RichardCranium

Yeah, I tried that mod but wasn't happy with the results. (Which is not meant as a slam on the mod designer! A *lot* of work went into it and it delivers what it promises.) I guess that I could shuffle back and forth between islands until I'm able to afford better weapons to take on the deadly islands. Doing that isn't very fun and it eats the small amount of gaming time that I have. I haven't played CC:GM in months. I used to have a lot of fun playing it, but not any more. I don't even think about playing it, so double-thumbs-up BI; you pissed off a customer that used to really enjoy the game. Of course, I've already paid for it so there's no economic advantage for them to make me happy but I wonder who the hell asked for them to add that? Rhetorical question. I'll probably delete the link to here in my browser and ignore the game in my steam library. Good luck for the rest of you. If you are enjoying the game the way it is now, good for you. (no sarcasm)

And here we are at almost in September and I haven't played CC:GM since March all due to the last beta patch with the respawning carrier. Good job. I used to play it all the time and thought it was fun.

I think your memory is better than mine. All these points ring a bell. While it didn't take long for a Command Center to be built, it did take a measurable amount of time. It also took a while for the other artifacts on the island to be built/rebuilt since tear-down started as soon as the old command center blew up. (Which was really neat, since you could watch all that happening from a parked walrus on the island.) ---------- Post added at 09:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:48 PM ---------- Oh, and I haven't played CC:GM since my post on the 20th of last month. Nor will I until the next patch is pushed onto Steam.

Well, part of that was due to the way resupply worked in the original. In the original, you had to be within a near radius of a friendly island to get resupply. I believe (but could be wrong) that the friendly island had to be connected to the stockpile island to be a valid supply source for the carrier. The same constraint appeared to apply to the enemy carrier. So you could draw the enemy carrier deep into your half of the island network, take over/destroy an island far away that breaks the supply chain, and starve the bastard. The enemy could also do that to you, but I don't think the AI back then was clever enough to plan for that. It did mean that you had to be careful when you attacked an island to ensure that you had sufficient resources to make it back to a supply island if the attack failed. Plus if you were short on supplies when you attacked, you really wanted to take over the island versus destroy the command center since that would allow you resupply immediately after takeover versus having to wait for the new command center to come on-line. Or so I remember it. :)

And that's cool. Like I wrote, I don't mind that the carrier re-spawn is the default behavior. Some people live to beat up the enemy carrier. I do mind that I can't turn it off. Now, if the long-range telemetry pods from the original along with the ability for Mantas to land on friendly islands to re-fuel were introduced to the game, I might also live to beat up the enemy carrier. But if you want scenarios to be harder, then it would make more sense (well, to me) for all the enemy held islands to switch over to become defense islands after the carrier is sunk versus re-spawning the silly thing. It's not like there is a carrier to supply any more in that case. You could also argue that the island defenders could expand their reaction radii to encompass the entire island and to send all ground vehicles to any location where the island detects 4 walruses. Both against humans and the AI.

I thought the "let the enemy carrier teleport away when it's been beaten up too badly" to be a steaming pile of excrement in the campaign game and didn't comment about it since that didn't happen in the non-campaign game. I just played a non-campaign game with the latest patch (1_07_0025) and I'd like to know what idiot thought that it was a wonderful idea to bring that crap into the non-campaign games? Please allow me to turn that bullshit off or I will never play this again. I do NOT want effing enemy carrier re-spawn. EVER. Maybe someone else does so you can leave it as a default, but I had better be able to turn that crap off outside of the campaign game. That is NOTHING like the original. NOTHING.

As far as I can tell, as soon as you arrive at another island any island that you've left is now back up to full strength. As long as you are at any given enemy island, nothing is repaired on it.

