UI Enhancer by QuantX

The first and most widely used mod of Carrier Command 2. It predates Steam Workshop support.

You’ve probably played on a public server with this enabled. It’s so well integrated you may not have even realised at first. Or you may now (like me) take all of its changes for granted.

In the HUD, hostile units are red diamonds, and for ground units you see your turret orientation!

Plus more zoom distance graduations for the Bear.

The HUD for aircraft now includes estimated fuel remaining time and a rate of climb/sink indicator.

On the operator stations, hovering over a friendly unit will show which of your crew is in control.

The change list on the workshop page is impressive and clear. This doesn’t change how the game works, but it takes the edge off of the things that make games hard (un-fun rather than challenging).

Gentle Missile Speed Buff by Cylindrical Bobcat

If you’ve flown the manta in combat you can’t help but notice that it is somehow faster than AA missiles. You can simply pile on the power and run away from missiles.

There are several mods that alter missile speeds but this is my preferred option as it is a fair re-balance rather than a shattering game-changer.

AA missiles, TV, laser and Cruise all are slightly faster and feel more natural than the core game.

Albatross AWACS by Thumblegudget

Up until this mode came out, most of the vehicle mods I saw were aimed at making units more deadly, they’d carry more bombs, go faster, turn better etc. This was the first mod I saw that made a unit useful for the whole game.

When you first play a campaign or long PvP game, you’ll tend to make-do with the ALB but make getting Mantas a top priority. The un-modded Manta outclasses the Albatross in every way. Once you unlock the Manta there is no reason to use the ALB.

This mod changes that with a simple re-balance. Now the Albatross gets the AWACS radar slot instead of the Manta.

This changes the gameplay in a much more realistic and complex way than you might expect. The AWACS now becomes your real eye-in-the sky for recon and warning. The ALB can loiter for a very long time compared to the Manta, so it can say up providing situational awareness longer than the Manta ever could, but it’s still slow and vulnerable to air attack. Real carrier air-groups, both contemporary and in recent history have used the E-2 Hawk-eye and Fairey Gannet to fill the same specialised and critical role while freeing the more pointy jets for strikes.

It’s not all Alby-only, the Manta gains an extra centre hardpoint.

You also have to keep both aircraft in mind for logistics, you now no longer dump all ALB production in favour of Mantas, you have to prioritise getting some of each.

TacView

With the help of a custom-written python app, and a modification to the HUD lua, I was able to record accurate flight data for aircraft, ships and ground units. This was hugely fun and I managed to appreciate how powerful Tacview is.

CC2 isn’t quite up-to the task for making this a realistic choice for SuperCap style post-battle analysis due to the overheads of writing the tacview data in lua, but it did teach me a LOT about how the lua scripts can see the game world.

Modification to the Carrier Weapons!

Failed experiments trying to refit and launch Needlefish lead me to discover that the lua scripting can refit carrier hardpoints before the ship is launched from the drydock.

This lead to several similar mods adding auto-turrets to the ship, extra missile launchers and a basic refit mod that would allow you to swap in/out the carrier CIWS/160mm or cruise missiles for other weapons.

• Combat Carrier VLS
• Combat Carrier
• Battle Carrier Refit
• Lubricant Combat Edition

Biohazard Mod – New Offensive Virus Bot

Working on the Tacview idea and an earlier experiment trying to make a spectator mode taught me a lot about how to inspect the game world in Lua After watching some GRNO videos I had the idea about making the virus bot take over units instead of just command centers.

Now when you drop a virus bot, you can (if you are fast) take manual control of hostile units!

More Aircraft HUD Displays

Mod-ing the HUD is great, but reminded of my old-old KSP mod to add external displays to the game I wanted more such as navigation waypoints. Unfortunately the HUD lua script cant see waypoints, so I figured out I could actually add extra screens just in-front of the aircraft camera, and I could control what different things were on each (all from one screen script) by detecting the width of the screen (the videos to the left have 3 screens of different sizes, all running from the same lua file)

Modular Mods

One of the annoying issues with moding CC2 is that no two mods can alter the same file. Workshoppers are forced to download and manually merge lines of code to combine two (or more) mods.

In an effort to make the popular UI enhancer easier to use I have re-distributed it as a collection of several mods. With the full collection installed this gives the same UI Enhancer experience, but you now have the option of swapping out parts of the mod like the HUD, logistics screen or holomap without losing ALL of the UI enhancer benefits.

Waypoint Hacks and Map Markers

In UI Enhancer, QuantX cleverly discovered you could use the “Dry Dock”, which in-game is actually classed as a vehicle. And you could make use of it’s waypoints. In UI Enhancer this is what drives the feature that lets operator screens see the captain’s holomap cursor. It’s actually the team drydock waypoint being updated every time the holomap cursor moves!

I was struck by how fantastic this hack was and build upon it while also creating a more cut-down HUD and holomap mod.

Instead of adding/removing the same single waypoint, I was able to use multiple waypoints, by storing data as the altitude value for each waypoint I could retain the captain’s cursor and could use different altitude values to create map markers.