When i first played the Original Carrier Command back in 1988 it had Flat shaded Polygons... It was very good! It also ran on any PC, needing only about 488kb of ram... I think it was one of the very first really deep 3D games of the time!
As for the pathfinding complaints, in the original i never relied on the pathfinding in that game to fully navigate any of the islands i just relied on the waypoints to "get my units to the islands" right off the coast and for the Mantas just to get them to the islands and circle in a holding pattern, taking them over once they arrived. I never expected the Units to full out combat the islands or navigate around on the islands, it made total sense how they were able to navigate... You could have the Mantis's land on a runway once the island had built one and come back to the Mantis and launch it if the island came under attack. I did notice that the enemy Carrier would be really scary to intercept, really cool too because you did not know where the enemy Carrier was "it was invisible to your radar, because of a cloaking device i believe", but when you saw Enemy Mantis's coming in you knew the Enemy Carrier was just off the Coast of the island you had harbored...
I also used the Mantis and Walrus as "drones" with them acting as a remote camera which was also really cool allowing you to view what was going on miles away from your Carrier, you could also add a range extender to the Walrus and Mantis to extend the range, all way before the Drones you see in real life today! The problem is not with the game it's with the expectations of the kids playing games that don't know what it was like before the amazing detail and complexity you see in today's miracles of technological advancement...
LOL i know what has come before so having such a broad view on the game genre and it's history keeps me from being too hard on any game!
I have such good memories of that big game on that little 3.5 inch disk that i can't complain...
And hey! even our drones today have to be controlled by a human hand so what's with the complaints? You all want the drones to fully fight and be autonomous to you the player? As i remember from the original game, these units don't have little people dropped in them, they are just extensions of your Carrier, as are the islands, in the Original game the last thing you wanted to do was to have to face off against the Enemy Carrier, because they was pretty much Check and Mate for you as the Computer even back then was able to mount a full assault of Manta's and Walruses and even the Enemy Carrier could devastate your Carrier head to head. The Enemy Carrier also had a nasty habit of doing Kamikasi style dive bomb attacks with it's Mantis's right into your Carrier causing massive damage... heh
