TAC nukes are better nukes

I finished a game with a space race victory as the Greeks. I had most of a continent shared with the French. Korea had most of the other continent while I had the rest. I decided after the win to play with nukes.

I used two Tactical nukes on the French to take two of their cities with modern armor. The French retaliated with 3 ICBM's on my cities and then the Koreans declared war on the French. As I used nukes first shouldn't the koreans have declared on me ?

Does that mean there is no diplomatic downside to using TACTICAL nukes while every neutral civ will declare on you if you use ICBMs.

If the Koreans were already in some kind of deal with you, they're less likely to decare on you first. Especially if you're both at war with the civ you nuked. But that last bit doesn't apply in this case, of course.

If you are lucky, you can launch many tacticals or icbm's without being attacked by third parties. I think I once managed to use 10-15 icbm's and still be at peace with 7 of a total of 10 nations. I had no alliances or mpp's. But some of them was also at war with my enemy.

I think the key is to have good relations to begin with, and much luck. I believe it's no difference between the two types of nukes.

I was wondering, is there any way to stop tactical nukes or ICBMs?

I'm trying for a domination or conquest win on Deity, and when I got a spy into my only rival, England, I found that they had one tactical nuke and one ICBM. Any way to prevent the ICBM from taking out one of my major cities?

Not unless you can destroy them in the town for ICBM's. I am not sure about tacticals, they may be able to be destroyed by bombing as othe units are, but not ICBM's. They can only be destroyed if you capture the town or have SDI to shoot them down.

Does the AI always target your capital city or your best city with its ICBMs? I'm actually kind of reluctant to play that particular game now; I've only seen an ICBM hit one of my cities once before, but it scared the hell out of me because I didn't realize what it was at first.

No, they have been known to it a junk town instead. If it has a resource or lux or just for the fun of it I guess. It is no big deal, IF you move your units out of the immediate radius (9 tiles) and have lots of workers to jump in and road/rail/irrigate/mine all tiles immediately.

Queen of Swords said:

Does the AI always target your capital city or your best city with its ICBMs? I'm actually kind of reluctant to play that particular game now; I've only seen an ICBM hit one of my cities once before, but it scared the hell out of me because I didn't realize what it was at first.

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This reminds me of one of Basket's stories where he got nuked about 20 times...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2816711&postcount=117

His capital did not get hit, nor did any of his main production centers. Smackograb, though, gets hit by 6 nukes- and it was a worthless little city, presumably cause it has aluminum.

If you want to disable the ICBM, capture the city that it is in. The AI will not nuke you if you do not toss one first.

vmxa said:

Not unless you can destroy them in the town for ICBM's. I am not sure about tacticals, they may be able to be destroyed by bombing as othe units are, but not ICBM's. They can only be destroyed if you capture the town or have SDI to shoot them down.

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Tacticals will be destroyed like an icbm if captured. Which means, they cannot actually be captured. They does not take damage by conventional bombing (Civ3).

I have not seen the AI use nuclear weapons alot. I don't know if they pick a random target, but usually they nuked major cities. I haved tested a little, and found they would not always change target if a neutral third nation (me) had units adjacent to the city they wanted to nuke. One time I got units killed accidently in the blast because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time, and the game engine treated it as the AI declared war on me.

Targets the AI seems to go for are Al and Uranium cities to stop you building nukes then the capital and your intel agency and then other major cities. I haven't seen them use them to wipe out defenders so MA can take cities.

I have never been nuked when I haven't started using nukes and in my games I prefer using ground artillery rather than deal with the mess and retaliation nuke use entails. I have captured nukes in AI cities so the AI won't use nukes unless for retaliation.

seanos08 said:

I I have captured nukes in AI cities so the AI won't use nukes unless for retaliation.

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AFAIK you cannot capture nukes. ICBM and Tacticals have 0 def and 0 att and that makes them so they cannot be captured.

Well, the English dropped those nukes, and they must've had just enough uranium to scrape up a third one before I cut off their supply. One nuke on Shanghai, my Forbidden Palace city, one on Atlanta, which was a one-population city that I'd captured from the Americans, and one on Oxford, which was a city of theirs that I'd captured. I had an elite battleship in Oxford and it was gone. Shanghai's population was halved and the terrain around it went from grassland to plains. Atlanta went from plains to desert. I immediately had workers on them, cleaning up pollution and irrigating everything to raise the population again, and Shanghai bounced back nicely population-wise. It was in the top five cities when I scored a domination victory (could have been conquest; England was down to two cities). So all in all, ICBMs don't seem to do that much damage. Maybe if one dropped on each of my major cities, that would have been different, but as it was, Shanghai didn't even seem to suffer any lasting ill-effects.

sorry vmxa - I meant that I captured a city with MA and saw a graphic of a nuke breaking up like a plane or a ship ie. destroyed unlike workers and artillery that can be captured. I was just surprised the enemy didn't let the nuke off seeing as their city was doomed.

They are not all that bright. I was watch Babs send units away from the last two Korean towns, while attacking it with 1 or 2 cavs. I had even helped them by bombarding the defenders to redline.

They finally made peace with them, they could have taken them out with ease. I have no idea why they would walk dozens of rifles past them. They normally attack with rifles.

vmxa said:

They are not all that bright.

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Definitely not all that bright. I've seen a city defended by a regular infantry and a couple of conscript rifles when my forces were closing in, and what do they do but send out the regular infantry to try to capture a worker or disconnect a resource.