DeathAndPain

Yes. Modders will be sent a letter that makes them aware of the fact that their actions are a copyright infringement, along with an invoice of the lawyer that sent the letter.

Are you considering dropping the silly linear approach and revive the great strategic experience from the original Carrier Command instead?

Well, I frenetically played Age of Mythology and its expansion online for like 10 years, but failed to complete the singleplayer campaign for reasons of lack of interest. Multiplayer is what counts, especially nowadays. The historical CC was good as it was, but with a multiplayer option it would even have been 100x better. I see a possible reason in the way this project was conducted in the past. They announced the game, then let the game website rot literally for years without anything happening, so I already had the impression that the game was swimming in the water like a fish with belly facing upwards. Now that they have eventually restarted to make progress, where should a sudden hype come from? Especially now that they have spectacularly missed their planned release date and postponed it for another half year? I still wonder whether this will end like the Carrier 2-project from Martig G Bell, who swore that he would eventually complete it, no matter how many years it would take, even though he had been advised to get himself some help so that he could finish it in a timely manner. Then BI bought the rights on the game name "Carrier Command", which made Martin post "Vulcan is now an enemy island!" and abandon his game, which was already in a state where you could drive around with your carrier, operate Mantas and Walruses, and behold beautiful islands. LOL... now they have... :D That is what I fear as well. It will also not meet the nature of its great predecessor in other respects. The story will be linear; you will hardly have the option to strategically shape your island empire as you could in the strategy campaign of the original Carrier Command. You will mostly be forced to play mission after mission, following a set plot. I fear it will be a feeling as if you were following a "walkthrough" to a game.You will be doing what you need to do next; you have little choice. Essentially it will be like watching a movie, only that you have to complete a task in order to be allowed into the next scene. This obviously does not allow for multiplayer, because multiplayer relies on flexibility and strategic choices. I remember a similar thing from Jagged Alliance 2. It was a great game with a lot of flexibility, but then they released the "Unfinished Business" extension, which removed the freedom and forced you to replay a preset storyline.

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 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! 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. 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. :) 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!

Just a few clarifications on the enemy carrier in the original Carrier Command: It was not possible to starve him to death. It occasionally stopped attacking for good, but this was more due to a software bug (e.g. when it got caught in the middle of an island like the guy above said). I considered this more as annoying than as a great achievement on my side. I play a game for an extended amount of time, get a message that one of my defense islands is being attacked, then get a message that the attack was repulsed, then never hear or see anything of the enemy carrier for the rest of the game so I can simply claim all his islands and win (even though the enemy island adjacent to my attacked one was connected to the enemy supply network so the enemy carrier could simply go back there and refuel). Now what kind of challenge is that? Who wants to win like that? Fortunately not many games ended like this, but they could. For some stupid reason, the amount of hitpoints of the enemy carrier strongly depended on his general economic situation. I guess they programmed this nonsense on purpose to make the carrier easier to beat when it had been weakened island-wise, but it makes no sense. I would have understood if it had run out on ammunition or whatever, but it simply had way less hp and exploded upon only a few hits when its island network had been weakened. Other than that, I doubt it had less hp than you own carrier. Also remember that your carrier usually was as good as dead way before it was actually destroyed, because with enough damage to its systems it could no longer really do anything, and with an inoperational self-repair system you were commanding a swimming coffin even if you managed to drive away the enemy carrier. Meanwhile, the enemy carrier never had any problems with damaged systems. As long as it was not destroyed, it was fully operational. I am amused how sophisticated tactics for beating the enemy carrier in direct battle others have come up with here. In reality catching it despite its high speed (also within island vicinity, very unlike your own carrier) was the hard thing. Defeating it was easy. The carrier is usually standing still in front of the island it is attacking. You need to approach it from behind (from the open sea), because that is always the direction it will flee into if damaged beyond a certain threshold. How to destroy it? You need no mantas, no walruses, no sophisticated tactics to achieve that. The enemy carrier has no laser gun. All it employs against you are the hammerhead missiles that your own carrier also has (the ones that are launched using the satellite-like espionage drone). The weakness of these missiles is that their place of impact needs to be programmed as early as the time of launch. The enemy carrier simply shoots them at the current location of your carrier, meaning that it will never ever hit your carrier when you are moving!. So what you do is surprise the enemy carrier when it is attacking one of your islands, approach it from the open sea (effectively sandwiching it between your carrier and your island), wait until it is in range of your laser gun, and, while still approaching it at full close-island-speed, fire your laser deck gun at it as fast as it can (make sure not to fire too early so your gun is cool when you open fire). Your laser gun is very powerful and will destroy the enemy carrier easily. A short time before its destruction it will try to flee, which means it will rush towards you in hopes of reaching the open sea, but die to your laser gun before it passes your carrier. During all of this you will see his awe-inspiring Hammerhead missiles approach your carrier, fly over it, and spash into the water behind it, because that is the place he programmed them to when launching them, not factoring in the necessary offset because your ship is moving. His Mantas might theoretically be a threat, but they are busy over the attacked island, and you will approach and destroy his carrier so quickly that you win long before his Mantas could do anything serious to your carrier. You should not even need to fire your flares. This even works if his carrier is in perfect condition. Destroying it is way too easy. You just approach it with your own carrier in kamikaze-mode, fire your gun for all it is worth, and win. There are other imbalances in the game. Manta missiles are much too powerful, for instance. You only need these for Manta armament even against ground targets. 7 manta rockets deliver more firepower than a cluster bomb and rockets for the remaining weight capacity, meaning that cluster bombs are utterly useless. This also goes for other weaponry in the game, like your own hammerhead missiles. They are fun to use, but do not make much sense, because you can conquer any island much faster simply by sending in mantas loaded with rockets. For some reason command centers (CC) grow in strength over the course of the game. Early game one kamikaze manta firing 7 rockets will destroy any CC. Later on you need to send in two of them, but by then you have a supply chain that allows you to replace any number of mantas even if you lose all of them in the process (which you normally should not need to anyway). Getting your carrier close to an island as necessary for hammerheads or your laser gun usually makes no sense. Using walrus virus bombs also costs way more time than it benefits you. You get to the island, you send in the rocket mantas, destroy the CC, send an unarmed walrus with an ACCB of your liking while your carrier is already moving towards the next island (as far as your comm range allows you to), then your walrus drops the ACCB and is then abandoned as your carrier moves on. This is the fastest and most efficient way of taking islands as long as you do not need to refuel. The game is great and all, but if the concept of patches had existed back then, it would really have needed some patching.