Battalion: Arena

Battalion: Arena was a badged, tactical, turn-based game. The gameplay was heavily influenced by the Nintendo game Advance Wars. It was part of the Battalion series of games, where it was the only multiplayer game.

The game included several improvements over previous Battalion: games, including custom player maps, new units such as the Spider Tank, and multiplayer.

The Servers (without which the game can not function) were turned off in April 2012.

Gameplay
Games may be anywhere from 1-4 players. On each players turns, they moves and attacks with their units.

There are two modes of gameplay: Blitz, and Normal. In Normal, the map contains buildings the player must control to create units and generate income (that comes from Battalion Nemesis). In Blitz, the player has Warmachines, a special kind of unit, that can produce units and mine ore as well to get money to build new units.

Each unit has either medium, heavy, or light armor along with a medium, heavy, or light attack. Medium armor deals with everything equally. Heavy armor is good at defending against medium and light attacks, but can't stand up to heavy attacks. Light armor is actually good against defending against heavy attacks, but falls to light attacks.

Medium armor, by default, stops none of the damage done by an enemy attack.

When a unit wearing light armor is hit by a light attack, the light attack hits for x1.5 the base damage. A light attack that does 20 damage will do 30 damage against an enemy with light armor. The damage seems to always round up.

Every terrain give you a bonus of defense, except canyons, ore deposits, roads and bridges.

Units
The game features a range of different unit types and units. The units moving on the ground are divided into infantry and vehicles. Infantry units pack a punch for a cheap cost while tanks and other vehicles can move far and are heavily armored. Boats and submarines rule the seas, while air units can reach any area of the map. The game's armor system creates a paper-rock-scissors system of sorts, where any unit are really strong against specific units and weak against others.

Terrain
Terrain types are split into land tiles and sea tiles, which decides which units can move on these tiles. Shore tiles link sea and land together. Some terrain will slow units down, but in return some of these terrain types provide defensive cover which will cause your units to take less damage. Some terrain types will damage your units if they rest on them. Warmachines can extract Ore from Ore deposit tiles in order to gain more money for producing units.

Gameplay Modes
The game contain both single-player campaigns and online multi-player. There are 8 tutorial missions teaching the player the controls and tactics of the game. There is also a map editor for users to create their own maps.

Maps
There are two types of maps in the game, Battle Maps and Coop Maps. On the Battle Maps, 2-4 players fight against each other. When playing Coop Maps, players cooperate to defeat a computer controlled enemy. This section contains tips and advice on how to win on each map.

Player Avatars
There is a large number of unlockable avatars for the player to choose from.

Helpful Links
Battalion: Arena forum on Kongregate.