Has anyone ever had any challenge from the enemy carrier?

[Has anyone ever had any challenge from the enemy carrier?]

My friend asked me how I liked CC after playing for a while now, and I sent him the following message. It's long, but I hope BI will read at least the last couple paragraphs for ideas about ways to improve this game:

Uhhh, glad you asked.

CC is the single greatest strategy/tactical hybrid game ever made IMO. But it suffers from a major problem which to me is game-breaking. I'm not talking about crashing or other technical issues. I'm not even talking about the terrible path-finding which can be very annoying at times. I'm talking about the game RULES.

As you may remember, I said CC is about trying to take your opponent's islands as he tries to take yours. As you're out there doing your thing, he's busy in real time doing his thing. You get messages saying he's attacking such and such island. If you're nearby, you'll go there to stop him. He almost always runs, heading toward a new island to take. I wish he ran a little faster....

You see, sometimes you catch him. When you do, a small skirmish ensues. You then limp off wounded and he does the same. You both take time to repair and then go back to your thing. When you cross paths again, the same thing happens.

The only thing is, I became very good at attacking the enemy carrier. I became better at it than I think the dev's intended. My tactic was to overwhelm them with firepower, using not only my gun batteries but launching every jet and amphibious tank from my decks. Usually a person won't risk them since enemy carriers have powerful countermeasures. But if you can take out the countermeasures on just one side of their carrier then launch the assault on that side, they're as good as dead.

The first time I tried this, I destroyed their carrier within the first hour and received a "You have won" message asking me if I wanted to continue. Well, of course not. What's the point?

The next time I played, I specifically set the game options so that killing the enemy carrier wasn't a victory condition. This meant I would have to take every single island to win, and killing the enemy carrier would just be incidental. In that game, I indeed killed the enemy carrier. And then it hit me: what am I doing now? I need to take every island to win, but it's going to be so freaking easy it's not even worth playing. Sure, some of the islands are very well defended. Some of them may take an hour or two to defeat. But without the threat of the enemy carrier actively trying to take my own islands, I literally have all the time in the world. Imagine Skyrim with no enemy NPCs. You get the quest to find Jurgen Windcaller's horn. You have your map marker to the dungeon. You go there. You walk through the dungeon. No fights. You find your way through the puzzle of corridors and chambers, find the horn, then walk back up the 7000 steps. It would all be very time consuming, but not very challenging. I felt the same way about playing Carrier Command without an enemy carrier.

What they SHOULD have done was make it so that if you destroyed the enemy carrier, you had free reign of the map for a certain amount of time while they produced a new one. This would give you time to take back lost territory, repair your ship and produce new materials. But eventually, the enemy carrier would be back and you'd have to contend with them. Likewise, if your carrier was destroyed, you could construct a new one as well. Time would advance more quickly and while this is happening you would have to watch the enemy take one of your islands after another.

It seems like such a no-brainer that I can't believe they didn't do this. But they didn't. And as a result, you could put hours and hours into a campaign and discover it was all for nothing with one lucky shot against the enemy carrier followed by a very untimely, unfortunate and un-earned "You Win".

[Here's how I was able to remap the keys]

I hope this helps a lot of people. Though I'm right handed, I've always used the arrow keys. I tried using the Xbox controller with this game but to me it lacked the precision of the mouse. And it was confusing.

The irony is I was playing so long with w-s-a-d that even though I now have the keys as I like them, I'm habitually going back to those when I first take control of a vehicle. :p That will change.

[Here's how I was able to remap the keys]

I found CCSettings in My Documents/CarrierCommand (not the doc by the same name in the main CC folder). I opened this file with notepad and found/replaced all instances of "padup" (without quotes) with "w". I did the same with paddown, replacing it with "s", padleft, replacing it with "a", padright, replacing it with "d". You could probably use any letter on your keyboard, but I chose these, knowing that I wouldn't be using them.

In the game options, I was now able to successfully replace the up-down-left-right keys with my arrow keys. Up and Down properly showed the arrow keys, but for some strange reason, left and right were designated as "left mouse button" and "right mouse button." However, in game the vehicles correctly identified all four arrow keys for movement as well as the left and right mouse buttons for the various UI actions and weapon firing. So it worked fine.