Original Carrier Command

[bfcrusader 10]

I understand your arguments, but remember that games of any kind of the era Carrier Command was born in were all basically experiments as much as a game, it still is a fact today actually. It was the childhood era for games and was bound to have its own set of flaws and faults. Despite the points you brought up, Carrier Command was a hit, a ground-breaking accomplishment and showed an outside-the-box kind of thinking.

[sav112g 10]

You have to remember this was on a floppy disc for gods sake!:jesus: What they achieved was amazing for the time. It is probably in my top ten games ever even when by today it looks almost prehistoric.

Good game play backed up with clever programming to produce a sense of command of Air, Land & Sea…………how many games at the time created a game world to play in apart from the mighty elite!

Yes I understand your points but it was a simpler time back then and this was right at the sharp end.

[gadgetmind 10]

Just a few clarifications on the enemy carrier in the original Carrier Command:

Out of interest, which version of Carrier Command were you playing?

I guess I need to take that feedback on the chin, though some detail doesn't match my recollection and I'd have to do a fair bit of source code reading to see how things worked - or at least how they were supposed to work!

Getting the final gameplay balance right isn't easy, and we were certainly short of both time and resource to do this. Our only test resource was ourselves, and towards the end, a couple of Rainbird people, but they weren't 100% on the CC project by any means.

This is why I'm so pleased that Bohemia have been prepared to put the work into this area for the remake, and some might even have spotting modest slippage to the shipping date from time to time ...

[sav112g 10]

The one thing I don’t fancy with the new game is the walking about bit or FPS…there is amazing FPS out there like BF3 MW3 for players to get there FPS fix so I’d rather it was not in it as its not looking great from what I can see.

Back on the original I think I had it on the Amega I’d have to check the box. The only bug I can remember was a supply drone one that would find your ship with no supply but im a bit foggy on how it happened.

I’ve still got the game boxed looking like new.

I’m so out of touch these days playing only Navyfeilds on a rather old 2005 PC…time to get a new rig me thinks…used to love playing BF2 but I think the old GFX card would end up going as when I played it last a few years back i was getting BSD.....so gave it a miss.

Still waiting on a Elite game with an online always alive universe to explore! Think of the advertising rights alone on space stations…

Edited February 25, 2012 by sav112g

[DeathAndPain 1]

I understand your arguments, but remember that games of any kind of the era Carrier Command was born in were all basically experiments as much as a game, it still is a fact today actually. It was the childhood era for games.

Aw, c'mon! It was the time of the Amiga, which means there was already a decade of C64 games before it! And while I agree that the Atari 2600 is no platform to design really sophisticated games, the C64 sure was.

I understand your arguments, but remember that games of any kind of the era Carrier Command was born in were all basically experiments as much as a game, it still is a fact today actually. It was the childhood era for games and was bound to have its own set of flaws and faults. Despite the points you brought up, Carrier Command was a hit, a ground-breaking accomplishment and showed an outside-the-box kind of thinking.

I sure agree on that. Then again, I remember myself thinking even back then that a game could hardly be more designed for 1v1 multiplayer, which is why I never understood why no multiplayer option was built into it. Remember it was the time of Populous 1 and 2, which featured Amiga vs Amiga multiplayer through a null-mode-cable, or even the flight simulator Falcon that even featured Amiga vs Atari ST null-modem-multiplayer even though those were very different systems that had hardly more in common than the 68000 CPU.

The technically awesome thing about Carrier Command was the floppy disc loading routine. I have never seen such a complex game load faster than Carrier Command!

Out of interest, which version of Carrier Command were you playing?

The Amiga version. I checked out the PC variant years later but was turned off by the ugly graphics, so I got myself an Amiga emulator to re-play the game. Back then PC graphics hardware just was not developed well enough; the Amiga still had a sizeable edge on the PC.

I guess I need to take that feedback on the chin, though some detail doesn't match my recollection and I'd have to do a fair bit of source code reading to see how things worked - or at least how they were supposed to work!

So you are one of the original developers? Awesome, I would never have thought that one day I would get the opportunity to talk to one of them personally! Allow me to point out that despite its flaws it was still an amazingly great game - which is why I am here. :)

Getting the final gameplay balance right isn't easy, and we were certainly short of both time and resource to do this.

