Originally posted by me4peace
practically unprovoked first strike nuclear attack by the bablyonians led to the near destruction of seven of my cities (didn't have sdi yet).
ouch, but of course that is the way to do it. Build up a bunch of ICBMs as part of your prewar force massing. And then with the declaration of war drop them on the major cities. Quite effective in hobbling even strong civ's. Of course I prefer to have enough nukes to take hit most of the enemy cities (really destroy their economy that way). And in the end game getting lots of nukes is pretty easy, since that is about all that is left to build in my primary cities.
yes, mad bomber and all the rest--the americans needed to a-bomb japan,
My main objection here (I do feel that nukes shouldn't be used, but feel that it also needed to be used once to show the horror) is that people seem to be conveniently to be forgetting that we already were specifically targetting civillian populations and that nukes were only a minor component of it. Nukes may me immoral, but make sure to also direct your objections at the firebombing raids which killed many multiples more civilians.
the israelis are only defending themselves agaist the people they stole the land from,
Might I suggest a course in recent history? The only reason why Israel has that land is the unprovocted attacks by their neighbors (twice). Now this is not to say that they aren't blameless in their actions afterwards, but they did not "steal" that land. I am sure you are familiar with the concept of if you attack me I'm going to fight you back and then some more as well (heck in Civ this is how I gain most of my territory, as I rarely start a fight but sure as heck I finish it).
bush the elder never had a secret relationship with saddam hussain or al-qaida (back then the holy warriors liberating themselves from the evil communists),
Not sure if it was quite so secret, but it just proves that we have to be careful in picking our allies. Since we need to make sure our proxies are not only good fighters, but also have at least a semi-complaint view of the world. And with Iraq we have learned the lesson of never give someone tech that you don't want to see used against yourself in the future. (was really a smart idea to give him chemical weapon tech, don't know what they were thinking
)
... egypt and saudi arabia are moderate arab states. ha!
Iraq is actually one of the most moderate states, but of course that is because Saddam would not tolerate having to share power with fundamentalist clerics.
Now back to topic
As the off topic discussion has brought up, I do think some changes should be made to nukes (or at least for Civ4). One their pollution should be different than regular pollution, be harder to clean up (maybe actually take longer under republics and democracy - who is going to willingly walk into a radioactive area). Also nuclear pollution should have a chance of doing damage to a unit (and killing workers) if it is in that tile and cities could loose pop, just like with disease.
The other modification would be to put in a cumulative effect. The more nukes that explode during a given turn (or the past few turns), the more devastating some kind of world effect would be (of course variable by map size). For a few nukes, no global effects would be felt. But explode a lot and you could get a nuclear winter effect (various tiles have their production reduced by one or more) and random radiation pollution could appear on the map (representing the radioactive plumes).
Right now there is no detriment to dropping a couple dozen nukes on your enemy in one turn. But make a few tweaks and do that and you won't have anything worth capturing and your own empire is going to be suffering the effects of nuclear winter and the consequental starvation.
. They sure have kicked my butt with them AFTER I've started a nuclear scrap :rocket:
. I have yet to encounter a first strike ( nuclear ) on the part of the AI.
