A Look at Nukes

One topic I don't know if its ever been debated is on the strength of nuclear weapons.

First 2 key questions:

1) Is the strength adjustable? Is this something the mod could adjust even assuming we wanted to?

2) How strong are they? I don't really know nukes work exactly. I know its a big blast, but in terms of how much pop damage it does, how much city damage, how many buildings are destroyed, what damage does it do to units in the blast...etc. Does anyone know the numbers?

 

City destroyed by 3 nukes, sometimes 4. Without bomb shelter.
Any units killed by 2 nukes, some by 1 as I remember.

Player vs Player: Nukes are OP. In war 1v1 who first use them has a great advantage. They give sight when used, so use them, after use paratroopers to pillage near resources/roads and start invasion. Better place to use: cities with resources like aluminium and uranium. Resources get pillaged, cities damaged. Your goal is just to block the ability to build nukes/helicopters for your opponent to defend.
Way to defend against it: wide empire with ability to fight in war when your 2-3 cities are destroyed or just fully pillaged. Like in real life.
The main problem of nukes as I remember: they destroys air units stationed in city, so u lost all units near city and all units in city. For tall empires it is a GG. Don't remember can they destroy nukes stationed in city or not.


Against AI: Better just to pass proposal to decline nuclear weapons. AI are not bad with nukes, and in usual game, the player has much better troops to fight. So even chance to lost part of them when AI successfully nuke u - will greatly upset you. And if you don't build bomb shelters u can lost a city in one turn. That snake attacks

P.S.: Maybe a bug here: when city get destroyed with nuke and has a main office of corporation - corporation did not closed. See such thing in December.​

 

Nukes < Raw Capitalism. Duh.

G

 

Historically, we were quite fortunate as a species that we didn't have one nation holding a monopoly on nuclear weapons for enough time to use that to either use them extensively or create a dominion on all others, and that for that very brief period of time that only one country had nuclear weapons and therefore under no deterrent/threat of retaliation, it didn't try to bomb its main competitor(s) into oblivion. Think Nazi Germany with first one with 10 nukes, one each for Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Washington, New York, San Francisco,...

In that aspect, the VP Civ game is much more "realistic" than our reality turned out to be.

Not sure if anything needs to be changed about the use of nukes in VP or how it should be changed, though. I sometimes wish there were a bigger deterrent for the first civ AT ALL to use nukes, but then I remember how the world reacted to that in our history.

 

I have never seen an AI drop nukes anywhere except on cities.

If you're trying to conquer someone who has nukes, ideally you'd never put your troops within 2 tiles of a city. What helps a lot with that is dropping paratroopers and cutting their roads. That way it's way safer for your units to heal on the edge of recently conquered territory without the fear of getting swarmed.

Nukes also destroy other nukes. So an even safer approach is to keep several nukes in reserve and place them such that you are able to nuke every AI city that is within range of any of yours. On standard maps this is often doable.
Whenever they build a nuke, you destroy it before they can use it. If they already have nukes in the border cities and you don't, you just have to take the risk and place one in your city and hope it survives one turn.
Vision on all cities in range is also necessary. This becomes way harder once nuclear missiles become available, 'cause now you have to monitor a much larger area for newly built/moved nukes.

Side note - I've had an AI waste two nukes on a city that I was razing. I had a whole two units next to the city. Thanks, no partisans for you.

 

i wish the nuclear bomb (the one that drops off of a bomber) would be interceptable. i mean. you can have super specialized jetfighters with air supremacy, that can stop hordes of bombers, but can't stop a single, slow giant plane carrying a nuke? meh.

 

Wouldn't the bomb drop anyways?

 

Thread title is bad advice. I would highly recommend you don't look at nukes. They're very bright, and unlike Fallout 4 you'd go blind at the very least.

There's a pretty specific arming process, and if armed early it would probably go off in the sky, avoid the worst of the damage. (I'm only like 75% sure on this, so take it with a grain of salt.)

 

I think some nukes are purposely detonated in the air prior to hitting the ground because they then cover a wider area but probably less penetrative power. Probably depends on the goal of that particular nuke.

And yeah, from what I remember of the first nukes- the triggering had to happen in a precise way to actually achieve fission. It was something like a sphere of explosives surrounding the Uranium, and those explosives had to detonate very nearly the same time in order to compress/heat the Uranium enough to achieve fission. Blowing the plane up mid-air would presumably mess up that triggering process and you'd probably just end up with a "dirty bomb" spreading Uranium around instead of a nuke going off.

 

So any actually balance discussion on Nukes?

 

I think nukes are fine as they are, though I stick to single player so maybe it's a different issue in multiplayer. I've usually used them in desperation on a runaway that I don't think I can otherwise catch. It usually doesn't work and I usually still lose but it's fun to try.

 

Most nuke behavior is hard-coded because, here's the deal, nukes are essentially a melee unit you move into an enemy's city (don't ask). So no changes here.

G

 

Nuclear Fallout is never discussed with Nukes. Nukes barely hurt compared to nuclear fallout in real life. It is devastating and hurts. Buff that.

