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RichardCranium

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Posts posted by RichardCranium


  1. Deadly Islands mod removes the game's respawning carrier as it has its own respawn system which you can opt out of if you don't like it.

    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)


  2. Several behaviours I remember from the previous game:

    (1) Your home base / starting point island (Vulcan) had to be connected to your stockpile island (Otherwise the transfer of materials and items was not possible)

    (2) You had to go back to the stockpile island to resupply

    (3) Stockpile island could be re-assigned instantly but the game calculated / estimated how long it would take to transit materials from one island to the next - and it did that with everything (items sent from old stockpile to new stockpile, and newly constructed items sent to new stockpile and therefore items would arrive at different times increasing realism). If the old stockpile wasn't connected to the new stockpile, I believe it wouldn't transfer stockpiled items and those would be lost (but i could be wrong on that)

    (4) It took a relatively short time for the Command Centre to build after placing down a builder pod.

    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.


  3. For me, the new CC:GM is focused on island taking. The enemy carrier has never posed a challenge when encountered. It is mainly an annoyance taking islands and interrupting the flow of my own strategy. The biggest challenge for me is enemy walruses equipped with missiles or flak cannons. They are real buggers to clear out.

    I wish it were more easy to feel the choke off of resources due to the enemy carrier's successful activities. I clearly remember that being a big part of the original game. Once you were on the short end of the balance it was very difficult to recover and make a comeback.

    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. :)


  4. Deadly Islands mod disables this function.

    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.


  5. 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.


  6. I'm writing to report some further observations with the strategy game using the latest beta patch. I've played at least a half dozen strategy games at this point and doing so has revealed some unusual behavior that appears at random.

    - The game crashes more frequently than it used to (once every session of playing at minimum compared to once every three to six sessions in the past). There doesn't seem to be a consistent event, time period elapsed or operation being performed when the crash occurs.

    - The supply barque frequently stops 5 to 7 minutes from delivery forcing me to sail the carrier out to meet the barque.

    - The path finding has been improved but continues to exhibit problems (more on this below).

    - Graphics seem to become corrupt after extensive time playing a single continuing session.

    - The barque path arrow (blue arrow on the map) remains on-screen after barque has returned to stockpile island. Sometimes if you zoom in, the arrow doesn't scale with the zoom so at closest zoom the arrow looks huge.

    - Sometimes the barque will instantly return to the stockpile island after a delivery.

    - In the last two strategy games I've started, I quit early because the enemy carrier only captured three neutral islands for its own and then stopped taking any more islands...leaving me free to take all the rest simply by building command centers. It should be noted I always start a strategy game with each side having only one island.

    - Not sure if this is a bug but I've noticed sometimes the enemy can make islands deadly, very strong or strong when the island is isolated (surrounded by my islands). Not a big deal but since it doesn't follow the same pattern as my islands I thought I would mention it.

    - For some reason the vehicles always launch in third-person view until a weapon is mounted; and even then they sometimes don't stay in first-person view. This never happened with version 1.04 (the previous version I used).

    I'm not sure what can be done about the path finding. It seems to be making "decisions" on two levels...one is at the destination level...the other at the immediate proximity to the vehicle level. At the destination level, the path designated seems to ignore the terrain that will need to be traversed. Most of the time, subsequent and "good" path making adjustments update on-screen and the vehicle follows them but frequently it sends the vehicle into areas that are overwhelmingly complicated to navigate through. At the immediate level, the vehicle gets bogged down trying to get around objects (trees, rocks, buildings...sometimes bridges). Here are some examples of the behavior I have witnessed....

    - Vehicle is on island's beach with carrier just offshore with absolutely nothing in-between. When I give the dock command, the vehicle heads off in other directions (with a waypoint) before finally heading towards the carrier. This could be an attempt to climb a hill, drive into a forest or even into a walled base which overwhelms the path finding routine.

    - Vehicles will always try to follow the land/beach border until its as close to the carrier as possible before heading out to the ship.

    - At the close proximity level, it is clear the speed of the vehicle impacts the path finding process. If the vehicle is traveling at high speed, it tends to overshoot the immediate waypoint and while beginning to turn around a new waypoint is set but that new waypoint is being calculated based on where the vehicle is positioned. This can lead to the vehicle driving around in circles, going back and forth as it tries to catch up with the waypoint while at the same time the waypoint keeps changing. It becomes a vicious cycle of sorts.

    - Sometimes the vehicle will slow down and move forward in short spurts even though the next waypoint is some distance away and the terrain path is clear.

    - Sometimes (particularly at Vattland) the walrus will have full fuel before launching and then 66% fuel immediately after launching.

    - I've had two instances where the walrus launches and then tries repeatedly to drive through the carrier hull, damaging both until I take manual control and get it around the bow of the carrier.

    I can only speculate the path making design was intended to "self-adjust" as the vehicle moves along but this approach seems to have some sort of threshold of complexity it can handle. I can see how this is necessary for handling dynamic situations (such as combat) but when simply going from point A to B it seems a better choice would be a set of waypoints based on a map "grid" that does not change. Perhaps a better solution would be to have both approaches active and have the vehicle switch between them depending on whether it has a dynamic situation to deal with or not.

    These are the only things I can report at this time. The rest of the game has continued to improve overall. Any improvement in the enemy's offensive strategy would only increase the game's challenge.

    What I've noticed about walrus fuel levels is that if...

