Defcon

[Raneman]

Nuclear holocaust time.

Imagine the ultimate endgame- ICBM's scorch the Earth in a self-destructive nuclear war.

 

[Camikaze]

I personally don't think it would be too fun for your hard work to be incinerated by nuclear blasts. If it was too common an occurrence it would be quite annoying, with the sure knowledge that whatever you do, whatever empire you build, it's going to get destroyed at the end anyway.

 

[Sonereal]

I personally don't think it would be too fun for your hard work to be incinerated by nuclear blasts. If it was too common an occurrence it would be quite annoying, with the sure knowledge that whatever you do, whatever empire you build, it's going to get destroyed at the end anyway.

Personally, I think the system could be made more interesting if tweaked just a bit. Right now, ICBMs are on constant alert and ready to strike at a moment's notice. Realistic? I honestly don't know but it leads to a situation where it's impossible to score a quick victory and take a few cities before the AI is raining nukes on you.

A "Nuclear Strategy" Screen that could be a sub-screen in the Military Sceen would be idea. From this screen, you would be able to see where all your ICBMs are and pre-set targets for each individual nuke.

Pre-setting a nuke would be as simple as selecting a nuke from the list and clicking the wanted target. From there, the ICBM would have it's target listed beside it's name and be put under a new category in the list (under the name of the Civilization it's targeted at).

After that business is done, the player could set their "Defcon" level. Only three levels would be really necessary. Blue, Orange, than Red. Under Blue, all nukes are on standby (and there's no added maintenance bonus). "Orange" is when a player arms a nuke, set of nukes, or all his or her nukes (I'll explain in a second), and Red is when a nuclear war is ongoing.


As for arming the nukes, this is simple. ICBMs, when built, cannot be fired immediately. Instead, it takes a few turns to "arm" them (meaning ready to fire). The player would be able to arm one, by target nation, or all of them.

Having the nukes ready to fire all the time wouldn't be beneficial. There would be a happiness penalty and possibly even a diplomatic penalty with the other nations. Of course, being at Defcon 1 or Red would keep the penalty and maintenance increase because the enemy hitting your with nukes is punishment enough.


This wouldn't apply to tactical nukes since, if they're still in the game, would be used against targets in the field. However, their range would be too limited and yield too small to be used as strategic weapons anyway. But now that units are going to be spread out, tactical nukes are either going to have to be cheaper (since the number of units they can hit at once are now much smaller) or something but that isn't an issue at the moment.

Then again, since there are no longer large garrison of troops in cities, there should be other reasons to use the nuke. Right now, bomb shelters are....strange since if I recall, it also reduces the destruction of buildings.

Now, in regards to the OP, nuclear war being the end game would be dreadfully boring. Should nuclear war have long lasting effects like killing off millions, destroying infrastructure and buildings, and slow population growth for a long time? Yes but it shouldn't be the end of the world.

 

[Camikaze]

That seems like too much of a complicated system for a weapon that has never been used in all of history (nukes have but not ICBMs). Also, having them ready to fire automatically would be a departure from the turn based structure of the rest of the game, something that would seem rather odd for, again, a weapon that has never been used in all of history.

 

[Sonereal]

That seems like too much of a complicated system for a weapon that has never been used in all of history (nukes have but not ICBMs). Also, having them ready to fire automatically would be a departure from the turn based structure of the rest of the game, something that would seem rather odd for, again, a weapon that has never been used in all of history.

While I'll have to agree with you on getting nukes having to ready to fire, I don't think the pre-setting targets should be that much of an issue to implement since it's easier than manually finding all your nukes in all your cities, moving the screen to the city that you want to hit, clicking a button, aiming, then firing.

Pre-setting a target could be as simple as just getting everything ready for when the AI invades or you're about to strike but don't want to have to do the above. Of course, this might now apply to Civ5 where the number of units should be lower but in Civ4, on standard or large, I easily get to the point where I had several cities churning out ICBMs.


So, I'll strip my idea down to the basic "pre-set" target system which I can't see fault with because it wouldn't require players to pre-set before striking and it would be possible not to use it at all. It's really for the players who want to launch 10+ ICBMs at once without having to find each one first or spend a turn getting them all in one city to make launching all of them at targets simpler.

 

[The Cosmic Kid]

If pre-setting was just a minor convenience for a player, I'd agree with Camikaze and say "why bother?" If they reinstituted the espionage system, however, I think it could have some interesting effects: stealing your opponent's nuke strategy might be a valuable thing to do (especially when combined with SDI satellites as units).

Hm. Still might be a little overcomplicated for vanilla Civ. Maybe for a scenario that focuses on the Cold War era.