In a series of blog posts we take a detailed look at the enemies in Cycle 28. Today we look at the carrier.

Carrier

What is it?

A slow, armoured enemy ship that periodically launches a wave of aggressive drones.

Behaviour

The Carrier continues on its path regardless of being shot or damaged by the player. A Carrier’s drones, however, will track and target the player. This leads to some of the more intense dogfights in Cycle 28, as many small drones can, and will, pursue the player. It is also common for a Carrier’s drones to target the player’s drones – for some drone-on-drone combat.

Tactics

Getting close to a Carrier will a first wave of drones, so having a sense of this distance can be helpful for planning your attack. The drones themselves take a specific, and predictable, route away from their Carrier. During these brief seconds of deployment they are less likely to attack, and some of the wave can be picked off by the player with relative ease. Once the first wave has been deployed a timer counts down to the next – anticipating this can be useful.

Development

“Take evasive action! Green Group, stick close to holding sector MV-7.”

“Admiral, we have enemy ships in sector 47.”

“It's a trap!”

Lando, over the comlink, “Fighters coming in.”

We then cut to the cockpit view of the Millennium Falcon as it flies into an armada of TIE fighters. Watching the sky exploding into a fierce dogfight as an 8 year old boy Cycle 28 was born.

I spent hours drawing swarming dogfights on graph paper when I should have been doing my history homework. Wondering what it was like sitting in one of those A-wings, how they could keep track of what was going on through all the chaos. It’s that feeling of chaos I wanted to capture with the drones.

Drones are easy to kill, one shot from the player or an enemy gun ship will do it, but there are a lot of them. On one hand they make you feel powerful as the player as you carve a path through the swarm. But on the other hand there is nothing more embarrassing than getting killed by the smallest unit in the game…