Design Maps

Design Maps is a mode present in all Advance Wars games, wherein the player can create and edit their own maps. A map will only become playable when two HQs have been placed upon the map, and one production property, e.g. Bases, Airports or Ports, has been placed for each army.

Restrictions

When designing maps, the mode has some limitations to map design. For a start, design map dimensions are 30 tiles across by 20 tiles down. A maximum of 60 properties are allowed to be placed upon the map at any time, and each army may have a maximum of 50 placed units at any time.

Trivia

• In the original Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, holding down a certain set of buttons while entering Design Maps will generate a map with the Kanji characters "任天堂" (Nintendo) formed out of mountain terrain.
  • In Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2, this is done holding down both the Left and Right shoulder triggers on the Game Boy Advance.
  • In Re-Boot Camp, this is done holding the minus (-) button on the Switch Joy-Con.
  • In Dual Strike, holding down both the Left and Right buttons on the Nintendo DS will instead generate the map with the words "Advance" (spelled out of forest terrain) and "Wars" (spelled out of plains and shoals terrain).
• In the original Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2, and Re-Boot Camp, if the player attempts to place units on invalid terrain 50 times in a row, Nell will appear to chastise the player by quipping: "You must really like doing that over and over. Keep it up."
  • In Re-Boot Camp, if the player continues with this antic Nell will become increasingly annoyed and eventually leaves. An Orange Star soldier will take over her place for any menu dialogue that she would normally say.

Mission edit glitch

In the original Advance Wars, a glitch is present where the player may edit campaign maps with the Design Maps tools. This glitch occurs by performing the following steps:

1. The player fails the Naval Forces mission in Field Training by losing either the Transport Helicopter or Lander.
2. The player then accesses Design Maps, places a single Infantry and then deletes it.

At this point the game somehow acts like the player is both in battle and in Design Maps at the same time, where Max's theme starts playing and interface glitches out. The player can then navigate to a glitched main menu, select Campaign or War Room mode, and can use the Design Maps editor options to modify the map. Any modifications made to the map can be saved, and the game can be reset to return things back to normal but with the map changes still present.