I’ve been thinking about a handful of basic quality-of-life changes. I will have a go at getting started on these soon, they won’t all be game altering as-such, but should make a few things easier

Bridge HUD toggles

Some people like the HUD, others less so. So I’m going to add a control switch that can turn the bridge HUD on/off.

The HUD will start off enabled on a non-launched carrier, but then switch off once the ship is in the water.

Carrier Gun markers?

I’ve been thinking about how to help gunners on the carrier or spotter aircraft. It might be nice to get a “time of flight” value for the shells to reach the target we are looking at.

This should be pretty simple if we only have one carrier gun available, but might get weirdly complex to figure out if we have needlefish on our team. Maybe it wont be so bad, eg:

• find nearest 160mm gun with ammo to the target spot
• compute distance between gun and target
• display shell time
• perhaps draw a circle/box on the surface

Other things I could maybe do is show some kind of “stability” indicator, perhaps that could also influence the target box.

Carrier Laser VLS opt-out?

Currently, if you start a new game, we auto-proivision the carrier VLS with laser missiles. If this isn’t want you want to do (you might want to put the laser missiles on an aircraft instead) then you should be able to do this.

This screen normally only lets you change the carrier name, but it could actually have more options (and a better UI layout) such as stopping the VLS setup.

Things that we could put in here:

• opt-out of the VLS before launch
• toggle “fog of war” on/off for your team
  • “off” – other teams see what islands you own or are capturing
  • “on” – other teams only see what is in range (rev 1.6 default)

Carrier Refit Option

What if before you launch from the drydock, you could decide to change what is attached to your ship?

The above is the screen for carrier loadout from the “Rev: Spectator Mode” mod. You can actually use this to change what is fitted to any pre-launch player carrier.

But what if some variation of this was available for normal games without spectator options.

I think it might be nice to use the bridge options screen to decide from a handful of carrier loadouts for normal games.

• Support
  • Replace 160mm and Cruise Missile with extra CIWS
  • No laser VLS
• Tactical
  • Replace all forward CIWS with 30mm droid autocannon
  • Replace Cruise Missile with extra 160mm
• Strategic
  • Replace 160mm with an extra Cruise Missile launcher

The idea I think will be that each of these options would be a significant tradeoff, Losing 2 CIWS guns would be a big deal as would gaining an extra one (which would never be knocked out by damage)