The power of mass nukes

[TheMeInTeam]

I had a few requests for this in recent months, so I'll post a recent save.

Playing through a game on strategy & tips as Qin, I found myself in an interesting scenario on immortal:

- Monty had declared on me early and slowed me down...
- He also capitulated Wang, so when I did fight him offensively I had to fight him + vassal which was time consuming.
- Pacal had gone for culture, forcing me to sail over to him and stop his victory short by a few turns (2, I believe). I managed to capitulate him after taking 2 of his legendary cities despite him winning liberalism because he turned off his slider before infantry (which I had)

This sounds well and good, until one looks to the 3rd continent. During those distractions, sury picks up the pace and takes the tech lead. He capitulates both Joao and Shaka after taking quite a few cities. It's late in the game, china is behind in tech and has less total power than khmer. Khmer has superior gnp. On the plus side, the empire is larger and more productive. Space is a (difficult) possibility, the 2 world powers hate each other and BOTH have nuclear arms. That means this game is likely going to come down to war at some point.

So, you're significantly down in power and tasked with the invasion of a continent with ~40% of the world's land, entirely owned by one large AI and his vassals. The task is to win handily. The title will give away my answer .

Spoiler:

I'll attach two saves, each on the same turn, shortly before the world's strongest military disappears in an instant and then after . If you're interested in how nukes can completely change a game and turn fortunes, it's worth a look. You can also replay the 1939 turn if you like! The goal is to win by the next UN election. Might be a fun 3 turn scenario .

Qintasm AD-1939.CivBeyondSwordSave

Qintasm AD-1939 AFTER.CivBeyondSwordSave

[ParadigmShifter]

Who has a grip on Wang?

[TheMeInTeam]

Originally Posted by ParadigmShifter

Who has a grip on Wang?

More than one guy had his hands on that, but only one's grip was sufficiently firm as to keep control until the end.

[ParadigmShifter]

Was it Willy?

You can do anything with nuclear arms, anyway.

[digitalcraft]

Originally Posted by TheMeInTeam

More than one guy had his hands on that, but only one's grip was sufficiently firm as to keep control until the end.

[TheMeInTeam]

In case it wasn't clear, Wang initially belonged to Monty, but I beat both of them down and capped both (along with Pacal). The war on sury at the end is a battle of 2 superpowers with vassals. However, on occasion I still see questions on this subforum about nuking in practice...so I saved a game just before the attack that will literally take someone stronger down to less than 1/4 of his power.

However, no other setup can do it quite as quickly or thoroughly as nukes can.

[digitalcraft]

Originally Posted by TheMeInTeam

In case it wasn't clear, Wang initially belonged to Monty, but I beat both of them down and capped both (along with Pacal). The war on sury at the end is a battle of 2 superpowers with vassals. However, on occasion I still see questions on this subforum about nuking in practice...so I saved a game just before the attack that will literally take someone stronger down to less than 1/4 of his power.

However, no other setup can do it quite as quickly or thoroughly as nukes can.

The real question is if you beat wang and who had a handle on wang while you were beating wang. Thats the type of question that can end a politician's career, you know.

[karadoc]

I guess we should just be happy that you took control of Wang, rather them him taking control of you. -- .. I guess that was never a risk in this particular game.

[Mylene]

I dun like them, yip you get to see your final score but..never feels like winning
In other parts of Civ, AI bonuses can make up for their inability to focus..nukes are like pressing a button several times, and game over cos the computer wasn't programmed to protect itself.

[TheMeInTeam]

Originally Posted by Mylene

I dun like them, yip you get to see your final score but..never feels like winning
In other parts of Civ, AI bonuses can make up for their inability to focus..nukes are like pressing a button several times, and game over cos the computer wasn't programmed to protect itself.

Somewhat hypocritical coming from someone who abuses cavalry and the AI's inability to cope with sudden attacks with fast units .

