Advance Wars Role Play
From AWRPedia
The Advance Wars Role Play or AWRP for short was started in August 2008 on the Wars Central Forums. It takes place in Cosmo Land, the continent where Advance Wars 1 took place, albeit in a different continuity to the game. It is currently led by Craig.
The link can be found here.
Contents |
History
Countries
All four main nations of Orange Star, Blue Moon, Green Earth and Yellow Comet all make their appearance in the RP yet have more basis their real life counterparts (United States of America, Soviet Union/Russia, Europe and Imperial Japan) than the game equivalents. Black Hole is absent, only to be replaced by the archipelago of Grey Meteor, based on India. However, as Grey Meteor is not controlled by RPers it is largely absent in the everyday RPing.
Commanding Officers
Every RPer signs up as a CO in the employment of one of the four nations, each of which is led by a senior RPer. This is done in-character by having their character in the role of Commander-in-Chief of the military, and depending on the country they are officially in charge of the entire nation as well. To simplify procedures the Commander-in-Chiefs are de facto in charge of everything should they not be the country's leader.
Once hired a CO is supposed to do their duties as the CiC sees fit; normally this means that COs have a large amount of freedom as long as their actions do not affect international relations; do not expect to see subordinate COs starting a war or trading military technology at their own discretion. While doing this a CO receives character development by interacting with the other COs or NPCs, often leading to unforeseen twists. Due to the nature of a RP, the CO base in a single country rarely stays the same for prolonged periods of time leading to new possibilities nearly all the time. Characters that have been around for longer usually have their relations with each other set out, allowing for more intricate plot. Results may vary, though.
Mechanics
In the AWRP, there are several mechanisms in place to ensure it is a fair game for each of the four countries. Though there is not set end goal, a single country obtaining an edge over the others eventually leads to a boring RP.
Daily Updates
One of the rules firmly set in stone are the income of countries, which is granted on a daily basis and taken care of by the country leader or someone appointed by the country leader. During these updates, known as daily updates, a country leader has the ability to purchase units and increase their army as they see fit.
CO Skills
Like in the games, each CO has their own set of skills to distinguish themselves from the mold. As there are few restraints due to the open nature of the RP, many abilities that are untouched in the game are found here. To prevent any CO from having statistics that dominate the others each CO has to go through the process of balancing during sign-ups. This is not as bad as it sounds, as fair stats are usually easy enough to obtain. A hint to any newbie thinking to join would be to read recent sign-ups that have been approved to get a feeling of balance before attempting to join. On top of that it's easier to power up statistics than to tone them down, so when in doubt play it safe.
Examples of skills range from relatively standard boosts of having an affinity for all naval units or bland COs like Andy, via abilities that depend on what units the opponent is using to COs whose statistics change depending on how often they have used their CO Powers or the amount of stars in their CO meter.
Technology
A difference from the actual games is the addition of custom technology. These can be divided in four main groups; offensive technology, defensive technology, battle technology and passive technology.
Offensive technology is the technical term for custom units; varying from ranged anti-air ships and an indirect land unit combining the offensive capabilities of rockets and missiles to subterranean tanks and stealth fighters, the RP is filled with interesting unit concepts and is the perfect place to put your own ideas to the test- if you can convince your country leader to research them, as the number of tech that can be researched is limited.
Defensive technology covers all emplacements, equivalent to Black Cannons and similar found in the games.
Battle technology boosts the combat performance of either a certain number of units or the entire army as a whole, ranging from improved ammunition to nanomachines altering a COs' abilities.
Passive technology has an influence on the other aspects in the RP, such as the time it takes for reinforcements to arrive at a battle or the income a country receives.
Warfare
Should war be declared by a country leader it is done one battle at a time. During a battle, each side is allowed to field a maximum of two COs and fifty units. When these are handed in by each side involved, the RP leaders draw up a map. The victor is decided by a dice roll, and the odds are determined by the RP leaders depending on factors such as how well a CO's abilities match their available units, the map, and technology involved. The results of this dice roll is posted after which the battle starts, each side keeping the result in mind and working towards it.
The main combat technicalities are a mix of RPing and mechanics from the Advance Wars games; using the units and terrain from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, the COs each take a turn one at a time in which they RP the actions of their army, including attacks. However, the damage output for each of these attacks is then calculated and included at the end of the post, eventually resulting in a list of lost units for that battle. Since the end of December 2009 these calculations are done by an excel sheet to alleviate the amount of work done by RPers; it can be found here.
