Onshape is definitely great, but it could go away or have its free version cut down (like Fusion 360) at any time. Having an open source alternative that's less of a slog than FreeCAD would be awesome.
You know, like they already did previously? It is utterly insane to me how onshape even consider luring folks in again after absolutely ruin their userbase and community.
You might have played some (most?) of these games already, but I'd like to offer some suggestions in case you haven't.
- The Disgaea series is hilarious, infinitely replayable, and allows you to pull off some very satisfying game-breaking maneuvers. Disgaea 1, 4, and 5 are considered the best in the series. Disgaea 7, the newest release, has good reviews on Steam too. If you want to pick just one, get Disgaea 5.
- Tiny Metal is inspired by Advance Wars and improves on many aspects of the game.
- Wargroove is also inspired by Advance Wars. It's very good, but a single level can sometimes take a long time to beat (45 mins to an hour). Comes with a scenario editor so you can design your own levels (or download other people's creations).
- Into the Breach is one of my favorite games. The design is simple with very few rules, but it lends itself to emergent behavior that can be a lot of fun to discover.
- Deckbuilders give me the same kind of satisfaction as turn-based strategy games. The current genre darling is Balatro, and its popularity is well deserved. One of the best games to come out in recent years. I've been recommending it to everybody.
- And of course, the Fire Emblem series is still alive and well. The games are 3D now, but the gameplay is still the same as it always was (with slight variations between versions). Fire Emblem: Three Houses might be my most played game ever. That said, Fire Emblem has never been as challenging as Advance Wars in my experience, so you might not enjoy it as much unless you play on higher difficulty levels. I play these games for the story, so I usually play on easier modes.
- EDIT: oh, how could I forget Triangle Strategy and Unicorn Overlord? I haven't played these yet, but they're well reviewed and come with some very interesting mechanics.
Hope there's something new in that list for you to enjoy :)
I got a buddy who is making an AW2-like and was exploring procedurally generated gameplay modes (including co-op), not sure if they'll use this new AI thing or not.
I'm guessing they mean with some type of procedural generation or another randomization approach in mind that creates a bunch of new maps, bosses, vehicles even!
Advance Wars, if I recall correctly, has a hand-crafted set of maps and battles structured in a campaign story. So once you're done, you're done. Replay-ability is a bit limited.
I absolutely loved Advance Wars and my brother and I played the heck out of it growing up!
Advance Wars has a map creator and the AI can play on it. In theory one could get an AI to generate maps given the rules of the map creator and then users can implement them. Per my memory, no way to share, so it'll be a bit harder to setup and you can't do things like give the enemy units whose location you don't know, but it achieves a near infinite replay value. With some more work and one could have a new AI interface with an emulator and play the game instead of using the built in AI, if one finds it is no longer challenging. Thought that is probably reaching the scale where remaking the game from scratch would give one more freedom and control (and ability to monetize).
Replayability is overrated imo. The old advance wars games on gba and ds took hours to beat and had excellent map design. There's also something cool about the no strings attached development model of old cartridge games where the game had to be perfect on release that is very endearing.
I always thought those strategy games were missing a competitive community and better PvP experience but I could also see how more replayability would make them more popular.
I think it's hard to make those PvP modes compelling to most people, being turn-based with longer turns is rough (card games get away with it because turns are typically pretty short).
It's hard to think of popular turn-based video games where it's popular for multiplayer and the turns are long.
