What I enjoyed more on classic Advance Wars wasn't the cute soldiers, but the different models they had and the animations.

The first Advance Wars had your soldiers walk to the screen, take aim and shoot. Each nation (green, blue, etc) had their own style of machinery and gear. Yellow looked japanese, Green kinda of germanic and Red seemed kinda like U.S. army.

Days of Ruins have color swapped armies with just a 2-frames animation of the gun blaze.

In the end this doesn't matter that much because I end up skipping combat animations, but on classic Advance Wars at least I waited the campaign to end to do it.