This approach is not foolproof. I showed it because a few people wanted to see it and asked (either in forum or through PM at some point) for an example. It is great when you already have a large productive base and need to deal a devastating blow to a single superpower. However, there are plenty of ways something can go wrong:

- AI picks up SDI, making the # nukes required to break through very cost-prohibitive (you can still do it, but it might not be the best option for any longer; for example fighters/jet fighters + carriers might win out then)
- AI attacks you before you can get into position. Not only will this sink any lone subs out there in bad amounts, but if the AI has nukes it WILL hit you with them, and that leaves you in a poor position to build more and stop other AI from winning culture/space
- Of course, you have to actually reach nuclear weapons before somebody wins and without being killed. If you can last that long, you probably could have won culture already for example.

So I disagree on "nuke = autowin". They ruin the AI stacks but that isn't enough. There are many, many ways to do that. If you don't like abusing the AI in this game it's to the point where you might as well avoid playing single player at all .

Because let's face it, it's only through the AI's complete idiocy and our abuse of its tendencies that winning on deity is possible at all. If a player is using 1 gold requests to avoid DoW plot and using a lib-bulb + trade strategy w/o sufficient defenses for any stretch of time there is no room to argue against nukes based on the AI inability to handle it.

[Mylene]

Originally Posted by TheMeInTeam

Somewhat hypocritical coming from someone who abuses cavalry and the AI's inability to cope with sudden attacks with fast units .

lol, Cavs or Curis is not abusive.
Many players prefer cannons, Rifles etc. over them. Someone posted a while ago that mounted requires more planning, and i'd agree. That's why many ppl dun fully use them, oh come on you really cannot be serious
I use them because moving and planning them is fun, not cos it's sooo easy.

Nukes...i won't get into further arguments here, i've seen AIs leading by 2x more points getting destroyed within a few turns just cos the human had nukes.
You can talk them down, or just admit
Nothing is foolproof , but if it works you can turn around an otherwise lost game.
Show me how you kill 15+ city Deity AIs on tech parity with mounted, please.

[vranasm]

Originally Posted by Mylene

lol, Cavs or Curis is not abusive.
Many players prefer cannons, Rifles etc. over them. Someone posted a while ago that mounted requires more planning, and i'd agree. That's why many ppl dun fully use them, oh come on you really cannot be serious
I use them because moving and planning them is fun, not cos it's sooo easy.

Nukes...i won't get into further arguments here, i've seen AIs leading by 2x more points getting destroyed within a few turns just cos the human had nukes.
You can talk them down, or just admit
Nothing is foolproof , but if it works you can turn around an otherwise lost game.
Show me how you kill 15+ city Deity AIs on tech parity with mounted, please.

I think the only other option is bombers+tanks... if we would consider tanks as mounted ;-)

right not sure would have to check, but I vaguely remember that tanks started as "mounted" divisions in France, but it's really really long I read the books about military advances so I can remember in a bad way.

German changed the tanks strategy ofc, but I think tanks were initially assigned instead of horses as cavalry support for infantry.

[TheMeInTeam]

lol, Cavs or Curis is not abusive.
Many players prefer cannons, Rifles etc. over them. Someone posted a while ago that mounted requires more planning, and i'd agree. That's why many ppl dun fully use them, oh come on you really cannot be serious

Of course I'm serious. If nukes are abusive because the AI can't handle it, then so is playing single player at all. I could use the exact same "moving and planning is fun" thing for nukes, and it would apply equally. Regardless, it's silly to talk about an AI that doesn't even attempt to win the game the vast majority of the time being abused.

Nukes...i won't get into further arguments here, i've seen AIs leading by 2x more points getting destroyed within a few turns just cos the human had nukes.
You can talk them down, or just admit

Show me a deity game where an AI doesn't have 2x more points than the human at some point. You can talk playing single player down, or just admit .

Nothing is foolproof , but if it works you can turn around an otherwise lost game.
Show me how you kill 15+ city Deity AIs on tech parity with mounted, please.

Then what, you want me to say the same thing about bulbing? The point is that there are lots of ways the AI is inadequate, and lots of ways humans take advantage of that fact. Denying nukes over any other strategy that routinely works is just preference. If it were so easy to get nukes and win on deity, forum polls wouldn't be putting some number well under 5% for people who play it.

Indeed, I'd go so far as to assert that if you went for nukes every game instead of a tech-lead cavalry push or alternative, you'd lose games that you would have won if you attacked with cavalry...