    1. you launch a walrus at an island
    2. dock it back onto the carrier
    3. move the carrier
    4. 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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.


  7. I have my doubts. I believe coop multiplayer, where all human players are in the same carrier controlling the different vehicles, should be definitely possible. But certainly that sounds less fun than a versus mode with different players controlling different carriers.

    However, the way the game seems to work, only one island map can be loaded at a time. That would make it impossible to have players in different islands doing stuff unless the devs somehow remove that limitation, maybe by reworking the networking code to allow different players at different islands load different maps, and only those players in the same island would bother to sych with eachother. Now that I verbalize those thoughts, it doesn't sound that impossible. But of course, I know nothing of the limitations of the engine.

    By having a quick look at the half-finished multiplayer code present in the files, it seems like they had prepared a couple of versus multiplayer modes: "Deathmatch" and "Capture the Command Center". That sounds totally like they absolutely scrapped the strategic map for multiplayer, ironically the main attractive of Carrier Command. It would have been a really shallow multiplayer experience and I undestand now that they dropped it.

    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.


  8. 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).


  9. 8. Mild: Make anti-air weapons only do high damage to air units. Example, quad gun for the walrus can kill tanks faster than a gatling and has massive amounts of ammunition. I even killed buildings faster than 2 walruses with machine guns. All I had to do was back up on a hill so my tank could aim at those buildings or ground units. Same for the carrier anti-air defense cannons. They do tremendous damage to anything they hit, about as much as the Plasma Cannon it seems.

    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.


  10. Is what you ask much different from setting and strategy game with the Island Owner slider set max to the enemy, and removing the victory condition about defeating the enemy carrier? You will get a couple of neutral islands (that you will need to get some production going because otherwise you have almost no chance against deadly islands), and you will defeat the enemy carrier in the early stages of the game when you two meet at one of the few neutral islands.

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


  11. 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:

    1. 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.).
    2. 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.
    3. 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.)
    4. 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.
    5. 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.


  12. 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.)


  13. I think missiles are supposed to be an anti air weapon primarily, so the AI wont pick a ground target to override it.

    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.


  14. It's good in general though because you have to avoid him early game and build up your tech before you can take him on properly.

    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.


  15. There are several things I'd like to see eventually happen in the next patch.

    1. I'd like to see a use for slot 2 on the walrus. New technology doesn’t need to be added to the walrus, although a shield like the manta has would be useful. Maybe some weapons that go into slot 1 can go into slot 2 instead or maybe certain items that go into slot 3 can go into slot 2 instead.

    2. I'd like to see the carrier get a laser for its main turret. That should help against enemy mantas better than a shell gun or plasma cannon. The shell gun and plasma cannon can be kept, though.

    3. The mouse lag has to be eliminated.

    4. The pathfinding for both the walrus and the manta needs to be improved more. In my opinion, this was improved with previous patches, but it needs to be improved more.

    5. The enemy's carrier and player's carrier are going through each other during battle. They should be completely solid and if they hit each other, they should cause damage to each other.

    6. There should be a way to stop the carrier from firing at any target to avoid wasting ammo and to avoid accidentally destroying the command center on an enemy island, which actually happened in a game I played once.

    Even though I have listed several items in this post that I think should be added or fixed, I still like this game a lot and I play it often. Sorry if any of the items on my list were mentioned on this forum before. I believe these items on my list are important and worth mentioning again as a reminder if they were mentioned before.

    If nothing else:

    1. Don't shoot at aircraft with the carrier's shell.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.])


  16. I don't know how this suggestion could be incorporated but here goes....

    To me, the original game put the player's attention on two key elements. The overall strategy of the entire island chain (the map) and the tactical strategy of the islands controlled by the player that made up the "front line" so to speak. Since the islands distribution and makeup was randomized at the beginning of each new campaign, the game never played the same way twice in regard to these two elements.

    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.

    Now, the new game's attention to detail at the island level has introduced a third strategy...namely, taking the individual islands. But the islands are not randomized so if you play enough times you become quite familiar with what is needed to take a particular island you encounter and over time it becomes routine. It would be wonderful if the islands could also be randomized in type, terrain and placement of facilities and defenses.

    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.

    Another aspect that I think would great improve the overall playability is to develop the AI to intelligently go after islands (neutral or controlled by the player). The location of islands and what type they are best developed into dictates to some extent what each side's strategy should be and how the ensuing battles will shape the game as you go along. There should be instances where a particular island plays a key role in the overall strength of the islands in the immediate area under control by one side or the other (I'm not necessarily talking about the "strength" multiplier in the existing game). The AI should be able to identify these strengths/weaknesses and exploit them. This is what the human player naturally does.

    How difficult it is to capture an island in terms of time taken and expenditure of resources is what the game is all about. After all, this is a game where your aim is to become more efficient than the enemy. It's the core challenge of playing the campaign (or should be). So while the player is busy trying to undermine the enemies island support network, the AI would be doing the same thing in return. Currently there doesn't seem to be any "method" to how the AI prosecutes its attack. This is what I miss in the current game. I think there is room for improvement. I love the game...just wish this were possible as I think it would truly raise the bar on what is possible to experience.

    From what I've seen, the enemy carrier has two strategies (this is pre-patch 1.5):

    1. 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.
    2. 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.


    1. 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.
    2. Stop walruses armed with weapons that can't hit ground targets from running toward enemy walruses when in offensive stance.
    3. 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).
    4. 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.
    5. 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.

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