Idea: A nuking player immediately gets a Sanction and Decolonization thrown on them.

[LukaSlovenia29]

Haha, Chicorbeef, must say your post put a smile on my face

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

On a serious note, I strongly support introducing a deterrent to (first) use of nuclear weapons. There's a reason why it's only been used basically once (twice in a span of two days) thus far in 70+ years of human history, and not once from the moment at least two nations possessed nuclear weapons.

 

[Moi Magnus]

Some random ideas:

1) [Unlikely code-wise] One turn delay for nuke: You give the order. Every civ know that "you are nuking Askia" and can retaliate. Next turn, the nuke land.
2) Add a nuke programming (similar to fighter interception) saying "if someone nuke any of my cities, and this nuke is on range of one of his cities, nuke them immediatly".
3) Add bad events that trigger after a nuke to represent ecological/diplomatic/... consequences

Additionnal remarks:

Not only the nuke was not used after WWII because of fear of retaliation, but even during WWII it was used on two non-capital cities that did not have any relevant armies nearby. But those city were anihilated.
=> Should't nuke just straight-up raze a city? With no effect on (non-garnison) units and terrain other than radiations? Thus, they would not be usable on a capital and other non-razable cities.

 

[tu_79]

I support the permanent uranium idea. You have to use them wisely, after you detonate a few....you're done!

And it makes a whole lot of sense.

What we are not really realizing is that the same is happening to oil and coal. In game, the resource numbers might represent the rate at which these can be extracted, and depletion of the sources does not happen in the game life span.

While it is not reallistic to think that a single nuclear bomb is able to deplete an uranium quarry, the destruction of a single nuke is not so huge in real life either.

Do you think it would be best to make it reduce the uranium availability only for A-bombs or may we include tactical missiles too?

 

[bigcat88]

Maybe just make a World Congress propose(that prevents nukes) avalaible much earlier?

 

[Tzar Sasha]

Maybe just make a World Congress propose(that prevents nukes) avalaible much earlier?

You cannot propose to not use nukes if no one has knowledge that nukes exist...

If possible, a special session could be called as soon as one builds the first Manhattan Project where they can vote on whether or not to allow their use.

 

[Stalker0]

You cannot propose to not use nukes if no one has knowledge that nukes exist...

If possible, a special session could be called as soon as one builds the first Manhattan Project where they can vote on whether or not to allow their use.

Another option is that the Global Peace proposal also includes a no nukes clause. (Code wise the restriction would be in it the whole time so you don't have to add in some time coding but you can always flavor the text to say "after atomic theory this occurs")

 

[FreedomSS]

Might actually be my favorite idea I've seen thus far...

G

(revived an ancient account just to type this)
Is it feasible to make nukes only available under 2 conditions?
1. Your war weariness is above a certain set value
2. someone else nuked you
I have zero knowledge about coding so idk if its even possible to code that in

 

[Rafs]

Personally I think making nukes harder to produce and stockpile could be an interesting solution (in my games I often bought them if I was thinking about using them as they took very long to produce).
Maybe restricting where you can produce them (you need a certain building), not being able to purchase them with gold (can you still do it? haven't test in a while), and stockpile them (introducing a nuclear silo? Idk, I'm clueless about nuclear technology honestly), and making them take a long time to move (like a trade road? I don't think this can be easily done sadly), so you can't readily use them. It won't stop people from stockpiling some but it would give people a chance to intercept the nukes with paratroopers/planes.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

Maybe one option (in addition to other changes) could be to have a cap for them, just like for archeologists and siege towers?

 

[chicorbeef]

Maybe one option (in addition to other changes) could be to have a cap for them, just like for archeologists and siege towers?

The cap is supposed to be uranium though.

