ICBMs and Tactical Nukes.

[lindsay40k]

I don't do much nuking and want to educate myself in the fine details. I've been looking at threads and wikis and the information I've found has been fragmented and contradictory. Can any clever souls clear up some points:

- Exactly what damage do they do to cities, buildings, improvements, cultural defense and units?

- How many hits does it usually take to cripple, say, a size 20 city with most buildings present?

- I understand that an ICBM can only hit enemy territory & units and will cause a DOW on neutrals caught up in it. Can a tac nuke's radius include a tile in your own borders, say to wipe out a stack?

- Can a sub under Ice launch tac nukes without coming out into open ocean?

- Is a sub full of tac nukes hiding under Ice within attack range of a dangerous enemy's capital worth the hammer investment?

- Supplementary to that: in a multiplayer game, I've paid to upgrade a Warrior to a Spearmen whilst my opponent was telling their Chariot to attack. Their odds went from over 90% to suicide. If I nuke my opponent's city and a single Marine jumps out of a Transport to take it, do they have any opportunity to charge in with a Tank and retake the city before I click the 'raze' option?

 

[Ghpstage]

- Exactly what damage do they do to cities, buildings, improvements, cultural defense and units?

Good question that I too hope someone can answer, unfortunatey its hidden somewhere in the SDK and I have no idea where. I am 90% certain however that both tacticals and ICBMs have the same power, and the damage is equal in all tiles affected.

- How many hits does it usually take to cripple, say, a size 20 city with most buildings present?

Why cripple it when you can usually take it with just 3 (pre SDI or nuke bunker), a Sub a transport and any unit? 3 Would probably cripple it however.
I like razing modern capitals with Warriors personally!
3 nukes usually being all it takes to annihilate a stack, if anything survives its gonna be hurting bad.

- I understand that an ICBM can only hit enemy territory & units and will cause a DOW on neutrals caught up in it. Can a tac nuke's radius include a tile in your own borders, say to wipe out a stack?

Both can be fired in your territory, apart from the need to declare war on neutrals the only restriction I can find is that a nuke cannot be fired less than 2 tiles from where it is.

- Can a sub under Ice launch tac nukes without coming out into open ocean?

Yes it can.

- Is a sub full of tac nukes hiding under Ice within attack range of a dangerous enemy's capital worth the hammer investment?

Frequently yes, though less for destroying the capital, more for destroying the garrison for easy capture. However a sub full of tactical nukes will surely put a dent in any core city or culture whore city.

- Supplementary to that: in a multiplayer game, I've paid to upgrade a Warrior to a Spearmen whilst my opponent was telling their Chariot to attack. Their odds went from over 90% to suicide. If I nuke my opponent's city and a single Marine jumps out of a Transport to take it, do they have any opportunity to charge in with a Tank and retake the city before I click the 'raze' option?

Assumedly this could only be done due to playing simultaneous turns, and I would assume they could take it back before you managed to click raze under such circumstances, but under normal game turn conditions its not possible to stop.

As a bonus tip, the appearance of fallout on a tile remves any other terrain feature permanently, this includes forests, floodplains and oasis. Also knowing that fallout cannot form on water and slows units that don't use the roads/railroads down is useful for planning nuke wars.

 

[lindsay40k]

Why cripple (a city) when you can usually take it with just 3 (pre SDI or nuke bunker), a Sub a transport and any unit? 3 Would probably cripple it however.
I like razing modern capitals with Warriors personally!
3 nukes usually being all it takes to annihilate a stack, if anything survives its gonna be hurting bad.

Aha, so if a city absolutely has to go, three nukes and a unit that can quickly get there is the way to go. I guess a bunker makes it 6 nukes? And bunker + SDI... 24 nukes?

Crippling can be enough, though. If they're zooming for a Culture win, destroying every Town & Cathedral and leaving 1pop to rebuild is sufficient denial. (Can a Nuke kill a non-settled GA?) Likewise if you know where their main stack is, once I rushed three nukes immediately after MP and decapitated Stalin's army. Then it was a conventional war with a massive numerical advantage to me, with occasional nuke support where necessary.

Both can be fired in your territory, apart from the need to declare war on neutrals the only restriction I can find is that a nuke cannot be fired less than 2 tiles from where it is.

Whoa, it was my understanding that if an ICBM's blast would hit a tile or unit belonging to yourself then you can't launch it.

 

[Ghpstage]

Aha, so if a city absolutely has to go, three nukes and a unit that can quickly get there is the way to go. I guess a bunker makes it 6 nukes? And bunker + SDI... 24 nukes?

Occasionally they will survive the 6, but any that do will be crippled, bunkers do raise it to 6 or 7, but with SDI you have to remember that tactical nukes have a 50% evasion chance, coupled with the 25% chance of getting through anyway it gives a chance to hit despite SDI of 62.5%. So its probably a little less than doubled again.
Its not greatly efficient against cities at stages late enough to see both bunkers and SDI in operation unfortunately. Though it will still be absurdly hammer efficient for wiping out high level AI stacks that can go well beyond 100 units.

Crippling can be enough, though. If they're zooming for a Culture win, destroying every Town & Cathedral and leaving 1pop to rebuild is sufficient denial. (Can a Nuke kill a non-settled GA?) Likewise if you know where their main stack is, once I rushed three nukes immediately after MP and decapitated Stalin's army. Then it was a conventional war with a massive numerical advantage to me, with occasional nuke support where necessary.

The strategic bombing of cities, while a lot more niche than blowing units away is sometimes very useful, the culture city approaching legendary point being one of the most prominent.
The bombing of stacks is entirely different due to the rate at which they die and the immense hammer concentrations that can happen however .
A stack with 100 Infantry (worth 14,000!) can be reliably removed using 3 tactical nukes (totalling 750), its a near certainty that you would lose more hammers than this whatever other method you used to remove them, especially if they were hunkered down in a city.

In MP strategic bombing of cities would likely become very useful due to them spending as much as you would to rebuild, and payers will specialise cities ad place national wonders (which nukes can destroy!) carefully. The destruction of floodplains to greatly reduce land value may be useful against other players too.

And yes nukes can kill unsettled great people, but I suspect it may suffer from the same issues as they do against missionaries, workers, settlers and executives.
Nukes kill in 2 ways, insta death, or by the accumuation of 100%>Damage they cause to survivors. The problem with these units is that they don't have strength and therefore cannot recieve damages less than 100% (outside of mods), making them much more durable than normal units, and this durability becomes ridiculous in a city with a nuke bunker as that prevents the instakill almost outright....
Its also quite annoying when you use paratroopers to chase your nukes into cities as after paradropping paratroopers can no longer attack that turn (though they can take empty cities!) so basically those workers are defending

Whoa, it was my understanding that if an ICBM's blast would hit a tile or unit belonging to yourself then you can't launch it.

I carried out a quick workbuilder test before posting that, and the only rule seemed to be that it couldn't nuke the tile it was launched from.