That is what I thought, but it was a shame nonetheless, because there was not much of a change necessary to fix the most blatant imbalances. I understand that putting good use to all of the various weapons systems would have required resources that you did not have, but there were some things that were most obvious by simply playing through the game once or twice. One thing that you probably could not do much about was game speed (the 68000 was only so fast, thank god for the warp mode of modern emulators :) ), but the Manta missiles were particularly broken in that they were so powerful that you effectively did not need anything else. Giving them only half or even quarter damage against ground targets would have forced the player also to make use of other weapons systems like the cluster bomb. Fixing those missiles alone would have made a huge difference!

But well, it was the time before the internet. Nowadays such a patch would always come within a couple months after game release.

Another game of that time that was - literally - breathtaking by design, but poorly balanced through final quality assurance (beta) testing, was Dragon's Breath. IMHO it is the Amiga game with the greatest athmosphere, outclassing even classics like the Psygnosis games or even Defender of the Crown. It was also huge fun to play (while both DotC and the Psygnosis titles only lived on their graphics, but had little to come up with gameplay-wise), but the final balance was poor, so it made no sense to give a potion to an egg when you could simply give the hatched dragon one super-potion to max him out in all respects, and with such a dragon it was not very hard to overrun any city no matter how plentiful and advanced its defenses were. There were other minor balancign flaws while the basic game concept was brilliant. Tweaking a few numbers would have worked wonders for that game as well. I never understood why the makers obviously spent so much energy on working out an awesome new game concept, equip it with the best graphics and sound of its era, deliver a perfect presentation, and then blunder on the level of basic balancing. Patching this game basically would only have required to alter a few numbers, without making any changes to the code.

As for the new Carrier Command from Bohemian Interactive it puzzles me why they repeat the basic mistake of the game not coming with (initial) multiplayer capability. The concept of CC practically screams for multiplayer, and while it may have been forgiveable back in the original CC times, bringing such a game without multiplayer option today is not!

[gadgetmind 10]

I never understood why no multiplayer option was built into it.

To be honest, it never even occurred to us!

The technically awesome thing about Carrier Command was the floppy disc loading routine. I have never seen such a complex game load faster than Carrier Command!

I wrote both the ST and the Amiga disk routines, and we even went on to licence them to a few people. The ST used a fairly standard layout, but I did skew the sectors to let us load a whole track in just over one revolution. The Amiga didn't use sectors: we put all the odd bits (with clock bits interleaved) in the first half of the track, and then the even+clock in the rest. We did this because we could then use the blitter to both split and combine the data and to insert/remove the clock bits.

Of course, I then had to visit the disk duplicator to work out how to write the parsing code for their fancy disk making machine!

So you are one of the original developers?

Yes, way back in my youth. I signed the Carrier Command contract the day before my 24th birthday and I'm now over twice as old!

Hey, I wonder if there will be another remake when I'm 72!

[celery 8]

Yes, way back in my youth. I signed the Carrier Command contract the day before my 24th birthday and I'm now over twice as old!

Fancy that, I signed my soul to BI a day after I turned 24. :)

[dingbat91 0]

Hmmm I'll be finishing my Games programming degree in uni when I'm 24...co-incidence?

[Dajunka 10]

I remember buying 2 copy's, the second a week after the first, just so I could have time acceleration between islands. Updates and patches, were a thing of the future, you either used a work around for a bug or you bought another copy. :)

[bfcrusader 10]

To be honest, it never even occurred to us!

Would you say it would have been possible to implement back in the day?

[gadgetmind 10]

Would you say it would have been possible to implement back in the day?

Way back then, networking PCs was difficult, and modems were rare, slow and expensive.

Just as we were finishing the ST version, we did see Midi Maze, but I'm not sure we considered adding anything like that to Carrier Command.

[Malligant 1]

I'm wondering, Gadgetmind, was it possible to cut off the enemy carrier's supply lines to the point that it got stuck in the middle of the ocean or on a "dry island" with no fuel and no munitions? Or was it a glitch of some sort?

I'm asking since it was part of my strategy, to cut him off while protecting my own islands, but I also had this lingering suspicion that you had programmed the enemy carrier to not run out of stuff.

I remember playing this back in the day, (still do occasionally!) never having my carrier meet the enemy carrier was one of my favourite tactics.

I used to use a manta with a comms pod as a cruise missile to start with, you could usually determine what island the enemy carrier was basing its current operations from, and by cutting it off from its main base island, stop production of fuel and really slow it down. I found at first that four assassin missiles, closely followed by a manta crashing into it destroyed the island command centres.

