Advanced Missiles Mod v1.x

[Sonereal]

Antimatter Armageddonator.

You're going to make me ask, aren't you?

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

You're going to make me ask, aren't you?

it's this

Another idea, unrelated to missiles, but related to mass destruction: "Doomsday Device" National Wonder. Build it in some city. Then, whenever you feel like, you can detonate it — either from city-screen somewhere, or maybe it actually can come out like a unit which can't move or fight. Detonation basically destroys a good half of your continent (turning anything into archipelago with small 1-hex islands), and ravages all other continents pretty badly (random destruction of land, new mountains appear from nowhere, apocalypse now).

I took his idea and decided to make it into an antimatter explosion instead of a form of nuclear fission. It is a true Planet Buster.

 

[Lord Shadow]

I'm fairly sure current atomic weapons at least partly draw their energy from nuclear fusion, as per Teller-Ulam two-staged designs. The largest bomb ever detonated, the 50-megaton Soviet Tsar Bomba (tested in 1961) derived almost 97% of its energy from fusion. I'm no nuclear physicist, but as far as I know, the difference between fission and fusion is not the power, but the fact the latter's "cleaner" in that it produces less fallout. Nuclear fusion's technically safer, too, so that's another advantage a fusion power plant would have over a fission one.

A fusion bomb unit wouldn't be that different from the conventional ICBM as far as strength is concerned, but it'd generate less radiation tiles.

If you want stronger nukes, you may be looking for multi-staged missiles.

In essence, the Teller–Ulam configuration relies on at least two instances of implosion occurring: first, the conventional (chemical) explosives in the primary would compress the fissile core, resulting in a fission explosion many times more powerful than that which chemical explosives could achieve alone. Second, the radiation from the fissioning of the primary would be used to compress and ignite the secondary, resulting in a fusion explosion many times more powerful than the fission explosion alone. This chain of compression could then be continued with an arbitrary number of secondaries, and would end with the fissioning of the natural uranium tamper, something which could not normally be achieved without the neutron flux provided by the fusion reactions in the secondary. Such a design can be scaled up to an arbitrary strength, potentially to the level of a doomsday device, though usually such weapons are not more than a dozen megatons, which is generally considered enough to destroy even the largest practical targets.

Other types of nuclear weapons include:

- Neutron bombs, which are specially constructed so more of the bomb's energy is emitted as neutrons instead of x-rays. The neutron radiation would decimate population (and maybe units) but deal a lot less damage to buildings and tile improvements.
- Salted/cobalt warheads, which contain blankets of cobalt or zinc to make large quantities of deadly radioactive dust. This would result in additional radiation tiles, perhaps balanced by a lesser explosive force.

I see you have already considered anti-matter bombs, which would work very well as apocalyptic weapons. Zomgmeister's idea would make them very interesting. I'd add to that suggesting even a new type of victory: the first ruler to construct the device could threaten to use it unless the world surrendered to him. Each surrendered nation would become part of his, and civs which refused to yield would have to either face the might of the madman's suddenly enlarged empire, or withstand the massive, planet-scarring anti-matter detonation (madman's choice). If everyone surrendered at once, it'd be a Doomsday victory, or something.

 

[Sonereal]

I took his idea and decided to make it into an antimatter explosion instead of a form of nuclear fission. It is a true Planet Buster.

Then you should totally make a Stranglove Doomsday device. Basically, its like that bomb but with several highly radioactive nuclear bombs going off and covering the planet in fallout.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

I'm fairly sure current atomic weapons at least partly draw their energy from nuclear fusion, as per Teller-Ulam two-staged designs. The largest bomb ever detonated, the 50-megaton Soviet Tsar Bomba (tested in 1961) derived almost 97% of its energy from fusion. I'm no nuclear physicist, but as far as I know, the difference between fission and fusion is not the power, but the fact the latter's "cleaner" in that it produces less fallout. Nuclear fusion's technically safer, too, so that's another advantage a fusion power plant would have over a fission one.

A fusion bomb unit wouldn't be that different from the conventional ICBM as far as strength is concerned, but it'd generate less radiation tiles.