[vranasm]

well i don't like using nukes because imagining world where the world leaders would deliberately throw nukes around is world i don't want to live in. This aspect is totally unrealistic and thus i don't use them.

other thing being that only 2 nukes was satisfying to capitulate Japan, nation supposedly not capitulatable (the emperor thing and all)...

from gamers perspective it's not good argument, but in my eyes the most important.... the imagination has to stop somewhere and that is my line.

[Mylene]

You missed my point tmit, or didn't want to see
With Cavs (i dun use them often, most is Curis) you have to fight.
Things can go wrong, good old standard war with units vs. units.
Just like things can go wrong if you build no military, before reaching good units.

Nukes = eradicate cultural threats, or sometimes capitulate other continents without setting 1 foot into them. Vran has made good points, it feels...cheap and dirty, we all know there would be no winner in nuclear wars. I only said i dun like them, you made more out of it. If someone wants to use them, fine..

[username804]

dude! i challenged you to win by spears alone!

EPIC FAIL!

[TheMeInTeam]

With Cavs (i dun use them often, most is Curis) you have to fight.

With nukes, you have to fight. .

Things can go wrong, good old standard war with units vs. units.

Things can go wrong. There are units vs units!

They share the problem of reaching required tech; nukes do take longer however and therefore carry more risk.

Nukes = eradicate cultural threats

Anything that can take a city can eradicate cultural threats.

or sometimes capitulate other continents without setting 1 foot into them.

Nukes are not alone in this regard.

Vran has made good points, it feels...cheap and dirty

A matter of perception and perception alone. People don't like wars in other eras and with other units too. If your first post was simply "I don't like using nukes because it is against my preference", then I'd have no counter-argument. That's not what you said though .

Also, as I'll get into detail below Vran's points do not match your argument at all.

we all know there would be no winner in nuclear wars.

I think what "we all know" is far from reality, as is the game in general by the way. In real life you don't even have a "winner" per se' because the race continues while individual leadership does not. The game doesn't even tell us what kind of nuclear warheads are being used and you want to tell us whether or not said warheads are realistic ?

I only said i dun like them

Hmm...

I dun like them, yip you get to see your final score but..never feels like winning
In other parts of Civ, AI bonuses can make up for their inability to focus..nukes are like pressing a button several times, and game over cos the computer wasn't programmed to protect itself.

It seems like in addition to saying you don't like them, you claim they don't feel like winning (your preference, no arguments if you don't like them as the only reason). However, quoted post also implies that nukes handle materially differently than other units available in civ IV, and goes on to claim the computer isn't programmed to protect itself as if that is ever truly the case. These factors combined with "don't feel like winning" makes an implied argument that AI bonuses matter except for in the case of nukes. That, however, isn't true and I've shown why.

Comments such as

i've seen AIs leading by 2x more points getting destroyed within a few turns just cos the human had nukes.

and

Nothing is foolproof , but if it works you can turn around an otherwise lost game.

Also carry claims and/or implications that nukes are materially different from other kinds of warfare...quite different from simply saying "I don't like nukes"!

These quotes also do not exclusively identify nukes. Nukes are only at their best under a certain set of conditions, and used outside of those conditions can waste , slow down victory or in some cases result in a loss outright. I'm failing to see how they're so divergent.

Vranasm wasn't arguing them in the gameplay sense much at all (which you were). He is instead taking the "realism" line and saying that in-game nukes don't reflect history or reality very well.

Of course, one could argue that Japan saw WAY more duress than just being nuked twice as it wasn't exactly owning the pacific just prior to those bombings (indeed, their being pushed back isn't an insignificant factor in their being nuked in the first place). One could also argue that media has drummed up a hysteria regarding nuclear weapons/power that doesn't reflect actual reality either (the fire bombing of Dresden didn't employ nuclear arms, and yet if you were ground zero or even miles away from its bombing that would be no consolation).

What we have regarding the long-term impact of nuclear arms is a combination of irrational speculation, media information control, and some actual fact in various quantities. What we don't have is on what scale a supposed civ IV nuclear warhead acts. Considering that entire armies can survive a nuke in a city in civ IV, we're led to believe that the amount of nuclear energy in civ IV isn't so large as some real-life nukes...and there are ways to detonate them that have less significant radiation exposure (though you can never eliminate it).