 

[Headshotkill]

The only drawbacks of nukes that make sense are:

-Mutually assured destruction
-Nuclear winter/other apocalyptic consequenses

Anything else won't be enough to discourage nukes, nuclear winter could work when a critical threshold (hidden from player, I guess a certain percentage of the world's surface covered in fallout) is reached it would result in large patches of fallout appearing randomly across the world and over a number of turns the yield of all farms and fish would start decreasing to end up at a lower level resulting in global starvation and eventually a new stable point with smaller cities. Maybe even polar caps growing and moving downwards turning tiles into snow/tundra.
Mutually assured destruction I'm not sure of how you an put that in a turn based game.

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

Some brainstorming ideas, aimed towards presenting a trade-off for each use of a nuclear weapon (mostly geared towards your influence to wage war):
- each time you use a nuke, your military cap permanently decreases by a certain number;
- each time you use a nuke, all your cities lose 1 pop (to represent people leaving the cities out of fear of nuclear strikes as retaliation etc.);
- each time you use a nuke, you gain a permanent (un)happiness penalty of a certain number (more likely you'll start losing cities due to unhappiness);
- each time you use a nuke, the warmonger fervor number (the combat bonus others have against you) AND its cap are permanently increased by a certain number,
- each time you use a nuke, your war weariness increases by a certain number;
- each time you use a nuke, you get a permanent malus against your empire's culture, science and/or gold,..., income (to represent your scientists, artists,..., objections towards the use of nukes).

These would be harsher for the stronger&later nuclear bomb. Some of these ideas could change from "use" to "build".

Alternatively, like others have said, we could make the nukes non-purchasable with faith/gold, weaker militarily, more expensive to maintain, permanently tying up uranium, eating up your military cap not by one, but by a higher number etc.

EDIT: The above mentioned maluses could be made to not apply if your warscore at the time is -25 (or some other number) or worse.

EDIT: Perhaps certain maluses could apply when you build Manhattan Project.

 

[Moi Magnus]

Some brainstorming ideas, aimed towards presenting a trade-off for each use of a nuclear weapon (mostly geared towards your influence to wage war):
- each time you use a nuke, your military cap permanently decreases by a certain number;
- each time you use a nuke, all your cities lose 1 pop (to represent people leaving the cities out of fear of nuclear strikes as retaliation etc.);
- each time you use a nuke, you gain a permanent (un)happiness penalty of a certain number (more likely you'll start losing cities due to unhappiness);
- each time you use a nuke, the warmonger fervor number (the combat bonus others have against you) AND its cap are permanently increased by a certain number,
- each time you use a nuke, your war weariness increases by a certain number;
- each time you use a nuke, you get a permanent malus against your empire's culture, science and/or gold,..., income (to represent your scientists, artists,..., objections towards the use of nukes).

These would be harsher for the stronger&later nuclear bomb. Some of these ideas could change from "use" to "build".

Alternatively, like others have said, we could make the nukes non-purchasable with faith/gold, weaker militarily, more expensive to maintain, permanently tying up uranium, eating up your military cap not by one, but by a higher number etc.

EDIT: The above mentioned maluses could be made to not apply if your warscore at the time is -25 (or some other number) or worse.

EDIT: Perhaps certain maluses could apply when you build Manhattan Project.

I'm not convinced you should have penalty like that against nuke.
Do you really think that nuke are that much hated by the public? Sure, people are against, but so are chimical weapons (and razing cities, by the way).
Do you really think the opinion makes a difference between "we've nuked New York" and "we've conquered New York and razed it".

However, what is true, is that nuking Tokio (as it was considered at some point) would probably have had bad repercussions for the USA. Contrary to nuking Hiroshima and Nagazaki, which had very few negative consequences for the USA.
So, if any malus should be given to using a nuke, it should depend on the target.

 

[ElliotS]

I'm not convinced you should have penalty like that against nuke.
Do you really think that nuke are that much hated by the public? Sure, people are against, but so are chimical weapons (and razing cities, by the way).
Do you really think the opinion makes a difference between "we've nuked New York" and "we've conquered New York and razed it".

However, what is true, is that nuking Tokio (as it was considered at some point) would probably have had bad repercussions for the USA. Contrary to nuking Hiroshima and Nagazaki, which had very few negative consequences for the USA.
So, if any malus should be given to using a nuke, it should depend on the target.

