Nukes - an underused part of Civ

The crux of my argument is that Nukes as a weapon have far greater significance beyond their tactical power.

Nuclear weapons have changed diplomacy and how superpowers/nuclear powers do business with each other e.g Cold War.

I've only watched my flatmate's games and he is a bit of a n00b and not a great player - as yet he's not built nukes - so correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't it be great, especially given the new diplomacy system, for nukes to have a much greater and more defined diplomatic/strategic role? They produce rhetoric in your opponents but don't change the balance of the game as much as they could/should. It's too easy for big players to go to war in the modern game. Has their ever been a full-scale war between two declared nuclear powers? I think not.

For example, once you've built nukes why not allow AI/Human players to set their posture ('first strike, pre-emptive, retaliatory strike only, no tactical use i.e. against units etc.) and perhaps even their position (allow people to bluff about their capability or be ambiguous about it). This could have diplomatic consequences (-5 for retaining a first strike policy) and other effects on your opponents.

I know Civ relies on keeping itself as simple as possible but....I often find the modern game can get stale and greater roles for nukes could add more texture, reflecting their role in our world, the replicating of which being part of Civ's brief.

You could make lots of arguments for game changes - I just thought of this one and think it could be cool.

Sounds like a good idea, it would open up a whole new dimension to diplomacy and war. The only way this would fall flat would be in games where there's one player running away with a tech lead, and so can build nukes way before anybody else.

Perhaps - but that happens anyway.

And given that the leaders have such different personalities you know that some will be bullied and some won't. The leaders in Civ4 have so much more interest to them than before and I think that can be built on. Plus you could be penalised heavily diplomatically for bullying people with them/not ruling out first-strike etc.

I suppose I think it's totally false to not recognise the clear effect Nukes have had on diplomacy. There have always been arms races (e.g. Dreadnought Race, 1900-1914) but none where the stakes are so high and the consequences so dire - nukes just seem different.

good suggestrions. The modern era suffers for most people.
Maybe having the Manhatten Project give the builder one nuclear bomb (missle) would also emphasize (sp) the importance of the nuclear age.
I think that the main problem with the modern age is the lack of discovery and how you start to simply move little figures around. Since just blowing everything up with nukes would get tiresome after a few times (although the game mechanics actually do a pretty good job of thwarting that)- opening up the diplomacy aspect in relation to nukes is a great idea.

girtholomew said:

The crux of my argument is that Nukes as a weapon have far greater significance beyond their tactical power.

Nuclear weapons have changed diplomacy and how superpowers/nuclear powers do business with each other e.g Cold War.

I've only watched my flatmate's games and he is a bit of a n00b and not a great player - as yet he's not built nukes - so correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't it be great, especially given the new diplomacy system, for nukes to have a much greater and more defined diplomatic/strategic role? They produce rhetoric in your opponents but don't change the balance of the game as much as they could/should. It's too easy for big players to go to war in the modern game. Has their ever been a full-scale war between two declared nuclear powers? I think not.

For example, once you've built nukes why not allow AI/Human players to set their posture ('first strike, pre-emptive, retaliatory strike only, no tactical use i.e. against units etc.) and perhaps even their position (allow people to bluff about their capability or be ambiguous about it). This could have diplomatic consequences (-5 for retaining a first strike policy) and other effects on your opponents.

I know Civ relies on keeping itself as simple as possible but....I often find the modern game can get stale and greater roles for nukes could add more texture, reflecting their role in our world, the replicating of which being part of Civ's brief.

You could make lots of arguments for game changes - I just thought of this one and think it could be cool.

Click to expand...

I think that Dale and others with their mad (as in insane levels of) MAD (as in Mutually Assured Destruction) coding have addressed alot of your suggestions.
I have wished for another, where units entering a nuked area would be subject to radiation sickness.
And a nuked area would be impossible to build infrastructure on for a set time, depending on the potency of the nuke dropped on it.
I also would like to see radioactive clouds move about the map.
This concept would sort of emulate The Plague conditions that showed up in some of the Civ III scenarios.