We could make people get mad at Nuclear Fallout causing great city unhappiness which eventually falls into revolution and flips to a barbarian city and-

 

If anything, I'd like to discuss the merits of introducing a mechanism that would more significantly and immediately punish the civilization that becomes the first to use nukes in the game, thus representing the diplomatic and erstwhile fallout of such a decision.

Perhaps something like instant and automatic dissolution of all its DoFs, RAs and DPs, instant denouncement by all major civs, influence with all city states changed to -60, incurring a permanent source of unhappiness of -20 (or some other number) or alternatively an instant source of major war weariness&unhappiness.

 

i'm not sure if the AI would know they'd get those repercussions. we can talk about them, but i'm not sure if a change is needed. it's been a while since i had a nuclear war though.

from what i know using nuclear weapons damages relationships with all civs. but i'm not so sure if the AI cares about maintaining relationships too much, which might be a problem.

 

So not possible to make some change such as "nuke no longer destroy aircraft and nukes" ? Because it seems to be the main problem in MP.

 

The same USA citizens punished their government for Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
The first time this bombs were dropped, their effects weren't well known.

Maybe AFTER the first bombs, people may become aware. When fallout is spread.

 

He's taking the piss guys. Well played @LukaSlovenia29, it took me a second to realize that too.

Also for what it's worth the circumstances of dropping the bombs was different from any nowadays. Here's the thing most people don't know: Japan knew they had lost since pearl harbor. Hell, Japan knew they lost since BEFORE pearl harbor. It was a last-dtich attempt that they thought had a 1% chance of working, because they were out of resources from China's scorched-earth tactics.

So the entirety of the fighting we did with Japan, their leadership knew it was only a matter of time. They were at every disadvantage possible. Technology, Numbers, Resources, Political, Location, etc. They weren't dumb, they knew they had lost, it's well documented.

So why did they fight? Honor, Pride and desperation. They considered Jingoism so important that the idea that they were stopped was worse than dying outright.

It wasn't just the soldiers. When the US took islands the Japanese women and non-combatants would often commit mass suicide. Sometimes they would jump off cliffs, but many times they charged tanks and trained troops with old pistols, knives and sharpened wooden sticks.

The scale of death that would have ensured if we actually needed to do a land invasion into the Japanese mainland is beyond imagination. It would literally be a genocide.

Nuking them wasn't our first choice either. We tried all sorts of conventional bombing. They knew they had lost for months. It had been confirmed over and over. We had been fire-bombing their wooden cities and were on their doorstep. Yet still they refused to surrender.

So to avoid a genocide we dropped a nuke, and still they refused to surrender, in the vain hope we only had ones. So we were forced to drop a second.

If you think for a second we were doing anything other than the LEAST violent solution, look at these pamphlets we were dropping: https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/warning-leaflets

There are questions about if the pamphlets made it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we tried. What kind of evil empire risks military advantage for a reason like this? Do you think Hitler would have dropped warning letters in London if he developed the first nukes?

You can criticize some actions of the US in WW2 (Using the Holocaust as a bargaining chip to extort Europe for example) but this is one of the clear cases of the US doing the right thing. Don't let our modern day military actions color your impressions. (Also most Americans disagree with our military polices right now. It's not representative of the people.)

Sorry if I sperged out a bit with history, but I'm so sick of people using the nukes we dropped against us. It's one of the things we did right.

 

you should be lol. stick to civ, not ignorant speculation about what Harry Truman was thinking 75 years ago when he decided to nuke a hundred thousand civilians... cause you really have no clue.

 

In my current game, just so happened to get a lot of uranium, and since I brought up the subject thought I'd try out the bomb a bit more aggressively this game.

Militarily, the bomb is of course awesome because of its ability to mass kill units in the field, or at least greatly weaken them. That combined with fallout can provide a no man's land in places you may not care to go.

The bomb's true destruction comes in pairs or in threes. Two bombs pretty much wipes out any army on the field. Three bombs is enough to near wipe out a capital, or at least weaken it enough that a few bombers and a melee ship can capture it. Now of course, that capital is a husk of its former self, but if capitals are what you want the bomb makes them pretty trivial to get.

G already mentioned that the nuke itself cannot be adjusted. However, there are some indirect ways to do it.

1) Modify the hammer cost of the manhattan project.
2) Modify the hammer cost of the bomb.
3) Modify the uranium cost of the bomb (2 for bomb, 3 for missile).
4) Change how early and how cheaply bomb shelters can be built.
5) Give the missile the bomb's attack strength (not sure if this one is possible).
6) Reduce the bomb's base range (focus more on carriers to transport them). Is it possible for techs to give them more range later on?
7) Change how easily fallout can be cleaned up, or how much damage it deals (maybe changeable).
8) Allow non-nuclear proliferation to occur at an earlier tech (less historically realistic but its an option).
9) Throw a blanket diplomatic penalty for using a bomb (maybe changeable).
10) Greatly increase war weariness for using a bomb (maybe changeable).