What I've noticed about walrus fuel levels is that if... you launch a walrus at an island dock it back onto the carrier move the carrier launch the walrus ...then the walrus's fuel level will drop as soon as it hits the water. The amount of the drop appears to have some relationship on how far you move the carrier. Other things that I've seen are... I've noticed that the walruses in aggressive mode will still lock onto things but not shoot at them, even when other enemy units are shooting and hitting them. I've seen this with missile and flak armed walruses against ground targets. They will happily blow things out of the sky. The carrier has no idea how to use the bow gun when it fires shells. None. It attempts to use the plasma cannon solutions when targeting, especially when shooting at aircraft. I've lost several walruses that way when the carrier shells its own forces. Please change the carrier to stop firing the bow cannon at aircraft when it doesn't have a plasma cannon mounted there. The Vulcan map appears to be offset. Units on the map in a certain location appear to be some distance to the east when you use the map view there. Things that I'd like to see: If the scout drone is launched, I'd like all the weapons views have a picture-in-picture of what the drone sees in the upper right corner. There's no way to tell where the carrier/walrus howitzer shells are landing without it. Walrus formations. Nothing super fancy. Column, line, or wedge will do for me. You can hard code which walrus is in what position for each formation as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I had noticed that as long as you did not approach another island close enough to see its vehicles, the last one that you had visited was in pretty much the same state. (I mean, how long can a recon drone hover on a basic load of fuel?) In one game that I had played, two islands were close enough that I could fly my recon drone from one island to the other. Which, of course, I did. When the drone reached the location on the strategic map where the other island was supposed to be, there was nothing but sea. I honestly don't remember what happened when my carrier showed up, but... 1. It didn't leave me with an working recon drone. 2. I decided to never bother doing that again. So, I won't claim that anything bad happened, but it certainly wasn't worth the effort.

This thread implies that MP is better supported by the underlying framework than I had thought.

With the last beta patch, they would stare at the target for a short time and then attempt to move to be able to engage it. Well, unless it's one of those machine guns sitting over the gate to a compound. The walruses will stare at those puppies all day long or until those turrets finally chew through the walrus's armor (then the walrus blows up).

That would probably require a redesign from the ground up to a certain level that you wouldn't see. And that work would not make the game any more appealing to me, personally, since I have no interest in MP.

I do like your suggestion about the bomb sight. At the moment, the bomb sight is useless; it doesn't provide any information about where the bomb is going to land. That was semi-acceptable in the original since the bomb there would bounce on the ground, spitting out bomblets with each bounce, until it hit something or bounced too many times.

The current behavior is realistic. The German 88mm AT gun from WWII fame started as a 88mm AA gun. The Quad-50 used in the Korean War started off as an AA gun.

Well, flying mantas into the enemy carrier after firing all of your missiles at it was a preferred tactic in the original game. :)

I haven't tried that idea, but I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

Well, if you're an Old Fart (like me!), then you'd remember a game from the 1980s called Carrier Command. The Bohemia version diverges from the version mentioned at Wikipedia, but a lot of us from the old days really liked that game. IMO, this version of the game attempts to do more than the old one (today's graphics are much better and the islands now have real terrain versus maybe a conical volcano or two back in the Old Days). I think the underlying story in the new version is absolute crap (sorry guys, but getting water from another solar system is stupid beyond belief), but the game play is better in some ways than the old game (you'd hope so after 30 years) and slightly disappointing in others. I replay it fairly often (I have to reboot into Window to play it; I'm normally running Slackware64 on this machine, such as now as I type this.) and find it pretty fun. Your mileage may vary. There were tactics in the old game that aren't possible in the new one: You could deploy Walruses while the carrier was moving in the old game. Not possible in the new one (the way they are launched is completely different.). The old game had a long range telemetry pod that you could stick on an aircraft (Manta) that allowed you control aircraft and ground vehicles across the entire map. Nothing similar in the new game. The old game's ground vehicles had wire-guided missiles that you could steer into a target that you normally couldn't see. Nothing like that in the new game. (In fairness, the islands in the old game were pretty much pool tables. It wasn't hard to steer missiles in that environment but would be almost impossible to do it in the modern one. The new game has missiles that attempt to lock onto a target.) Mantas in the old game (with the long range telemetry pod) could fly to a friendly island, land at the airstrip, refuel, and continue to fly somewhere else to attack a target. That allowed some really interesting strategies which, frankly, the current game does not. Aircraft carriers are all about projecting force far beyond their line of sight and they've been like that since the 1940s. In the current game, you have no way to control anything out of telemetry range and you have no way to refuel or rearm aircraft on friendly islands. You can refuel and rearm vehicles on islands, friendly or enemy. While the enemy has some infantry-like things (droids), they don't act like infantry. (Standing in the open to be shot has not been part of infantry tactics since late 1914, if not earlier.) The old game, however, had nothing like infantry at all. The old game had carriers, flying things, and vehicles. The new version has enemy vehicles to attack you when you invade an island (unlike the original). The new game also has jammers and firewalls to interfere with your hostile takeover of any given island (also unlike the original). Get the PC version. There's also a demo available from Steam that will allow you to see if you like what they've done. I've been overall happy with my purchase.

