer-range version of the Artillery. Excellent damage but serious problems moving across non-road terrain.  Surprisingly useful anti-naval units: their long range and high firepower projects a lot of power out into normally impassable waters and almost every naval unit costs more than a rocket group.  Perfect food for battle copters, though.
* '''Missiles:''' Same basic stats as the rocket, but can only attack air units. Will obliterate any flier in the game from far enough away, serving as either powerful area denial or a trump card hidden in obscured terrain.  Too powerful to ignore, but too immobile to use unsupported -- it has a minimum range, and every flier is faster than its maximum range.
* '''Piperunners:''' Only appears in DS. The silliest unit in all Advance Wars, and that's saying something. It's got the same maximum range as rockets and missiles, with slightly less minimum range, it has stupidly high attack and defense, and it can attack anything other than a submerged submarine. The only downside is that, as its name implies, it can ''only'' move along pipelines. If you're playing on a map without pipes, it'll sit on top of its factory for the whole game. These units are probably at least partially based on the Train unit from Super Famicom Wars (a Japan-only predecessor to the Advance Wars series), which were bound to railroad tracks instead pipes, could be used as transport, and were faster.
* '''Anti-tanks''': A DoR addition. Powerful and infuriating anti-tank artillery.  Unlike the self-propelled guns representing normal artillery units, anti-tanks are crew-served weapons with large blast screens.  Despite being moderately expensive, anti-tanks are difficult to counter and problematic to engage: they attack at range like artillery but also have no minimum range and are capable of counterattacking direct-damage attackers like tanks or infantry.  Their offense is very strong, particularly against medium or war tanks, and an anti-tank's defense is nearly unmatched, with most units dealing less than 3 HP of damage even if attacking at full health.  An attack force relying mostly on tanks (as most attack forces do) will very quickly find itself ground to a halt.  The best countermeasures (bombers, seaplanes, battle copters, and battleships) are costly, restricted by available airports or seaports, and are efficiently countered out themselves.  Only infantry and perhaps rockets fight cost-effectively against anti-tanks, and the former present the great difficulties of employing slow units against long-ranged indirect-fire weapons.

===Utility vehicles===

* '''APC:''' Unarmed, but can pack an Infantry squad inside. Can also supply fuel, gas, etc. in unlimited supply to other units, giving it a critical role as a supply unit. Used for cheeky tactics such as driving past the enemy flank and plopping an Infantry unit on their HQ. Somewhat low defense though. Days of Ruin renamed them to '''Rigs''' and gave them the ability to build temporary airports or seaports to serve as fuelling stations for planes or ships. In the first game the AI was obsessed with killing these, so you could lure their entire army away from the objective with a few serving as distractions (something that is actually required for the completing certain maps as fast as possible).
* '''Flare tank:''' Another DoR invention. Lightweight vehicles with an anti-infantry machine gun and a long-ranged flare launcher that clears the fog of war in an area, including revealing units hidden in forests or cities.  Essential to breaking the line of a clever opponent, and to almost any big action in Days of Ruin if you're playing with Fog of War on.

===Sea units===

Sea units go on the water, as you'd expect. A lot of maps are based around islands, meaning that you need to build them to ship your units back and forth, but they're a very secondary consideration on non-island maps.

