<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Move X unit one square too far, it gets blasted by the enemy forces, and it's either crippled or destroyed outright. So it's trial and error to figure out how far you can move without getting screwed.
Suppose you get two scout units to deal with the fog. Terrific. You push one out to scout in the fog, and they get completely slammed by artillery and rocket units because you either made the wrong choice of which squares to scout out, or you pushed them inadvertantly into artillery range.
That's not strategy, that's trial and error, and it's a puzzle.
I got the same vibe from playing it as I did with X-Wing and Tie Fighter (the mid 90s PC flight sims). Great games. Lots of fun. Nobody would ever classify them as puzzle games, because you were dogfighting and all that stuff. Lots of action.
But a lot of the missions were trial and error. Like a puzzle. You had to be at X spot at Y time to achieve Z goal in time, or you'd have to start over. There were literally missions where you had to play them a half dozen times so you knew where enemies would appear, because if you waited for them to appear and THEN reacted, it'd be too late. So you'd have to take care of one objective quickly, and start immediately heading towards the next one even before it popped up or there was no way you could make it in time.
Advance Wars gave me that exact same puzzle, trial-and-error vibe, which just annoys me. So I stopped playing it. If I want to deal with puzzles, I'll play an actual puzzle game.</div>
"For one thing to live, another thing must be killed. God, or whoever is responsible, deserves respect for creating such a system. It reveals that we cannot take all matters into our own hands. We need only to focus on doing our best--a simple, yet profound way to live, is it not?"
