Nuclear Tactics

[cpicard]

Let's talk Nukes.

I want to talk about offensive and defensive tactics. I'm focusing on multiplayer games. I'll list some questions and give my input from some of my experience. Please add to this with your experiences. Obviously this is advanced warfare.

Defense:
How do you best limit the damage of a nuclear attack?
On the homeland.
Minimize the units in your cities. Keep marginal units in your cities. (infantry or below) 1 in internal cities, 2 in your border cities. Keep your best units (tanks, marines, etc) at least two squares away from the cities sitting on railroads to they can move quickly. Preferably at least 5 squares from the border or ocean to get out of range of Tactical Nukes. If a convental attack happens, keeping 2 units in the city gives you time to replenish with your better units.

If a city gets hit, most of your strong units will only be badly damaged. Immediately protect the city with new full strength units that are sitting nearby. Then move the damaged units out of the city to a safer central square (not a city). Where you've got medics awaiting. Especially if you have a lot of units damaged. If you keep damaged units in the city to heal, another attack will completely destroy all the damaged units.

On the ocean
Don't have one huge fleet sitting on a single square. This will be a sitting duck for Tatical Nukes. Instead have multiple smaller fleets within 2-4 squares away from each other. Probably a single Battleship, Destroyer, and Carrier with planes. More fleets the better of course. This way if one fleet gets hit you can protect the damaged fleet with healthy ships until it has a chance to heal.

Prior to having SDI, can you prevent an attack altogether?

Can your own nuke be destroyed by a nuclear attack? If so, how do you prevent this?

Offense: On this I've got more questions than answers
Are the effects of a detonated Tactical Nuke vs ICBM different? (Assuming they can hit the same city)

Hitting a city once will greatly damage the units inside. If I hit it again right away will every unit in the city be killed so I can just walk right in? (see my defense for this above)

What is the most effective way to invade a Civ that has nukes? By land or by sea?

Can my forces be nuked if they are next to my enemy's city? Can you nuke your own land? Haven't tried this yet. If so I presume this would damage the units in the city as well.

If they have nukes, is it worth trying to keep a city you just conquered or punt and just raise it?

[MrCynical]

Prior to having SDI, can you prevent an attack altogether?

No. The only real defense at this point is to ban nukes by the UN before anyone else has built any.

Can your own nuke be destroyed by a nuclear attack? If so, how do you prevent this?

I'm not sure, but I think the answer is no. Tactical nukes you can hide on subs anyway.

Are the effects of a detonated Tactical Nuke vs ICBM different? (Assuming they can hit the same city)

The explosion is exactly the same for both of them. The difference lies in their range and chances of being intercepted by SDI.

Hitting a city once will greatly damage the units inside. If I hit it again right away will every unit in the city be killed so I can just walk right in? (see my defense for this above)

I'm not sure it's guaranteed to destroy all units, but there is a very high probability of doing so, allowing you to march in unopposed.

What is the most effective way to invade a Civ that has nukes? By land or by sea?

Depends where they are keeping their nukes. Find out by espionage and hit those cities on turn one of the war, even if you have make amphibious attacks to do so.

Can my forces be nuked if they are next to my enemy's city? Can you nuke your own land? Haven't tried this yet. If so I presume this would damage the units in the city as well.

I don't think you can nuke a tile if any of your units or cities will be caught in the blast radius. I think you can hit your own territory if empty though (you might have to hit the tile next to the stack in order to avoid catching your own city, but still getting the stack in the outer ring).

If they have nukes, is it worth trying to keep a city you just conquered or punt and just raise it?

I'm not sure if the AI is set up not to nuke cities that used to be theirs. I'd be wary of leaving a large stack in it though. At this phase of the game you may as well burn the city if you're uncertain of holding it - the damage to the AI will still be major.

[DaveMcW]

In multiplayer, the most important thing is to secure a defensive perimeter.

Assume that your opponent will use Magellan + Refrigeration + Navigation II to sneak a transport behind your lines, and fog-bust every possible route they will take. Then kill any transport that steps inside your perimeter.

If your perimeter overlaps someone else's continent, you need to either agree on a de-militarized zone with mutual observers, or strike first and wipe them out.

[Navarre]

Originally Posted by cpicard

Defense:
How do you best limit the damage of a nuclear attack?
On the homeland.
Minimize the units in your cities. Keep marginal units in your cities. (infantry or below) 1 in internal cities, 2 in your border cities. Keep your best units (tanks, marines, etc) at least two squares away from the cities sitting on railroads to they can move quickly. Preferably at least 5 squares from the border or ocean to get out of range of Tactical Nukes.

If you plan on leaving your coastal cities defended by only one or two units, that's an invitation to take them for the enemy. IMO it's worth stacking unit in your cities even with the risk of being nuked, losing a city and all the buildings is too much of a damage.

What about bomb shelters ? You can (MUST) build them as soon as the Manhattan Project is completed, and they greatly reduce the damage of a nuke on a city. If you want to defend your homeland from nukes, they're the first thing to consider (the 2nd being the SDI if you have the techs).

[BuzzumFrog]

Originally Posted by cpicard

Can your own nuke be destroyed by a nuclear attack? If so, how do you prevent this?

Yes, your nukes can be destroyed by other nukes. I had ~9 tactical nukes in a city before it got nuked 3 times. Along with everything else in the city radius, they were gone afterwards.

