I've never seen the AI nuke themselves before.

On my latest Emperor game, I just captured Constantinople with nukes, Giant Death Robots, and X-Com units. A turn later, Theodora dropped an Atom Bomb on the city and took it back. Sure, she may have killed my Death Robots, but she also took out half her army and tiles. Her population started at 30, and ended up at 6.

Was that worth it? Yeah, I voted Nuclear non-proliferation after that. Silly Theodora.

Well, I guess you answered your own question- she nuked you and not herself.

Still a hilarious example of civ AI though

AI must be pretty desperate.

I"ve had AIs nuke themselves plenty of times before, most common occurrence is when I have just taken the city and usually most of the times all of my soldiers already left it and is working on the newly moved frontline or attacking somewhere else.

And all the nukes kill is a random dessy or two and maybe an badly wounded unit or two left behind at the city to heal. Most of the times I have those units retreat deep into my lines cuz it'll be safer for them there when having them heal at an recently conquered city will get them picked off by random bomber or arty in fog of war.

If any of the natural warmongers have nuclear capability they won't hesitate to use it if you capture a city of theirs (certainly doesn't have to be a capital). I once used a missile to take out most of a Roman fleet in late game that had two ACs with atom bombers on board, after he had dropped one on newly-captured Antium. That was a very messy game...

Whats really annoying about nukes is that if any tiles or units in the nuke area belong to another civ, you get NO warning at all and that civ auto-declares war on you.

I think that's what the AI normally does, sure it's baffling when you think they are nuking their own people in order to liberate them from their bodily prisons the enemy occupation, but AI are programmed to act like players, i.e. like complete psychos.

I saw the same thing happening with Ramkhamhaeng. I conquered his capital with a pair of nukes, and he answered with an ICBM the turn after. Needless to say the population of his once glorious capital dropped to 1.

It is however interesting to note that he never dropped a bomb on a city that I had conquered to use it as the land base for my invasion (I was coming from another continent), and the reason is (i believe) because inside its 3 hex radius there were territories owned by a nearby CS. The AI just can't seem to be able to move his aim a little further away from the dead center of a city.

There is in fact a simple trick you can use to invade the cities of a nuclear power AI without risking to have them nuked the turn after: sell them to another Civ, possibly one that is in good relation with you and behind the victory race.

The AI will never start a war with another Civ if it is already engaged in one with a strong enemy.

Question said:

Whats really annoying about nukes is that if any tiles or units in the nuke area belong to another civ, you get NO warning at all and that civ auto-declares war on you.

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Well, that's what you get for flinging a nuke into an area where you don't have full line-of-sight on adjacent tiles.

It's fine to me that the game has a penalty for such recklessness, and that the game doesn't coddle the player by popping up repeated "are you sure you want to do this?" messages.

The AI nuking its own citizens is par for the course in my experience. I plan for it now, when I am lucky enough that games go that long.

Browd said:

Well, that's what you get for flinging a nuke into an area where you don't have full line-of-sight on adjacent tiles.

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I am sorry to say it took me a couple of games to figure out why I was getting DoWed by my allies... I agree that the mechanic is fine as-is.

Also, I had a game where I had turned off animations, and could not figure out why certain cities suddenly dropped in production! My first thought was that CiV had brought back the terrible random event feature where nuclear plants would sometimes implode...

I just find that its not user friendly, imagine if you never got a pop up to ask if you were sure you wanted to declare war...

Speaking of which, being new to BNW from lots of GnK, I have accidently DoWed more than once now! That pop-up warning is quite different from what I am used to...

Yes, it is not user friendly that you can accidently nuke your friends, but (as with a few of the game interactions) it is really only an ugly surprise the first time (maybe first couple times, if you are as slow a learner as I).

Question said:

I just find that its not user friendly, imagine if you never got a pop up to ask if you were sure you wanted to declare war...

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beetle said:

Speaking of which, being new to BNW from lots of GnK, I have accidently DoWed more than once now! That pop-up warning is quite different from what I am used to...

Yes, it is not user friendly that you can accidently nuke your friends, but (as with a few of the game interactions) it is really only an ugly surprise the first time (maybe first couple times, if you are as slow a learner as I).

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There are innumerable circumstances in the game where a human player would benefit from an "Are you sure?" warning before taking actions, but that would quickly get super annoying (particularly if the dialog box defaulted to "No", since you had to manually click on "Yes" rather than just hit "Enter").

Although I generally oppose the idea that the game should "protect human players from themselves", I'm OK with "Are you sure you want to DOW?" since the DOW button is the only diplo screen button that doesn't take you to a sub-menu and it's right next to the Trade button, making mis-clicks all too likely. (Frankly, I think the DOW option should be at the bottom of that screen, rather than the top, or even better only be on the Discuss screen, but who cares what I think about UI design?)

Anyway, when you are tossing around nukes, you are already at war and, presumably, thinking carefully about what you are doing. And, as beetle notes, this should be a mistake you only make once (or maybe twice....).

I totally agree with Browd that generally fewer warnings is better. I also agree with observation that the DoW button belongs in the dialog menu.

My accidental DoWs have been from moving units (usually a scout) into territory when I have not negotiated open borders. The dialog box that pops-up seems wholly irrelevant to the action I am trying to perform, so I try to dismiss it -- and BOOM. At least three times now, the first couple of times I didn't know what happened! I never made this mistake with GnK... I could see the same thing happening to someone who thought they were clicking on the Trade button. It hardly matters that you get a warning when the dialog is so detailed and out of context. OTOH it is a nice information screen but if and only if you meant to DoW, so it doesn't help as much as it could.

Cyberpunk85 said:

On my latest Emperor game, I just captured Constantinople with nukes, Giant Death Robots, and X-Com units. A turn later, Theodora dropped an Atom Bomb on the city and took it back. Sure, she may have killed my Death Robots, but she also took out half her army and tiles. Her population started at 30, and ended up at 6.

Was that worth it? Yeah, I voted Nuclear non-proliferation after that. Silly Theodora.

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Obviously the AI doesn't mind a Pyrrhic victory.

Yep. AI must be desperate. Nuking their own citizens and all.

It's a reasonable tactic and game behavior, but it really bothered me the first time it happened. It breaks my sense of immersion. If would be less disappointing if the AI had a chance of retaking the city.

If the city wasn't a capital, you could have razed it to the ground.

I was trying to crush her before she built any nukes, but I guess I was a little too late. Oh well, her 6 population didn't help her war effort much after that.