However later in the game they seemed to get tougher :( So I staged air raids.. with one manta armed with a comms pod, and another fully kitted out with assassins, that usually did the trick! was fun island hopping with them, refuelling then going on to strike the enemy base while my carrier was safely behind a string of friendly islands.

Once I do remember being stranded in my island claiming run by having one of my connecting islands taken out, however with a comms manta set to auto pilot slowly, and a couple of walruses armed with virus bombs, harbingers and ACCBs, both auto piloting fast, is was possible, with occasional interference from myself to send the walrus out long range too (the mantas on slowest were a smidgen faster than walrus at their fastest in the water.)

[Chris Jolley 1]

Fast forward several years and over half a decade to the future...  Replying to a 9 year old post i'm not expecting much response!

Anyway, first.. how cool is it to read all of the comments in this thread from an actual developer of one of the best games ever? I discovered this one when I was about 15 (now 38), during the twilight couple of years of the Atari ST's life as a games machine. Thank you for making this amazing game, I lost so much time to it!

I always felt like the ST version I had, had a seriously game breaking bug. I simply could not get enough carrier fuel being made. Even with a really good chain of resource and factory islands, I was always running out of fuel and finding that no more was being made in order to transfer. Which still seems strange to this day! Was that a known problem? Or did people finish the strategy game with a big network of islands, on the ST? Maybe I was just rubbish at it! But I think i got to about 8 islands once and had the same problem, sitting in the middle of the sea unable to progress. 

I also found in many games the enemy carrier seemed to stop doing anything. Even waiting at an island for it to arrive and attack didn't yield any results.. thanks to this thread I know why!

I have on last question.. There was an 'action' mode, if I recall, where you were right in the middle of the map - Thermopylae? Have I got that right? with a good island network behind you and behind the enemy carrier. I always assumed the point of this mode was that the enemy carrier was not far away.. but I still had the fuel problems, preventing me from exploring much further, and I never found the enemy carrier near any nearby islands - or Thermopylae. What did I miss here? I've always wondered 🙂

Anyway.. thank you again for making one of my favourite games, here's to hoping someone in the know is able to reply here, and put these distant memory questions to rest for me!
 

[Zane Moseley 0]

I just have one question? Can you destroy the enemies stockpile and have the enemy carrier run dry of supplies ( If you can even do that with the equipment you have because Anderson or Okoro mention that with some of the equipment you have you may not be able to attack the enemy stockpile ) I have never tried to attack the enemy stockpile first because I either have bad luck and as im trying to warp  the enemy carrier is taking my islands and the carrier may even take 1-2 islands while im in time warp or ill encounter the enemy carrier and get obliterated because if you played the story mode ( cant spell campaing right sorry ) Captain Arora says  "The enemy is building a second carrier that is far Superior than the one you found at the old docks on Vulcan". What I am thinking of this is that the carrier in the strategic mode is the same and it still is far superior than  you until your able to get better equipment. ( yes I know theres a way to put the difficulty of the carrier on different levels but easy level is just well to easy so Id rather go medium or hard.) So does anyone know if its possible to destroy the enemy stockpile first thing without any new equipment?

[Zane Moseley 0]

oh and i just read you comment Chris Jolly I didnt notice that this commenting platform was sooooooo old. I think thats really cool its like looking at some old  cave writing.

[Zane Moseley 0]

On 2/13/2021 at 9:45 AM, Chris Jolley said:

I have on last question.. There was an 'action' mode, if I recall, where you were right in the middle of the map - Thermopylae? Have I got that right? with a good island network behind you and behind the enemy carrier. I always assumed the point of this mode was that the enemy carrier was not far away.. but I still had the fuel problems, preventing me from exploring much further, and I never found the enemy carrier near any nearby islands - or Thermopylae. What did I miss here? I've always wondered 🙂
 

Yes you are correct about the spawn point I think but the enemy carrier will spawn the same distance away from mid map as you and the carrier will star producing and upgrading instantly I suggest you fill up your production  list with the stuff that you think will be useful but remember the limit you have on minerals and always try to stay away from the enemy carrier intil you think you are ready and take out the turrets first then disable the engines so it cant move because it will be faster than you so use mantas they will hang behind the enemy carrier witch you want take one manta to attack at a time once you have destroyed the turrets then you can bring in the rest of your units park your carrier broad side ( next to ) the other ship and then your ship guns will also help and you can use walruses ( choose your weapons carefully ) and i think that's it if you could help me out with my fist question that would be great!