As someone with close to 800 hrs played, I have never used a nuke. Am I missing out?

I tend to stick to playing Domination victories on Deity (as I see it all the other victories are variants of Domination anyway when you play on Deity), and I have never built a nuke.

I don't even really know what they do. Sure I've been nuked by the AI, so on a superficial level I understand it renders tiles unworkable, massively reduces a city's pop and damages/kills many units in an AOE, but what do they DO?

I mean, I have all the killing power I need from artilleries and bombers and what-not. My style of play also values all of my units highly, such that I tend to load when I lose units unnecessary until I'm in the home stretch, so building a suicide unit that can't gain exp, become more powerful and whose only purpose is to do what I can already do with my fleet of bombers seems... wasteful. Also it's the same reason why I don't build cruise missiles.

Can anyone fill me in - am I missing out on some kind of tactical dimension by not using nukes/missiles?

The only time I ever used nukes was when I was literally 1-2 turns from winning, for some reason AIs build Manhattan Project quickly but then don't build actual nukes for a while, and when you obtain them, they poo their pants

I have only used nukes a couple times for the same reasons. The game switches from tactical to strategic once WMDs are introduced. I like to outmaneuver and defeat a numerically superior AI. Nukes just don't fit that battle plan.

That being said, I keep them at home and if invaded I wouldn't hesitate to launch. But on offensive they seem like messy overkill.

There are a couple of reasons that nukes are not very useful vs AIs. The most important one is that they're simply not needed, because the AI is slow at winning and terrible at defending. You can as you say easily break down an AIs using bombers and artillery. Nukes can make things faster, but as you say they are less effective. All in all, if you get to nuke tech you will win the game with or without it.

In multiplayer games nukes are very powerful and one of the cornerstones of the late game (with the others being stealth bombers and x-com). The most important function of the nuke is that unless a city has a bomb shelter, you will kill every single airplane located in that city. This effectively means that if you tech to nukes, it's very hard to kill you without teching to both stealth bombers and bomb shelters, two completely opposite ends of the tech tree. If your cities are not in stealth bomber range, your opponent might try to plop down a city in range to use as an air base. In this case, even with bomb shelters, you will destroy the city (and all units) with the nuke.

Offensively, the nuke is also powerful. One of the most common ways to take a city quickly is by bombing with stealth bombers and landing x-com to capture it. However, if the city is surrounded with Mobile SAMs this is impractical. There are no spots to land x-com even with spy vision, and trying to clear spots with bombers doesn't work great vs anti-air. In this case, the nuke is what will break the initial defense open by removing the anti-air that stops your bombers, and also opens up spots for x-com to land.

In general nukes are also pretty decent value. The damage caused to a city, the tiles and nearby units will easily cost your opponent more than it cost you.

OP, clearly you are winning too quickly!

I found nuclear missiles situationally useful up through Immortal, but not yet for my Deity games (which I am still struggling with). I had at least one Immortal games where missiles let me launch first for SV and my last couple games of Immortal were domination wins using missiles followed up by Xcom as Emtee described. (Those wins are what led me to think I was ready to try Deity.)

I have found nuclear missiles to be more than 2x better than nuclear bombs, so I don’t bother with the latter. Bombs leave survivors which might heal. If there is no bomb shelter, missiles reduce city size by half and will even delete small cities (size 3, I think, and no warmonger hate for city capture) while bombs only knock down pop by a few.

I am with you OP, that I hate to leave xp unclaimed, but nukes are best late game anyway.

And the animation is fun, so turn that on, at least the first time!

you arent really missing out on a tactical reason if you play mostly domination. if you wish to hold off a DoW in a more peaceful game then building them will do that but you dont necessarily need to drop one either. of course, i have done it just for fun/curiosity reasons and wanting to see the combat animations but it isnt really factored into a gameplan as a necessity, at any difficulty really.

the only strategic reason i can come up with (limited warmongering skills with nukes, btw) is reducing pop for happiness reasons. capping a 30 pop city reduces it to 15, still a big chunk of happiness and a long time of Resistance. so drop it under 20 pop with a nuke (depending on if they have the bunkers), then cap it, and shave off extra turns of large unhappiness? but high pop is usually mitigated by letting them take it back and then retaking it. and you dont deal with fallout or loss of lux tiles, etc. if you took autocracy, free courthouses will also help with this too, i think.

Ive never built the nuke bunkers for protection from their nukes either, but since you said you have been nuked i'd guess you did build them? losing lots of pop/tile improvements that late could be a dagger if things are really close, at least at one of the high diffs.

Nukes only become relevant if your games go well over 300 turns on Standard speed

I *always* build Bomb Shelters when going for SV. I tech the upper tree last, and I often sweat it out a bit until I get them up. Probably just an immersion thing for me, I don't believe I've ever been nuked unless I nuke first.

I like using nukes as the ultimate F U card. You have a run away in the game that you can not seem to catch up with, nuke'em til they glow in the dark.

Do you have a carpet of doom coming your way? A few well placed nukes will turn the opposition army into ash/glass parking lot.

Do you have a trouble some neighbor, who has no valuable resources that you want?
Feel free to wipe out their measely existence with Atomic Mushroom Clouds of fire.

I only use them for fun. Unless this was changed in a patch, three nuclear missiles can destroy a non-capital non-city-state city. Destroy as in it vanishes off the map.

I'm not sure if you're missing out.. I have used both nukes and haven't used nukes. I've been nuked and I only used nukes once during gnk. I had nuked India as Russia and gotten nuked twice by Siam as both Korea and Japan. I feel that I have missed out from playing other games..

I think there is at least one Steam achievement for using nukes, so you'd be missing out in that sense.

I am in the same boat, lots of hours played and never once nuked anyone. I think my reasoning is the same as OP.

consentient said:

I think there is at least one Steam achievement for using nukes, so you'd be missing out in that sense.

Click to expand...

Yeah, like he said. There is an achievement called Apocalypse Now or something, where you, as Mayans, must nuke a city in the year 2012 AD. I have no idea how turns translate into years but I do remember when I wanted to get that one, it turned out I had to wait long after I'd have wrapped up the win. It probably would work on Epic speed

I have close to 3000 hours and only used a nuke way back in vanilla, probably a day or two after launch.

in Civ4 they were very useful. Tanks plus nukes were easily the easiest way to overrun a continent, especially tactical nukes or whatever they were called on subs as it was much more economical than ICBMs.

I guess the one-unit-per-tile rule made nukes a lot less useful because they have less effect (carpets of doom instead of easily nukeable stacks of doom) and because there is less need since the AI has more difficulty handling the tactical aspects of civ5 combat.

Also, the economics have changed: in civ4 a modern armour (240 hammers) was about the cost of a tactical nuke (250), while in civ5 you need to buy the more expensive nuclear missiles to wipe out units (1000), while a modern armour costs only 425. Also, I think air units are more powerful in civ5, but that's less easy to compare directly (?).