Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is the rebirth of a twenty-year old franchise, with a twist. They’ve taken the entire game and set it square in the world of author P.D. Gilson and his Gaea series (Gaea: Beyond the Son available now). In the books (and game), the Earth’s population is in trouble and needs resources from Taurus, another planet. The problem is that the APA are already there. Your mission is to capture a damaged carrier and begin taking control of the islands on the planet to fight off the APA. 

The colony planetoid of Taurus is a pivotal battleground in the United Earth Coalition (UEC)’s long campaign against the rogue Asian Pacific Alliance (APA), who gained dominion over Earth in an apocalyptic conflict. The wide oceans of Taurus are dotted with resource-rich islands of varying composition and hiding many secrets.

Bohemia Interactive and Black Element Software have taken the original game’s mechanics and ideas and brought them forward into the modern PC gaming era. The graphics, as one would expect, have come a long way from the groundbreaking work of the original and are sure to impress. From what I saw on my visit to the studio, even though the game is far from complete (as in all the pieces aren’t in place just yet), the graphics are shaping up quite nicely.

The strategy of fighting on Taurus 

You begin the game by crash landing on an island and have a single first-person mission where you must find and take control of the damaged carrier. After that the entire game revolves around you being in the captain’s chair controlling the systems, commanding your units and looking at the world from a tactical perspective. However, with one-click you can jump right into any your vehicle units and take direct control of them giving you both strategy and FPS feel and gameplay.

The islands come in three types - Production (units, weapons, fuel), Mining of resources and Defense which are hardened positions to help keep control of your island network. The islands themselves offer six climates including arctic, temperate, mountainous, wastelands (savanna-like), volcanic and marsh or swampland. There will also be dynamic weather on the islands along with a day-time cycle (there’s apparently no night I guess). Each island was individually designed by the team of three designers and they all have specific landmarks on them that make them far from the same old islands being used over and over again.

In order to control and maintain all of the islands you capture they must remain in a connected supply chain where the severing of the chain means you will lose control of the islands on the other side of the lost link. This will be an important strategic element that can also be a weapon against your enemy as much as a danger for you. Looking at my shoddy example image (not actual game imagery), if you were in control of islands A, B, C, E and F, the loss of E or F would cut you off from all resources of A, B and C also. If you were in control of D and H the loss of H would cut off the supplies from D as well. This is where the defense islands will be useful. E would be of great strategic value and therefore would be best as a defensive island so that it would be harder for the enemy to retake.