Really? How so? I'm not saying the coding doesn't do that - I just don't know how as I haven't played enough Civ 4.

It only seems to be implicit and still doesn't allow player manipulation. The MAD thing is reasonable but no fun.

Having nukes just doesn't seem to have the effect/advantages for your position that it should have.

And yes - the manhattan project should definitely give you free nukes. After all it was a bit more than just a proof of concept exercise!

Actually I think the crux of the problem is that the modern era has been treated with gloved hands this time. There are no spies with suitcase nukes, or suitcases of city-buying money, no kamakazi airplane "privateers" to crash into your rivals cities, no alternate fuel technologies to obsolete oil (perhaps at some cost -1 food from farms for ethonol?), no ability to vote in frowned upon civics in the UN, no eugenics programs in the 20's-40's era, no concentration camps, no . . . the list goes on and on.

What we really need is an expansion pack devoted to modern times. Espionage and terrorism in the modern world have become very important features, we don't just have cold wars, we have shadow wars. I can imagine saladin sending out his terrorists to weaken me, Stalin sending in his spies to spread discontent and buy away my cities, Tokigawa sending in his kamakazi's like missiles to wipe out stacks of my units at once (or perhaps a new Jap leader, with leader specific UU "Kamakazi"), etc . . .

We live in a very fast moving and exciting time civilization-wise. There is a lot going on from 1900 to now. But it's so recent that firaxis seems deathly afraid of offending someone. So we have realistically fewer modern military units, but also lack the controversial "battlefield" tactics that have largely replaced them.

The modern era could be at least as fun as the early game, given a few new options. Has anyone else thought of sending in some new unit to eradicate religion in your enemies cities? Or even some new internal civic (not free religion) to simulate the chinese or russian views on the subject over the past hundred years? I think everyone knows what we really want to see, it's just that we need Firaxis to see it too.

It's a shame that most Civ games are won before the modern age, unless I purposely prolong them.

One thing that I think would be useful would be for the builder of the Manhattan Project to get something like a 25% bonus in building nukes.

As it stands, nobody really wants to build it, because then everybody can go ahead and build the things, and the player's lead / industry is for nothing.

I'd like to see a greater role for nuclear weapons, also. I like the idea of giving one free ICBM to whoever builds the Manhattan project. I like the Bomb Shelters and SDI project, but those in tandem decrease nuke effectiveness so much as to hardly make it worth it.

I think that allowing nuclear submarines (new unit) to hold one or two nuclear missles would help make nukes a bit more relevent. The missle itself could be cheaper, less powerful and have a shorter range than an ICBM, but SDI would only have a 25-50% chance of intercepting.

I personally was dissapointed with not having nuclear submarines and the ability to load nukes on them in CIV.

Bring back tactical nukes from Subs!

And whatever happened to "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" as in an immediate impact on diplomacy - i.e people making NICE with you because you can annihilate them - and vice versa!

girtholomew said:

Really? How so? I'm not saying the coding doesn't do that - I just don't know how as I haven't played enough Civ 4.

It only seems to be implicit and still doesn't allow player manipulation. The MAD thing is reasonable but no fun.

Having nukes just doesn't seem to have the effect/advantages for your position that it should have.

And yes - the manhattan project should definitely give you free nukes. After all it was a bit more than just a proof of concept exercise!

Click to expand...

Have a look at some of the modpacks that are coming out.
Nukes that auto-launch when a nuclear strike is launched against you are available as a user installed modpack now. And that is a key part of a nuclear deterrence for US and Warsaw Pact since the 60's.
I also believe sub-launched nukes are now available with one of the modpacks.

I do agree that the impact of nukes is way understated in the game.
A single nuke from say 1980 vintage should be able to lay waste to a massive part of any country's territory and infrastructure.

Consider that today a single nuclear bomb dropped on say, North Korea, would end up killing people in China and Japan with radiation poisoning, and certainly sicken, maybe kill people on the west coast of North America.