* '''Lander:''' Vulnerable but essential transport ships capable of carrying two units of any size at once.  An attacking army needs several of these, making killing or protecting these the prime directive for both sides. For some reason you can only stick two infantry units in one, but can stick two APCs loaded with two infantry units each (for a total of four) in one.
* '''Cruisers:''' These were an odd duck in the noblebright AW games, where they were a hard counter to submarines and flying units, but couldn't actually attack other ships. This made them very dependent on getting the first strike -- if they took a hit from a full-health bomber or sub, or a battleship took a potshot at them, they were toast. Then Days of Ruin gave them the ability to shoot other ships, and suddenly they're one of the best units in the game.  Weirdly enough, cruisers have always been able to carry and refuel helicopters, giving them a niche supporting role in a combined-arms sort of battle.
* '''Battleship:''' Naval siege engine with superb damage and the singular ability to move and fire at long range, dominantly powerful but require support.  Once you have a cruiser or two this is probably your prime naval unit. Days of Ruin cranked their price even higher but gave them the ability to move and attack, thoroughly breaking some maps.
* '''Submarine:''' Stealth-capable naval superiority unit with enough firepower to sink a lander or cripple a battlecruiser.  Can "submerge," as an action, using twice as much fuel but making themselves invisible to all but adjacent enemies.  And the only unit besides a cruiser capable of attacking a submerged submarine is another submerged submarine.  Fighting cruisers takes crafty and evasive tactics, and usually amounts to "don't".  Used carefully a submarine can recoup many times its own cost, as even one solid strike on a battleship will cost more than the sub.  If you can afford the expense, a hit squad of a few submarines and a scattered few cruisers and battleships can wipe out much larger and more expensive fleets.
* '''Carrier:''' Both DS and DoR feature aircraft carriers. They're quite different between the two games, but what they have in common are a huge price tag, monstrous power in the right hands, but relatively low defense and a dependence on other ships to protect them. In both games, planes can land on them for resupply. In DS, they pack an anti-air missile with a massively long range -- just as powerful as the Missile but much less susceptible to being flown over. In DoR, they're unarmed, but can build very nasty seaplanes to harass the enemy.
* '''Black Boat:''' A variant on the Lander which only appeared in DS. It can only carry infantry and mechs, but it can also repair adjacent naval units for 1HP. Unarmed, but dirt cheap, and good for spamming infantry in the early game on island maps.
* '''Gunboat:''' DoR's replacement for the Black Boat. They can carry one foot soldier and have a single salvo of transport-killing missiles. Good for infantry spam on island maps but die horribly to most other naval units.

===Air units===

Air units can, um, fly. Which makes them the gamechangers on most maps. Helicopters can be shot at by most ground units, whereas planes can only be targeted by specialised anti-air weaponry.

* '''T Copter:''' Transport heli, basically a flying, terrain-ignoring APC. But it can't supply units, and can also be mercilessly raped by AA guns, balancing it. Used for even cheekier HQ-dropping tactics.
* '''B Copter:''' An attack helicopter, good defense against ground units, mostly because only machine guns and rifles can hit it. Can batter enemies to death with its autocannon and missiles, though an AA Gun will instant-kill it. Also is helpless against fighter jets.
* '''Fighter:''' Air superiority unit with exceptional speed and enough firepower to cripple any other flier in one salvo.  Also excellent as a fast but expensive reconnaissance unit.  Fighters are quite costly to build, especially in the early stages of a map.  With no anti-ground capability at all it's often reasonable to only build fighters when your opponent(s) already have an air unit or two, but sometimes getting an early fighter can dissuade your foes from ever taking off in the first place.
* '''Bomber:''' The Fighter's fat, ground-attacking cousin. Pure offense fliers that hammer most ground units with impunity, but expensive, highly vulnerable to its counters, and can't counterattack air units.  When you're looking to bust up a ground army with insufficient anti-air, accept no substitutes; a bomber is capable of reducing a medium tank to an expensive pile of scrap in one run.  As most ground units cannot engage a bomber at all it's a key offensive weapon on some maps.
* '''Black Bomb:''' Only appears in DS. It's the fastest unit in the game, but it doesn't attack -- you can instead set it to explode, which deals 5 damage to anything within 2 squares of it, be it Infantry or Neotank (although it isn't allowed to kill anything, it'll just leave them on 1 health). It immediately dies (without exploding) if anything attacks it or if its very small fuel supply runs out. In spite of these restrictions, it has the potential to be very very nasty, mostly because it can only be killed by dedicated anti-air weapons.
* '''Stealth:''' Only in DS. Capable of attacking every unit except for submerged submarines, but not as powerful as fighters or bombers, and built like tissue paper. Acts like a flying submarine -- it can become invisible to other units at the cost of burning stupidly large amounts of fuel per turn.
* '''Duster:''' Added to DoR. Propeller-driven WW2-era fighters, extremely cheap, highly mobile and capable of modest combat duty but badly outgunned against real anti-air or especially fighters.  Do not expect these to win you the war; dusters are unquestionably budget fliers.  However, a duster can make a real nuisance of itself by slowing infantry advances, especially if your opponent doesn't have anti-air tanks nearby.
* '''Seaplane:''' Another DoR addition. These are built from Carriers and can attack every unit type in the game except for submerged submarines. They don't pack as much firepower as Fighters or Bombers, but are still incredibly versatile beasts and brutally overpowering if your economy is strong enough to support more than one carrier. Their main balancing factor, aside from dependence on Carriers, is their incredibly small fuel tank and ammo reserve, so they're somewhat tethered to their mothership unless you have some friendly airports on hand.