Carrier Command: Gaea Mission

The knackered karrier

I once sang medium-to-high praises of the 2021 Carrier Command 2, inspired by the Amiga/ST original and released under the resurrected Microprose brand. Back then I also learned there was another Carrier Command reboot, called Carrier Command: Gaea Mission, from 2012. It was released by Bohemia Interactive, perhaps best known from the Arma series.

Gaea Mission has a bad reputation, so I avoided it for a while. Now I saw it at a reasonable price at Steam and got hold of it. 

There's a choice between Campaign and Strategy play formats, I'll concentrate on the Campaign. It looks like the Strategy game would have been more similar to the original, but after doing the Campaign I'm too tired to continue with it.

The Campaign begins with a silly Halo-esque planetfall and FPS-sequence, where you escort Essi the specialist to the abandoned enemy carrier. Compared to much earlier games such as Half-Life 2 and Halo, this sequence both looks basic and plays basic. The characters are clumsy puppet-like figures whose eyes keep wandering. Fortunately these interludes are quite short, but they also tend to appear at key story points.

"Essi, it's getting messy... haha!"

After picking up the carrier, things also pick up. The original Carrier Command paraphernalia is basically all there, but it's all far more automated.

You take the carrier from one island to another, while guiding amphibious Walrus and flying Manta-type vehicles to the command center, neutralizing the island. Winning islands increases your production network, but also adds blueprints for new equipment you can then produce.

Driving around for a while it is obvious the FPS-intro suffers from being shoehorned into a world meant for vehicle scale. Had the story started with the vehicles, the reputation might have been already much better.

As the game advances, more real time strategy elements arrive on the table. You can manage multiple units at one time. Fortunately Gaea Mission is not a Command & Conquer kind of RTS, but something surprisingly close to the 16-bit original.

Different small screens convey parallel things while on the map screen

At the beginning, the game elements are spoonfed in small quantities, and the islands involve more or less storyboarded events. You can still pick routes quite freely, and especially after acquiring the airborne Manta, it's possible to recon the island and shoot critters before invading with the Walruses.

After conquering a few islands in a tutorial spirit, the world begins to open up and you can choose where to go with your carrier, and manage the production and defenses of the different islands.

Some of the islands have different rules, and it may be impossible to invade an isle before acquiring some tech that enables entry. One island even had an absolute ban on airborne units until all air defenses had been neutralized. And I really mean absolute, the Manta will be fried when lifted up to the deck.

Driving the Walrus back to the carrier

The islands are generally attacked in the same way, break down a few sub-centers and then transfer the command center to your side. This repetitiveness is to be expected from a Carrier Command, and those who were misled into thinking this is Halo-meets-RTS, may be disappointed.

There's an abstract "barge" that delivers the goods produced on the islands. The instructor says there may be situations when it's faster to use the carrier to get the goods. This sounds strange as the carrier takes good time between islands in (supposedly) accelerated time, whereas the barge travels great distances rapidly while in real time?

A Walrus muddles through

The interface and transitions between views are very smooth on a 2020s computer, which helps make the experience bearable. Sure, the environments don't look that flashy by today's standards, and there are a bunch of tiny environmental glitches, but it ain't all bad. 

Weather and visibility change dynamically. Despite the storyboarding the islands do feel like simulated environments where tactical alternatives are also possible.

Just as in that newer game, grass and trees appear to be completely impervious to weapon fire. This is a pity, as some of the buildings and other equipment can be brought down.

The island overview from a Manta is one of the more enjoyable things

Considering this game doesn't have to carry the weight of a multi-player mode, one would expect the play to be better thought out. 

As many have pointed out, the AI, especially pathfinding, is not good. The Walrus amphibious vehicles take any excuse to get stuck and have hard time navigating bridges. The solution: Just don't use the AI expect for very obvious routes and the few parallel operations you may need.

However, even this doesn't always help. Often the best approach would be to let the Walruses sit near the enemy base entrance, and concentrate fire on the enemy. However, the non-player controlled Walruses insist on being "clever" and engage the foes. This most often results in the destruction of the Walruses as they waffle about and lose the enemy from their FOV. What could have been an M1 Tank Platoon-esque tactical triumph, is reduced to an uncontrollable, chaotic skirmish.