[Ormur]

I've only once had a nuclear civ in my game. I was too late to get the UN ban on nukes to hold a monopoly so the Portuguese managed to build at least one tactical nuke. Fortunately I could see it with passive espionage and it was in a border city. If I had gone to war I'd have been able to destroy it with a preemptive strike in the first turn. Of course you can never be sure about nuclear subs but if you are more powerful and move quickly you can try to take out all their nukes in the first turn.

[cpicard]

Thanks for you responses. I've played 20 full games of multiplayer and this is the first time we've gotten to nukes. I tell you it's a whole new experience. My human opponent quite literally has every city building nukes. I've been hit by 8 so far. And he's still producing them. I'm almost done producing my first. My defensive tactics have allowed me to survive with a decent force to defend/attack. I prefer to attack. He has made my attempts to pillage his lands with planes look like mosquitos compared to how his nukes have pillaged mine.

I'd like to go on the offensive because he isn't that well defended besides his nukes. Just trying to figure out how to do that without getting destroyed.

More questions.
What effects do nukes have on the following: 1) City population 2) City improvements 3) Great People and Warlords sitting around. 4) Roads and Railroads 5) Tile Improvements

Can I nuke his City that has Uranium near it and sever (temporarily anyway) his ability to produce nukes? Will that wipe our all of his current production?

[Solon70]

Originally Posted by MrCynical

I'm not sure if the AI is set up not to nuke cities that used to be theirs. I'd be wary of leaving a large stack in it though. At this phase of the game you may as well burn the city if you're uncertain of holding it - the damage to the AI will still be major.

In last month's BOTM I had a tactical nuke used on one of my stacks right after I took the AI's city. It wasn't technically the AI nuking his former city, since it was a tactical nuke, but the effect was the same.

[BuzzumFrog]

Nukes work against all those things you listed except roads and railroads. They are immune to nuclear attack. As far as nuking his uranium city goes, you are probably better off nuking the uranium square directly, as that is the only way you can guarantee (with one nuke) that the tile improvement will be destroyed and replaced by fallout. If he doesn't have ecology to scrub fallout, he'll really be screwed if you can take him down with conventional troops.

[JBossch]

The best way to use nukes is before your opponent has them. Airstrike his uranium after you finish Manhattan and turn off research, revolt to US and rush-buy enough nukes to hit every city at least twice. Paratroopers can walk in to his now-undefended cities. You guys sound like Cold War military planners, talking about how to win a full-scale nuclear war.

[Yxklyx]

I just tried nukes for the first time. I needed to take out a city whose culture was preventing me from mining Aluminum. Unfortunately it appears that the city had a Bunker because the 3 or 4 nukes did nearly no damage. Can Spies take out Bunkers in the original game?

[pi-r8]

I feel like nukes just aren't worth it. They're so expensive, and SDI takes out what, 9/10 of them? Maybe if you beelined them so that you could get them before your opponent got SDI up.

[URSExelcior]

Problem is that people use too many of them. Two are enough to wipe out ~80 units. Not a bad investment IMO.

[InvisibleStalke]

You can't use too many nukes. There is always the Nuclear devastation win - when everyone elses population is reduced so much you win a DIPLOMATIC victory.

[InvisibleStalke]

Originally Posted by pi-r8

I feel like nukes just aren't worth it. They're so expensive, and SDI takes out what, 9/10 of them? Maybe if you beelined them so that you could get them before your opponent got SDI up.

Thats the only point in using them. You want to launch around 10-12 of them two turns after Manhattan is built. Which means rush buying. Noone can have SDI up that soon and noone else will have nukes. Hit their key production cities and keep hitting them and they will never have SDI up.

If you can't launch that quickly then don't use them. Stockpile a few for a deterrent and retaliation capability, but don't go to war counting on them.

[JBossch]

^^^ Exactly. SDI requires laser. There are a lot of techs between fission/rocketry and laser + time to build SDI. Rush buy nukes and annihilate.

[obsolete]

I noticed in my last deity game using Bhruic's patch, it causes the AI to build and launch nukes like a MoFu.

[cpicard]

My oponent's problem was that he didn't follow up nukes with an invasion. My opponent rush bought Nukes in Slavery. DON'T DO IT. His cities became so unhappy he couldn't build anything after that. I double-nuked his two best defended cities and went in conventional after that. He was devestated after nuking me about 20 times. I just about walked right in and won my first nuclear war (of course it was his too). Learned a lot.

Keep the tips coming!!!

[Yxklyx]

Originally Posted by InvisibleStalke

Thats the only point in using them. You want to launch around 10-12 of them two turns after Manhattan is built. Which means rush buying. Noone can have SDI up that soon and noone else will have nukes. Hit their key production cities and keep hitting them and they will never have SDI up.

If you can't launch that quickly then don't use them. Stockpile a few for a deterrent and retaliation capability, but don't go to war counting on them.

I don't understand this. Won't your opponents have Bomb Shelters by then? As I said I tried nukes against a city and it did very little damage - apparently due to bomb shelters. Seems that the AI has Electricity fairly early - which is all they need. Playing the original game - no expansions.

[troytheface]

nukes and marines and paratroopers. the greatest navy is subs with cruise and tactical nukes, attack subs and transports with marines. Border cities- tactical nukes with paratroopers. Skip infantry and upgrade old units to Sam Infantry.
This hyper modern confederation is the key to multi-player attack death.