The best strategy games like Advance Wars are Wargroove, Into the Breach and Tiny Metal. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to strategy costs you.
Filtering to strategy means you want to be making decisions rather than executing them. It is the right filter when what you liked was the planning.
What you get: Losing that teaches you something. A good strategy game makes the reason you lost legible, so the next attempt is different rather than just longer.
What made Advance Wars worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the strategy part of that answer, and only the strategy part.
The most direct successor — same grid, same capture-and-build loop, fantasy setting.
Perfect information tactics on an 8x8 grid; every enemy move is shown before you commit.
Openly modelled on Advance Wars, down to the unit roster.
Same studio's other tactics series, with permanent units and a school between battles.
Deeper class system, isometric grid, far darker story.
For when you want the tactics harsh and the campaign unforgiving.
The series' own bleak entry — same rules, no cartoon tone.
Real-time auto-battles built on tactical positioning, with the same unit-counter thinking.
Grid tactics with genuine puzzle-box map design.
Pace and immediacy. Strategy games are slow by design, and the good ones expect you to sit with a screen for a while before anything happens.
The full list is on games like Advance Wars — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Wargroove. The most direct successor — same grid, same capture-and-build loop, fantasy setting.
No. Advance Wars released on the Game Boy Advance, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Scale. Tactics is one battle, unit by unit. Strategy is the campaign around it — economy, territory, and which battles to fight at all.
Turn-based ones, yes; the genre started on consoles. Real-time strategy is genuinely worse without a mouse, with a handful of exceptions built for the pad.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Advance Wars list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is strategy — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the strategy guide for where to start in the genre generally.