Perhaps not a single nuke but I get your point.

glad there are modpacks - I hope Firaxis will see fit to integrate it into the next game. It's more the diplomacy aspect I want to see. It'd be fun to see a small civ standing up for itself against a giant neighbour (especially if they're your arch-enemy) using the threat of nuclear retaliation to stymy an invasion. After all, why do you think N Korea and Iran want the bomb so bad?

Also glad that others agree on how pants the modern era can become - I enjoy it in many ways because I feel that my civs really mature in that era and I almost always seize hegemony in that era (not a good ancient player me), not before - but it's also prone to becoming hugely stale. In Civ 3 there were many instances when I'd get bored, pick a neighbour, build 100 modern armor and then just roll over them. Even though they had nukes they would almost never use them when the threat of their use would have scared me off.

GIDS888 said:

Bring back tactical nukes from Subs!

And whatever happened to "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" as in an immediate impact on diplomacy - i.e people making NICE with you because you can annihilate them - and vice versa!

Click to expand...

Yeah, I miss that from Civ II also.

If it were up to me, every civ would have to build its own manhatten project to get nukes (or perhaps have a special spy to "steal" the ability).

Maybe you give the 2nd civ a discount to build it.

As it stands now, it's not worth building the manhatten project. I think that's a deliberate thing. Fixaris didn't seem to like the Nukes since Civ II.

girtholomew said:

Perhaps not a single nuke but I get your point.

glad there are modpacks - I hope Firaxis will see fit to integrate it into the next game. It's more the diplomacy aspect I want to see. It'd be fun to see a small civ standing up for itself against a giant neighbour (especially if they're your arch-enemy) using the threat of nuclear retaliation to stymy an invasion. After all, why do you think N Korea and Iran want the bomb so bad?

Also glad that others agree on how pants the modern era can become - I enjoy it in many ways because I feel that my civs really mature in that era and I almost always seize hegemony in that era (not a good ancient player me), not before - but it's also prone to becoming hugely stale. In Civ 3 there were many instances when I'd get bored, pick a neighbour, build 100 modern armor and then just roll over them. Even though they had nukes they would almost never use them when the threat of their use would have scared me off.

Click to expand...

It is perfectly realistic. The closest example would be Pakistan and India. The latter is stronger in terms of population and territory, and thus has so much more to lose to nukes...

I liked the way in civ3 it would tear up the roads and improvments around the cities and scatter polution everywhere. Much better than in civ4 IMAO, I cant understand why they changed it. I agree that nukes should have a greater impact on diplomacy. I also like the idea of versions of nukes. Say a late industrial nuke on par with the ww2 nukes, early ICBM with limited range and a late ICBM with an unlimited range.

I think nukes should have two things that define them. Range and power. At first nukes won't have much range but as technology advances nukes will be able to hit more distant targets until the ICBM comes into play when the range can be anywhere on earth. Nukes should at first be not that powerful, the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were weak compared to today's nukes. Later day nukes should vapourise a city completely and it's entire fat cross and the fallout should be massive and cause a nuclear war to literally wipe out a civilization

I would have to completly agree that nukes should upgrade just like any other unit and that they need to have diplomatic features. IOt really seems that they just threw in nukes to this game just because they were expected to be there. Also their effect as to be a scare tactic is demineshed when plying AI because 1)the game is usually already over by the moder age (or 1 civ has total advantage. and 2) because of SDI intercepting most missles, nuclear annialation on an entire civ would require upwards of a hundred nukes to take out a large civ. And even then the army must still march in and take or raze the cities

GIDS888 said:

Bring back tactical nukes from Subs!

And whatever happened to "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" as in an immediate impact on diplomacy - i.e people making NICE with you because you can annihilate them - and vice versa!

Click to expand...

I thought that Nukes on Civ 4 artificially inflate your power graph. If so, wouldn't having lots of nukes make an AI hesitant to attack you?

The tactical nukes are a good idea. Maybe something that can't be stopped by SDI but only affects 1 tile.

Of course this means we'd need some H-bombs too.

H-bombs... yummy...

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