Can Nuclear Missile leave city in ruins?

I've never been able to use a nuke to wipe a city off of the map. No matter what all it does is half the population. I once used 4 nuke missiles on a city in a single turn and it still survived. Such a waste of uranium that was. It also seems like it doesn't matter whether or not its a direct impact which is a bit silly imo. The damage should be more severe if its direct. Not exactly the same on any tile within 2 hexes.

So how do you completely destroy a city and leave it in ruins with the nuclear missile? All I can do is raze with a melee unit.

I hear a lot of conflicting reports on this. When you nuked it the fourth time, was it already at 1 pop? I suspect that IF it is possible to nuke a city to the ground you'd need to hit it again after it's at 1 pop. Not sure though; never tried it myself.

Oh, and it's never possible to destroy a capitol or city state; not with nukes nor with troops.

Nukes in Civ are porked. They never do the devastation they would in reality. The reason is simple: it would make the game end, basically. A lot of people don't want that, so nukes are little more than big WW2 bombs. But then I suppose you would not be happy if the AI wiped out your cities with them?

I have wiped cities off the map with nukes. Smallish pop with 2 or 3 nukes did it. I had already won a CV so was having a bit of fun to see what would happen.

It's possible but you need a LOT of nukes...

Is not totally true , depends even from.. positioning ! Yes , i tired , i i nuke a 4 pop city ,in plains will be ruined , but on hill will be at 1 pop

I've had it happen to me in a Vanilla game, but have never been in a position to see or make it happen post-G&K.

I was in a multiplayer game(on vanilla) once with my brother, and he wiped out one of my cities with a nuke.

ICBMs with MIRV capability could take out 10 cities with 1 missile.

You can take out a fairly big endgame city with 3 nuclear missiles. That's missiles, not atom bombs. But never the capital or a CS, of course. Smaller cities, sometimes 2 nukes. I've done it post-patch.

I have never found any kind of razing strategy to be effective. It's a good tactic for removing cities in marginal locations that the AI founds when sprawling. They just love to put a city in that one tundra square on your far border, right? Or that tiny scrap of desert you thought was useless.

But a 'good' city location will almost always be resettled quickly, and it seems the AI can grow a size 10 city in no time at all during the late game.

Yes, you can raze cities with nukes (missiles not bombs). If a city has low pop (less than 5 usually) and a low amount of HP (less than a third or so) - (not sure if both of these together are a requirement but its a common combo in nuclear war)

You can NOT raze CAPITALS or CITY STATES in this fashion, just as you can't raze them by capturing them. This may be where you are going wrong.

It's fairly simple to nuke a city of the grid - two nukes will usually take out most, so long as they don't have a bomb shelter, are a capital or a city state.

Source: I may have nuked Gandhi one or two times.

I had montezuma nuke my 2nd city once with 2 nuclear missiles and he took it off the map.

Yzman said:

I had montezuma nuke my 2nd city once with 2 nuclear missiles and he took it off the map.

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On the plus side, I found out Bomb Shelters work really well, at least against A-bombs. It was the end of the game in a science victory, playing as Spain. Napolean had been my nemesis the entire game, so once the last rocket piece was finished, in a fit of delicious spite, I decided to buy some nuclear missiles and mess 'im up a wee bit as a grand finale.

I laid waste to three of his cities bordering my outlying 'citadel' defensive city, just to see them burn. And of course I couldn't help torpedoing some of his ships, as well- those nukesub sailors get testy if you don't let them sink something once in a while... and my modern armor guys needed a workout too, of course.

So, before I knew it, it was 2-3 turns later, and I still hadn't bothered to build the rocket. About then, Nappy had moved a bunch of airplanes and a handful of Atom Bombs up to the front, and he decided to launch a tit-for-tat nuking of my citadel city. Over the course of two turns, he dropped at least 3 A-bombs on it (could have been more, not sure, as I play with quick attacks turned on), before I took out the city he was launching them from and all that was in it. Without it, my city would have been lucky to be left with 2-3 population.

The A-bombs reduced the city health to less than 1/4, even being a late-game city with a defense of over 170... but the population only went down from 17 to 13, which was a pretty darn good testimonial to the effectiveness of the bomb shelter, at protecting your most valuable assets.