Some of the most memorable and most fun games of CC2 have been ones where we’ve had a close shave. Where, seemingly doomed a crew has pulled it out of the bag to turn the tide of battle and win. This though has become rarer as players develop more skill and better tactics.

Right now, if you have the resources, you can pretty much plan to overwhelm and destroy a carrier. The only variables in your calculation are whether you can sustain attack waves to sink the target and the skill of your operators.

For the defender however, there are not many options at all once you’ve been “tagged”.

• Dig in near an island
  • Surround your ship with CIWS guns and needlefish
  • Operate a CAP to keep the enemy out of threat range
• Run away
  • Go dark
  • try to use barges to mislead your enemy

You can only really dig in if you know you have some kind of advantage. If for example you know your opponent has no Mantas, you can dig in and fortify the only manta island. As long as you can sustain your defence efforts you stand a good chance of surviving all but the most obscene air attack for a long while.

If you choose to run and fade you may last a while, but you will have to do so with no resupply (barges give you away) and operating very few (if any) aircraft at all.

The main thing that is virtually impossible in CC2 is to shake off your tail once you’ve been found. When you are “tagged” your carrier from that point on will easily be identified on maps when you are less than 5km from any ground or air unit with a camera or turret weapon.

There are no (as-is) in-game counters to this.

But what if there were? how could it work?

For anything to work, you’d want to make the job of scouts tailing you temporarily harder. The game already has a handful of physical-world effects that can hide you from screens for a short while, smoke and storms. Smoke can cloak all units from HUD view and control screens for a short while, but unless you are moving with the wind this wont last long, it’s also very hard to get right from a timing point of view.

Storms are not much use either, they are rare events and don’t move very fast, so can significantly narrow down places you might hide in.

Is there anything we could let a crew do that is better than smoke?

As with any “gameplay effects” and modding CC2 there are a few things we can do in the HUD and other scripts:

• control HUD graphics and control screen graphics
• add extra graphics to holomaps
• see deployed units
• see who owns islands
• see the attachments and ammo on deployed units
• see when a unit fires a sonic pulse or other weapon (not 100% reliably)

Given these. We could do some things like:

• Hide the carrier icon
• Move the carrier icon
• Add misleading contacts on enemy screens
• Show an enemy carrier as friendly

I want to try out some ideas here.

Virus Bots act as decoys?

I figure that the virus bots are pretty powerful gizmos to be able to take control over an island, so they must be able to do other stuff. If you drop them at sea the will rapidly sink, but they will exist for 2-3 minutes until they self destruct. For that brief time we could show the bots as the location of the carrier instead of the real carrier.

This would be short-term and would still require the crew to essentially abandon a ground unit and try to run their ship away.

Decoy Unit?

A ground unit equipped with a non-standard attachment, one not normally used, the presence of this could mimic the carrier icon much like the virus bots idea. Except it would potentially be able to move, and be deployed further away by petrel.

Perhaps a bear with a ground radar, attached could do this job. Adding smoke and flares could help sell the deception.