I'm probably the only one who would ask for this, but.... I'd like a strategy variant where there's no enemy carrier but every island other than a single one for my stockpile belongs to the enemy. I like just using walruses to conquer islands, so that variant would be fun for me. (Anyone in their right mind would use the combined arms approach and zip through those islands like something through a goose.)

That would be incorrect. Mantas are more than happy to use missiles on ground targets. In fact, they will use 2 missiles to take out a ground target when apparently only one would do. Or so I've seen.

No *bleep*. Now, if the starting stockpile islands are relatively close and the enemy carrier chooses the "make a beeline for the pitiful human's stockpile island" strategy, then there is no chance in hell to implement the "keep away from the bad guy" strategy. You're stuck with plasma gun and probably no quad guns (at best one) to shoot down enemy mantas and help engage the enemy carrier. There's no bloody time to build anything before it's ripping you to pieces.

One level ahead and fully equipped. If you play that with both of you starting from a single island, prepare to lose.

If nothing else: Don't shoot at aircraft with the carrier's shell. If either the carrier or a walrus shoots at something stationary with a shell or HEAT round, I'd expect the carrier or walrus to EVENTUALLY hit the target versus shooting at the same damned spot each time. If a walrus cannot fire on a target due to intervening terrain, then maybe it shouldn't just sit there aiming at the thing it cannot engage. Flak armed walruses should not charge towards enemy walruses or change flak armed walruses so that they can shoot ground targets *or* just have them target aircraft (which is what you'd kinda expect with a "flak" weapon [WWII 88mm FLAK notwithstanding. Those could at least *fire* at ground targets.])

I believe that your memory is incorrect about the original game. The same islands were connected together the same way for every game in the original. There was no variance, other than what you chose to build on your islands. Now, it may have been the case that the structures on each island were randomly distributed on them; since they were pretty much table tops, that wouldn't have been that difficult to code back in the day. At least the map and inter-island connections are random with each strategic game in the current version. I would also like that, but I can see how that would be very difficult to pull off when you are dealing with real terrain. From what I've seen, the enemy carrier has two strategies (this is pre-patch 1.5): Make a bee-line for your stockpile island. Take any islands that you pass on the way, but you don't need a connection to its network to attack an island. Conquer as many islands as possible that can be connected to its network, and *then* go attack your stockpile island. In the original game, the enemy carrier (IIRC) would not attack any island that wasn't connected to its network. My memory could be false on that one, but one trick was to draw it into the 7 central islands and then cut off its supply lines. If you were careful, you could leave it out of fuel in the middle of nowhere.

I'm always willing to learn a new cuss word. What makes a screen "polizied?"

Stop walruses from freezing in place when they are in offensive stance, sense a target, but cannot get a line of sight to fire at it. Stop walruses armed with weapons that can't hit ground targets from running toward enemy walruses when in offensive stance. Stop rolling up production requests. I'd really, really, really like to be able to fully equip 3 Mantas with Mark II armor, shield, missiles and gatling gun ONE AT A TIME. I'd like to queue up the production items as armor, shield, missile, gatling, armor, shield, missile, gatling, armor, shield, missile, gatling. With the current implementation, that would be turned into armor(3), sheild(3), missile(3), gatling(3). That freaking bridge on the WNW side of Somnus. If you aren't going to have guard rails on it, for the love of god remove the rocks in the stream below the bridge. One walrus will always drive off the south west side of the bridge, fall down, and be stuck between the rocks and the side of the gorge. As mentioned earlier, just have the *bleeping* walruses pivot in place ("neutral steer" as the American Army would put it) to line themselves up to their next driving point instead of the insane cat-circling-the-food-dish dance they can get into now. It would be fairly realistic if they had to stop to turn in place. That's all from running the 1.04 patch. I think that Walrus pathfinding and AI has gotten better in this patch, but it still has some rough spots. Thanks for putting the work into the patches; the game gets better with each release.