Fission can only be derived from (as far as we know) shooting subatomic particles at an atom which then blows up and shoot's it's subatomic particles at other atoms. Although this is considered fission it can technically be called fusion even though it causes the atom to be destroyed. The Tsar Bomb was the largest fission bomb ever detonated and caused more radiation than any other. The only problem is that before the the 60's no one knew what radiation was and had very limited geiker counters and couldn't get a proper reading on how much there really was. Nuclear fusion on the other hand is a rare thing on earth, the only place or thing that does it regularly is the (fairly new) Swiss supercollider. Instead of colliding two photons to make an electron and positron, it collides two atoms.

If you want stronger nukes, you may be looking for multi-staged missiles.


Other types of nuclear weapons include:

In essence, the Teller–Ulam configuration relies on at least two instances of implosion occurring: first, the conventional (chemical) explosives in the primary would compress the fissile core, resulting in a fission explosion many times more powerful than that which chemical explosives could achieve alone. Second, the radiation from the fissioning of the primary would be used to compress and ignite the secondary, resulting in a fusion explosion many times more powerful than the fission explosion alone. This chain of compression could then be continued with an arbitrary number of secondaries, and would end with the fissioning of the natural uranium tamper, something which could not normally be achieved without the neutron flux provided by the fusion reactions in the secondary. Such a design can be scaled up to an arbitrary strength, potentially to the level of a doomsday device, though usually such weapons are not more than a dozen megatons, which is generally considered enough to destroy even the largest practical targets.

- Neutron bombs, which are specially constructed so more of the bomb's energy is emitted as neutrons instead of x-rays. The neutron radiation would decimate population (and maybe units) but deal a lot less damage to buildings and tile improvements.
- Salted/cobalt warheads, which contain blankets of cobalt or zinc to make large quantities of deadly radioactive dust. This would result in additional radiation tiles, perhaps balanced by a lesser explosive force.

Not everything on Wikipedia can be trusted; this example is talking about a theory of a weapon, no such thing has ever been created even though the entry implies that there is a 'regular size'.
Neutron bombs would be trickier to code since the improvement/unit damage are directly related with each other.
Salted/Cobalt warheads would need another fallout feature type. The explosion isn't any bigger, but the radiation is more dense which would cause more damage per turn.

I see you have already considered anti-matter bombs, which would work very well as apocalyptic weapons. Zomgmeister's idea would make them very interesting. I'd add to that suggesting even a new type of victory: the first ruler to construct the device could threaten to use it unless the world surrendered to him. Each surrendered nation would become part of his, and civs which refused to yield would have to either face the might of the madman's suddenly enlarged empire, or withstand the massive, planet-scarring anti-matter detonation (madman's choice). If everyone surrendered at once, it'd be a Doomsday victory, or something.

Good idea, but it would need a lot of AI coding and just coding in general.

 

[Lord Shadow]

Fission can only be derived from (as far as we know) shooting subatomic particles at an atom which then blows up and shoot's it's subatomic particles at other atoms. Although this is considered fission it can technically be called fusion even though it causes the atom to be destroyed. The Tsar Bomb was the largest fission bomb ever detonated and caused more radiation than any other. The only problem is that before the the 60's no one knew what radiation was and had very limited geiker counters and couldn't get a proper reading on how much there really was. Nuclear fusion on the other hand is a rare thing on earth, the only place or thing that does it regularly is the (fairly new) Swiss supercollider. Instead of colliding two photons to make an electron and positron, it collides two atoms.

That's not true, and this isn't just Wikipedia:

The device offically designated RDS-220, known to its designers as Big Ivan, and nicknamed in the west Tsar Bomba (and referred to as the Big Bomb by Sakharov in his Memoirs [Sakharov 1990]) was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion stage tamper of the tertiary (and possibly the secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one(s) made of lead. This reduced the yield by 50% by eliminating the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons, and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of about 51.5 Mt), yet still proved the full yield design. The result was the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.

