Campaign Mode

There are two Campaigns in Advance Wars: Dual Strike, a Normal Campaign and a Hard one. We're going to try and get you through the Normal campaign in this walkthrough; completing it will test your strategic skills and give you a good amount of preparation for the battles in the other gameplay modes.

Notes On Ranking

After each mission, you're going to earn a rank that describes how well you did, with S being the highest score you can get. This ranking is affected by your scores in three separate categories: power, speed, and technique.

Power is a measure of your army's lethality. To increase your score here, you'll want to destroy as many enemy units as you possibly can, preferably in a short amount of time. If you use a CO Power or a Tag Team to wipe out most of their army in one turn, you should be able to get a 100 Power score without a problem.

Technique is determined by your ability to keep your units alive. The more units you lose, the lower your technique score will be. Fortunately, this is measured as a percentage of the total number of units that you've built, so when you're about to beat a mission, build numerous cheap units at your bases to boost your technique score somewhat.

Speed is, obviously enough, predicated on how quickly you complete a mission. You'll need to quickly and efficiently proceed towards your objective if you want to get a good speed ranking. If you attempt to sit in your base until you have enough cash to build megatanks and then slowly march them across the map, you'll probably have an easy time winning (unless your opponent takes over the entire map and beats you in funds), but your speed score will suffer.

A mixture of all three of these scores will determine your overall ranking for a map; you need to get above 280 or so for an S ranking. That doesn't include bonus points that you might earn for destroying ooziums, black crystals or obelisks, or minicannons.

At the end of the campaign, you're awarded an overall ranking for the campaign based on an average of your scores for all 28 missions. On the normal campaign, it's not too difficult to earn an overall S ranking, even if you happen to get a few less-than-perfect scores along the way. Just smash the heck out of the first dozen or so campaigns as best you can so you can absorb the A's and B's that will pop up later in the campaign.

Note also that your ranking doesn't really affect anything besides some minor unlockable stuff in the Battle Maps shop. If you're not concerned with that, then feel free to ignore it!

Mission One: Jake's Trial

Objective: Destroy all of my units to win. Good luck!
CO: Jake
Enemy CO: Rachel

The first mission of the game is a straight tutorial, where Rachel will offer up a few of her units for the slaughter in order to get Jake up to speed on the mechanics of the game. This shouldn't be too difficult to do. If you want to earn the maximum amount of experience from this battle, then be sure not to let any of Jake's units get destroyed.

You possess a Mech, a Tank, and an Infantry unit at the beginning of the fight, while Rachel will be fielding two Infantry units and a Tank. On your first turn, move your Infantry onto the neutral city nearby and begin the capturing procedure. Then, move your Mech forward into the forest near the enemy tank and take advantage of the cover there to open fire. This should let you bring the tank down to four hit points, which will make it an easy target for your tank to polish off.

On your second turn, go ahead and finish capturing the city your infantry is in. One of the enemy infantry units will likely have moved forward into the woods near the central city, so attack it first with your mech (they'll take damage, but shouldn't die), and then finish it off with your tank. The other infantry unit will be capturing another city here. Although they have good defense, they'll still be ripe for the picking if you send in your tank. Try to keep your mech unit out of their movement range, though, as they'll probably be weak enough to die at this point. Anyway, your own tank and infantry should be able to polish off the enemy infantry in another turn or so, earning you max points and an S ranking.