Getting worked up over nuclear options as opposed to 5000 year old leaders, the ability to completely burn an empire out of existence with only a few handfuls of units (and how is that any less terrible than nuking, by the way?), and the mere physics of how siege works in civ IV seems a little silly/irrational. That doesn't make it wrong to dislike using them, but it also doesn't support claims that they are materially different from other options in terms of being situational and/or cost effective.

[vranasm]

well I am a big fan of WW II warfare and did read a share of books about the era warfare and politics etc. and got the feeling that Japan was supposed to never capitulate/surrender because they Emperor was for them some kind of God and Gods don't surrender.

The US expected to lose ~million of soldiers if they had to go into Japan land based on the warfare on Okinawa and it's supposed that nukes were shortcut to victory which was needed to demonstrate.

People at the date didn't know the side effects of the nuke bombs (as we know now), they just knew that US had bomb that could eliminate 1 big city in 1 strike, where as Dresden was bombed by how many airships?

And it surely is easier to send 1 bomb ship over pacific then couple of hundreds bomb ships, other thing being that strategic bombers can't reach every city in japan and for vast part of Japan the US had to use ship based bombers which don't offer the same capacity as B-17.

I vaguely remember Doolittle attack being borderline successful in this respect.

If I would transition to these days...just look how big panic over the world imposed Fukushima...now imagine someone would launch ~200 nukes as you do in your games...

This game is not reality since it's game, but the overall feel is "reality like" and that is my reason I just don't use nukes :-).

Oh and there is big difference between Dresden and Nagasaki in post bombing effects...
btw when we're at it, we were learned at school that today's Dresden is ~5 meters above the old Dresden...they just rolled over the ruins and built new Dresden above the old ones.

I think that for communist parties bombing of Dresden and Nagassaki+Hiroshima made great PR potential how to describe US and West Germany as big evil ;-).
Of course for us from Czech Rep. the behavior at Munich 1938 by France+GB was just another example of ammunition for communist PR.

[dr_s]

Originally Posted by vranasm

The US expected to lose ~million of soldiers if they had to go into Japan land based on the warfare on Okinawa and it's supposed that nukes were shortcut to victory which was needed to demonstrate.

I don't want to sidetrack the TMiT/Mylene debate too much, but I can't resist correcting this persistent myth. While there were certainly after-the-fact claims of ~ 1 million American lives saved by the atomic bombing of Japan (most notably by Truman), the actual estimates made in June 1945 by the US Joint War Plans Committee were much more modest: 40,000 killed and 150,000 wounded in the anticipated invasions of Kyushu and Honshu.

Sources: Robert James Maddox, "The biggest decision: Why we had to drop the atomic bomb," American Heritage, May/June 1995; Barton Bernstein, "A postwar myth: 500,000 U.S. lives saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June/July 1986.

[vranasm]

Originally Posted by dr_s

I don't want to sidetrack the TMiT/Mylene debate too much, but I can't resist correcting this persistent myth. While there were certainly after-the-fact claims of ~ 1 million American lives saved by the atomic bombing of Japan (most notably by Truman), the actual estimates made in June 1945 by the US Joint War Plans Committee were much more modest: 40,000 killed and 150,000 wounded in the anticipated invasions of Kyushu and Honshu.

Sources: Robert James Maddox, "The biggest decision: Why we had to drop the atomic bomb," American Heritage, May/June 1995; Barton Bernstein, "A postwar myth: 500,000 U.S. lives saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June/July 1986.

sorry but the cited numbers here like . Just to make things a bit relative according to this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

40k soldiers are losses of Canada. Nation with ~12M people at the time.

The US itself lost over 400k men over the course of war, Japan over 2M and you want to claim that invasion of Japan would bring only 40k dead?

Another good comparision, numbers from Battle of Berlin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin

Germany losses over 80k, russian 90k. And that is only 1 battle over few days.

I call . It's totally unrealistic number, but totally expected from military committee...

That million could be way of, I just cited number I remember from "books".

The real number we won't ever realize since all of this is "what if"...