Source: http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html

Ninety-seven percent of the power of the 50-MT bomb derived from thermonuclear fusion; that is to say, the bomb was remarkably “clean” and released a minimum of fission by-products which would elevate background radiation in the atmosphere. Thanks to this, our U.S. colleagues understood that our scientists also desired to reduce to a minimum the radioactive aftereffects of nuclear testing, as well as to lessen the effect of radiation on present and future generations.

Source PDF: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF1B7.pdf

As I said earlier, if you want more powerful nukes, you're probably looking at more stages per weapon. I can probably find non-wiki sources to back that up as well. Realistically fusion makes things "cleaner" but that's about it.

But well, ultimately it's your mod. I'll refrain from cluttering the thread any further.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

I stand corrected then, I keep forgetting that Nuclear Fusion and Fusion are two separate things. Well I can add a RDS-220, get the radiation to not fall. Should it have a 3, 4 or 5 tile radius?

As far as the wikipedia page for the Teller-Ulam bomb, I could use that for the Tactical Fusi/Fusion Nova civilopedia entry.

 

[Lord Shadow]

As wiki says, the Teller–Ulam design is the nuclear weapon design concept used in most of the world's nuclear weapons. It's probably used by the mod's ICBM as it is. I mentioned the possibility of a multi-stage missile because the default design involves just two stages, but allows for an arbitrary number of extra stages to dramatically enhance the destructive power of the whole device. Each stage triggers the next, which is more powerful that the last and can trigger a subsequent one, and so on. The Tsar Bomba was a three-stage weapon, for instance, so you probably won't need a four-stage device.

As for the game mechanics, I'm not all that familiar with the workings of Civ5's nukes, but a Tsar Bomba equivalent would devastate a huge radius.

The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was seen and felt almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) from ground zero. The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 miles) away from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (nearly seven times the height of Mount Everest), which meant that the cloud was well inside the Mesosphere when it peaked.

Zone of total destruction of the Tsar Bomba (as an example - over a map of Paris):
red circle = total destruction (radius 35 kilometers)
yellow circle = fireball (radius 3.5 kilometers).

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

So that would be like a 5 or 6 tile radius with radiation only on the tile of impact also turning the first few tiles into desert.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

tidbit update: At this time I've scoured the different Lua files and looked through the LUA Events thread and assembled a nice looking Lua file to carry out the Tactical Fusi terraforming feature, but it won't work. The game detects the file and doesn't give any errors. After 7 Lua-oriented educational hours of coding/debugging, I finally got the tactical fusi (Well for debug reasons any nuke at this point) to react to the Lua code. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but it's a step in the right direction. What happened is that instead of the nuke launching, landing and blowing up, the nuke launched, landed and did nothing with no terraforming effects. This to me is terrific news, it means that I figured out how to get the nuke itself to react to my Lua. Now for the terraforming effects, I'll still have to look through the MapGenerator.lua to find alternate ways to set a terrain type.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

tidbit update: I've found almost all the necessary hooks and callbacks to terraform but lack the means to implement them. I'll be starting a worker terraform mod to play around with the lua and get a feel for how it can be applied to nukes. The reason why I'm going with workers is because not only would that be helpful to a few people but the improvement built/map coords for the improvement are more solid than an attacking unit about to take a tile instead of already being on the tile.

EDIT: Looking at Afforess's lua files I found some more debug ways to help me.
EDIT2: After finding a key pattern with the hexagonal tile radii, I rewrote my algorithm and must say I am very pleased with it.
EDIT3: I have began to implement the lua code and am make wonderful progress.
EDIT4: I hit a roadblock in the code, trying to implement the terraform. Although using SetPlotType and SetTerrainType works, the map doesn't update. I set up special detectors to see what kind of plot/terrain a tile is, and when I terraform it, it terraforms accordingly but the map doesn't update to show it. I'm currently trying to find out a way to refresh the map to show the changes and allow units to take advantage of these changes. But alas, I must go to bed.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

As the days go by, terraforming seems more and more out of the question. In light of the fact that the map refuses to update after a terraform takes place, I will (sadly) be moving away from the fusion nukes until the lua calls get updated. In it's place(for now), I will be working on the Peace Maker and Tsar Bomba. The peace maker has an overly large diameter of a shocking 12 tile radius with dense nuclear fallout on every plot, but has 25% of the initial nuclear damage.
The RDS-220/Big Ivan/Tsar Bomba will have a 6 tile radius with double the punch on killing units/destroying cities with light radiation only on the plot of impact. This will be the only unit capable of wiping an entire city off the map in one (1) blow. (That is until terraforming is enabled and the fusion nukes come back.)

