Today I was watching a cool video about Advance Wars map design. Makes me want to play some more Advance wars :).
In particular I really like the way randomness is handled in Advance Wars. For the unfamiliar, units all have 10hp, and when you get in a fight the system will tell you you will do 52% damage for example. This means you have a 80% chance to do 5 damage and 20% chance to do 6 damage. There are two reasons this is cool:
1) The variance is within a narrow range (i.e only one point of damage different out of 10). This means that you can normally account for both possibilities (unless you are far behind, which is fine), and often either result is fine, and will provide the same general outcome for the particular localized battle while…
2) The different outcomes most often result in minor differences in the amount of hp surviving units are left with. This is moreso Input Randomness (more desirable) for later turns than output randomness in my opinion. (I still have to write an article outlining my thoughts on the distinction here).
In addition, Advance Wars even attempts and largely succeeds in playing with an effective and player-influenceable information horizon with fog of war (and some additional ambiguity with weather effects). Overall a very strong design achieved with a relatively low complexity in terms of unit types, terrain types and rules.