EDIT: And another thing. The only reason why the big 5 are in the 'Broken Tier' is due to the playerbase itself, which incessantly makes maps that favor those guys. Intentionally or no.
I get that maps are a huge part of Advance Wars and have a huge ability to change the game and how the COs line up. That's natural; that's the way these guys are
designed. There are times where the big five don't necessarily need to be banned, yeah.
The exception, though, is Hachi. Playing Hachi is about as close as you can get to cheating.
Hachi is good. Hachi is
great. Most importantly, Hachi
has extremely large advantages that will apply to 99.9% of maps. He doesn't need to have a 1v1 situation or a massive 20 player game, he can succeed in both. Teams or not? Doesn't matter. Needs to be left alone? Lolnope. Ground, air, sea? No real vulneurabilities and he'll be outnumbering your units regardless of situation; and heaven help you if your map is regularly interspersed with cities!
To thwart Hachi, you need to be able to neuter two things:
-His SCOP's ability to deploy from cities, which allows him to do things literally nobody else except Sensei can come close to, reinforcing waves midpush and generally overwhelming the field with his presence in numbers the enemy can't fight off. To do this, there needs to be almost next to no cities present on the map - something that massively harms other COs, like Kindle, Lash, and Sami, who lose out on advantages from that kind of thing; not to mention it creates a noticably less dynamic warzone because if there aren't any cities to capture, why bother with many unit types? Alternatively, no cities - just air and/or sea combat! ...Except now obviously only a couple of COs are good for what's going on and Hachi STILL has his second advantage...
-His day-to-day and COP, which give him a huge monetary advantage. Even if the former situation is met, Hachi's ability to cut the cost of units
in half using all of
two power stars is pretty unmatchable. He has roughly 10% more income on a day to day basis, and then effectively
twice the cash every few turns. This is absurd, and there is literally no disadvantage to it in the process when you can still outnumber and/or outvalue your opponent's army with easy. The only way to thwart this advantage, which dwarf's Colin's especially in a 1v1 situation, is to pump up "gold per base" to such an absurd level that nobody cares how much units cost. Suffice to say, Kanbei and Colin are now god-tier, and any CO whose specialisation is typically limited by "it's most valuable on expensive units" (Jess, Grit, Drake, Eagle) are going to have a field day.
By this point - having few to no cities except around your HQ and having so much funds that nobody cares - you have straight up changed the entire face of what an Advance Wars game looks like. All in the name of trying to make Hachi NOT have an absurd advantage on any map.
You can argue for the others if you want, they're arguably easier to thwart (Colin is thwarted by quick, constant-conflict maps where he can't snowball; Sensei is thwarted by a lack of midfield cities; Grit is thwarted by low-income or low-chokepoint games; Kanbei... Kanbei is tough and it's hard to even counter-design a map against him really; Sturm is thwarted by having easily passable terrain or lots of air/naval combat that doesn't care). But Hachi was
designed by Intelligent Systems to be a god-tier reward for doing the insane and borderline-impossible (Remember that in AW2 you had to beat the Hard Campaign to unlock him, which was a very, very insane thing). He wasn't made to be balanced, and AWBW has taken a stance of not doing anything about this or any COs balance, really (Sturm is a rare exception), so... yeah.
Also, is it bad if I am admittedly most interested in a large-scale everyone for themselves game?