 

[Sonereal]

Sucks that terraforming isn't working the way you wanted too but at least Peacemaker is making its debut to Civ5.

On another note: Is SDI supposed to be cheaper than an ICBM?

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

On another note: Is SDI supposed to be cheaper than an ICBM?

Changed for the next version, nice catch.

 

[lichen8566]

=_= SDI cheaper than an ICBM ... you really need to change it.

BTW. I have a question, according to your current works, is it necessary that terraforming must have a SDK support?

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

=_= SDI cheaper than an ICBM ... you really need to change it.

BTW. I have a question, according to your current works, is it necessary that terraforming must have a SDK support?

It's being changed next version... it looks like terraforming is missing one crucial hook that exists but was never exported from the DLL to Lua.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

Hate to be the bad news bearer, but apparently what I thought what was a targeting function used in a tile highlighting lua file was not a targeting function that produced a tile plot as results. As a result of this, I will be releasing the next version shortly but with no new units. Since Nuclear radius size is now handled via the GlobalDefines, I am unable to set some number in the XML like it was in Civ IV and must use a function that I have made myself, doing this would require a targeting system callback. Also since there is no nuke explosion event like there was for Civ IV AND there is no hook or callback to just get the targeted plot, I am unable to retrieve the plot to do stuff to it. Until we get some DLL work done, I'm afraid it is nearly impossible to do anything that has to do with nuke effects.

For those who looked at the hooks and callbacks - I tried to test this with EndCombatSim but the event isn't to look at the results of a fight, but -stupidly- to do stuff unrelated to the fight right after it happens. I originally and am currently using RunCombatSim event and am able to do almost everything, but as I said above, I am unable to get the target plot and there is no events that call DURING a fight(i.e. Civ IV's OnNukeExplosion python event). Just before and after.

EDIT: AMM v.4 is now uploaded to the Hub.

 

[chris3418]

Is it possible to add MIRVs to the ICBM?

 

[ganpot]

I have an idea for 2 different kinds of nukes, though I'm not sure if you will be able to implement them. The main differences between these and your nukes so far is that these aren't really aimed at destroying an opponent's army directly.

The first is an EMP nuke, which would disable any units which usually use electronics (tanks, helicopters, artillery, etc) for a period of time (maybe 10-15 turns). During this time they could not move, attack, or even defend. If other units move onto their spot they simply teleport to another city, meaning they could not be killed until the time limit was up. The blast radius should be around 4 hexes in every direction.

The second nuke is a nano-machine filled one (I don't remember if anyone suggested this yet). It will be a very risky type of bomb, because it will occupy one tile when it is launched, but spread to 1 tile every turn for a random number of turns. When it occupies a tile, every improvement is destroyed, and military units use double movement speed to pass through those hexes. Nothing (except maybe nuclear fallout) can destroy the nano infested hexes until the timer runs out. Theoretically, one bomb could cover an the entire world for the rest of the game, effectively destroying civilization. However, this should almost never happen.

By the way, neither of these bombs would have any impact on cities. The first would allow an enemy to completely bypass one's army, and the second would allow you to ruin an opponent economically.

 

[Civ Fuehrer]

Well the EMP nuke would not only require AI work but some unit to unit promo tagging. The nanomite nuke you described is similar but different to the Plague Bringer I have in ANM. But the difference with the PB is that the virus won't stop growing and will destroy everything in it's path and will eventually cover the planet. But the nano nuke is an interesting concept, I'd need to be able to tag the tiles when they get covered in nanomites to be able to count the turns and disable them.

@chris3418
I'd need some fancy coding skills to get the warhead to split and land on multiple tiles simultaneously.