So far the best approach has been to take just one Manta, approach manually from the outskirts, eradicate opponents with the gun one by one, dock to repair/reload, rinse and repeat. Occasionally the ridiculously maneuverable carrier can be taken to vicinity and the opponents may be blasted with the deck guns.

Sometimes the Manta can be used to observe whether the deck gun bolts hit their targets. If not, adjust a little, fire the gun again and quickly switch to Manta view. Nice.

The carrier interior has quite a lot of detail

When the enemy carrier finally appeared, I got almost instantly blasted to pieces. After reloading I managed to just about survive and limp back to the proximity of the stockpile island.

There are some discrepancies between the narrative and what actually happens in the game, so I'll elaborate:

I got the impression that meeting the enemy carrier and getting bashed was a story event and I wouldn't see it again until at the end of the game. The reality is the carrier attacks you every now and then and you need to have a technique for repelling it. Had I known this I could have avoided the near death scenario.

Uh oh

Just save the game each time the carrier appears. It's necessary to face the enemy carrier so it can be shot repeatedly with the plasma deck gun just as soon as it appears from the fog. The enemy carrier is visible on the map, but only if you zoom out enough. This helps greatly in planning the run.

It might be useful to have your back against the island. If the carrier overtakes your rotation speed, it could still get stuck to the shoreline. This is a good opportunity to shoot at it.

Or you can try to circle around the island and avoid the altercation entirely. Launching mantas and walruses against the carrier is almost certain to get them destroyed, at least until they are sufficiently upgraded.

Back to the drawing board

As far as atmosphere and intriguing situations go, Gaea Mission at least occasionally delivers. The campaign escalates nicely and there will be more gear and weapons to try out.

Apart from the FPS parts, Gaea Mission plays quite well. Just don't be very optimistic about the computer-controlled help.

Some have claimed the program crashes, with Linux/Proton I have not encountered such a thing in my 20 hours of playing. Maybe some Windows environments are prone to crash the game, and the Proton config evades these.

But, near the end there are couple of videos that relate to the game story, and these refused to play. A test-screen like image was shown instead, and there was no dialog. These were quite crucial to the resolution of the "plot", but I'm quite indifferent to the omission. But, just so you know. (The videos are at Youtube, no big problem.)

There's a possible bug where if you repair a command center self-destructed by the enemy, and you save the game and quit, then it may be the island never falls into your hands as you continue the game. The solution is not to save the game until the island has been properly transferred over to you. Huh.

By the way, I hear the Carrier Command 2 has received a number of updates, so there might be some motive in going back to check that game...

Everspace 2

Everspace 2

I liked the first Everspace. I would go as far as to say that it could be closest to modern Elite. This is because I think Elite ought to be seen as a fun 3D action RPG game and not a serious space simulator.

The sequel, Everspace 2, has a more open universe than the linear, path selection system in the original. At least relatively. I'll be very clear, you won't be able to fly seamlessly through space, orbits and planetary atmospheres and admire a clockwork universe from different angles like in Elite: Dangerous or even Frontier. Neither are you going to be building installations like in No Man's Sky. And it might just be all for the better.

To put it in classic RPG terms, the hyperspace would be the World Map, but with optional rather than mandatory encounters. The player can travel between different locations in the hyperspace, either by navigating the semi-2D "plane" or by leaving it to the autopilot.

Locations such as planetary orbits or surface sites are more like towns or dungeons, with dangerous opponents, shops and loot. You can only properly exit such a location via a hyperspace jump.

Zooming in on the system maps.

There's also a very linear story, and you won't get to define your character. You still play the clone persona from the first game, Adam Roslin (groan), but this premise is not used for infinite lives. So the play has ceased to be a "rogue-like in space".

It's not necessary to follow the story all the time, you can go exploring the ubiquitous asteroid fields and wrecks, pick up alternate missions or jobs, buy and sell cargo, shoot outlaws and so on. As the universe opens up little by little, you can visit more locations of your choice. 

At the beginning I tried to avoid any additional missions, as I pursued the main storyline aggressively. Later, this begins to backfire as the player and equipment level is not equal to the tasks set in the missions.

Similarly, I've become so bored with crafting in games I avoided this side for the longest time. Fortunately, there's no need for a boring grind, as it's possible to take up on the various earlier missions at a later stage. Truth be told quite a lot of extra missions need to be taken up to stay ahead of the curve. The crafting is not a huge chore really. 

Just like everything, planet surfaces are limited area locations.

Only about after 8 hours I started to feel confident I would go through with the main quest. And this was mostly because I already had familiarity with the Everspace ship controls. You can/need glide, yaw, pitch, roll, elevate, descend, boost, cruise... swap between two primary and two secondary weapon systems.

And it took even more time before I understood I can craft the components needed for updating the Perks, and that I can also modify and improve the weapons and ship sub-systems. So I don't have to wait for a suitably leveled item to arrive randomly.

I had become accustomed in using the two warfare systems, EMP and Boost, to help fight my battles, so I forgot there's half a dozen other such systems. Granted, most of them are not as generally useful.

The EMP shuts down most of the enemy ships in near range for a little while, whereas Boost allows the player to escape the skirmish to the other side of the playfield. In some situations the enemies can be "jousted" one by one using this technique repeatedly, a way to kill foes above your paygrade. 

One of the tinkering screens.

And I'd completely ignored the ULT panic weapon system which activates from the "g" key.

It's possible that as now more battles are story-embedded set pieces, they aren't always as fun as in Everspace 1. It does become better as the ship becomes more capable and there are more things to experiment in in combat. The clever action RPG curve ensures the ship becomes gradually more and more "playable", and this is what keeps the player hooked.

So, ultimately, Everspace 2 is a better game than the original in all respects. The more open universe is a good idea and a great improvement over the first game. The size and scale has been well considered, as all locations have a name and some personality. A game like this doesn't need millions of procedurally generated star systems.

The hyperspace journey offers opt-ins for unknown events, distress calls and so on. Turn off the autopilot, choose the location and turn the autopilot on again. This could be seen as a tiny nod to the alternate routes in Everspace 1, and makes those boring hyperspace journeys more exciting.

An alternate ship type, out of many. I stuck with the default.

The more open universe is not all perfection.

In a strange way, the original 8-bit Elite universe worked precisely because the star systems were almost featureless. It didn't really matter where your ship was. You'd just keep hyperspacing to the next promising system, or jump between two profitable systems. Everspace 1 approximated this experience.

Now you need to hop back and forth as the missions require it. Jump to the system with the Gate, make the journey through the Gate, jump to the mission system(s)... add to this a mission structure where you set out to do a thing, it requires another thing or a favour, and then it all cascades back and in the worst case you need to do all the jump backwards to get your reward.

But Everspace 2 has a few tricks up its sleeve, and just about when you start to get really pissed by all the jumping around, shortcuts arrive.

A cockpit view is possible, but not very practical.

I considered delaying this blog post until I've completed the game, but after 45+ hours I have to say it is still some ways off. The first game took 60 hours from me after all. I'll just add to this post if something important happens.

The working of Proton/Steam on Linux can be taken nearly granted these days, so there's little point in describing whether the game works in the environment or not. At least I never experienced a crash or any dodgy behaviour, with sessions ranging from 30 minutes to about 2 hours.

Everspace 2 gives the option to use either Directx 11 or 12, I'm not sure but 12 might have been a little more laggy for the mouse input. The good old 1660Ti performed well enough in 1920x1200x60hz.

Everspace 2 on RTX 4060

However, I switched over to an RTX 4060 GPU. I had some positive experiences with Control so I wondered whether Everspace 2 could look any different?

The short answer is no. Of course the action became generally smoother, because it's a faster card.

I also felt there was no problem with DirectX 12, so I switched over there. This opened the Lumen illumination option. Lumen probably reverted to software, causing the game to drop framerate. It did change lighting just enough to be able to say it does something, but not enough to justify finding out whether it could be made to work faster.

Whether the DLSS 4.02. upscaler/frame generation does anything, is also difficult to say, at least it looked to remove vsync where it previously worked. 

Locations like these tend to hit the framerate.

FSR 3.1.3 just appeared to slow down.

XeSS 1.3.1 interestingly enough was smooth, and with balance on "performance" it introduced some visual artefacts, more apparent in motion. It is some kind of upscaling, but anything that's static or predictable appears in the native resolution without any artefacts, so I'm not exactly sure what the heuristics are. To me it looks better than using a directly scaled lower resolution.

Any frame generation is unlikely to help much as the display is limited to 60hz.