Nowadays we can't nuke Tokyo. Look up photos of Tokyo after we firebombed it in WW2 and compare to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. They look almost identical. More people probably had the chance to flee the firebombing, but the results were hardly different.

It's political, mutually assured destruction and humanitarian reasons that stop us. Not easy to model in the game.

 

[Mad Madigan]

Any mechanical downside to using Nukes has to be something that would cause a late-game warmongerer closing in on a Domination victory to give a second thought to laying down the radioactive carpet of doom on their enemy. There needs to be a good reason to take a city using conventional units rather than just spamming it with nukes and letting a tank unit waltz in and plant your flag, and there needs to be a mechanical downside to stockpiling nukes, or at least a means of the AI recognizing this behavior as extremely threatening. Maluses to , , , , etc. won't matter to a late-game warmonger closing in on victory, and I'm afraid that boosts to Warmonger Fervor % is just going to encourage warmongers to stockpile and spam nukes even more because their conventional units will become too weak to use effectively.

I still think giving Nuclear Bombs and Missiles an exponentially increasing, very costly GPT is a strong balancing option, as would be coding a new mechanic to limit the number of nukes you can effectively use at a given time to be the surplus of nukes you have over your opponent (to a minimum of 1). The idea being, if warmonger Civ has 6 nukes and defensive turtle science Civ has 4 nukes for "defense" then the warmonger can only use a maximum of 2 nukes in their first turn of combat, and then only a single nuke per turn after that. This prevents the warmonger Civ from dropping all 6 nukes in a single turn and taking 2-3 cities away from the defender without the defender getting a chance to react. Part of the real-life threat of nuclear war is that once one nuke flies the defending nation will launch all their nukes in retaliation, and currently in the game there is no real way for that to happen because once the attacker reaches a certain threshold they can launch so many nukes in a single turn that their opponent has no ability to react. Mechanically, this gives non-warmonger Civs a reason to build nukes, not because they want to drop them, but because it limits the number of nukes that can be launched on them in an alpha strike.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I suggested the surplus nuke limit mechanic as an alternative to massive nuke stockpiling GPT costs. Maybe Nukes do need a heavy GPT maintenance cost, but it doesn't have to be so massive if stockpiling nukes can mechanically be used as a defense against offensive nuking.

 

[Bromar1]

The biggest issue for gameplay when you get down to it is the alpha strike factor. Literally every single time I've ever used a nuke it's on the first turn of the war. Whatever the penalty for using nukes is, it should scale down based on the length of a war. Surprise attacking with a nuke should have much higher diplo/ happiness/ yields/ war weariness/etc penalties than using a nuke at 10 turns, which should in turn have higher penalties than using one at 25 turns

 

[Gazebo]

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that the mechanic I’m going to look at is actually a bit more involved, but it will work. I’m going to let nukes ‘sentry’ - if a nuke is sentried in a city, and the city is struck by a nuke, the nuke immediately launches and hits the city that shot at it. If it was shot from a submarine, then the nuke hits the nearest enemy city.

This solves everything we wanted to solve, and eliminates the value of the alpha strike if you are stationing nukes in targetable cities.

G

 

[LukaSlovenia29]

I've been brainstorming a bit more. There are certain "mild" options, such as introducing an effect where each time you use a nuke, you get a certain number of anarchy turns and rebels spawning in your empire. There's lots of ways to decrease the benefits from using a nuke and increasing the negatives, so I guess finding a sweet spot of this decrease/increase combo could work.

However, I do have an idea for how to introduce the "mutually assured destruction" concept into the game. @Gazebo , would be it possible to code, perhaps using the events code, so that each time you use a nuke, an event happens in one of your cities (randomly selected) with effects more or less equivalent to it being nuked, without actually needing the AI to nuke it in retaliation? That way, you'd have to consider the trade-off whether it's worth to nuke your enemy if one of your cities will automatically be nuked (the next turn).

 

[CppMaster]

However, I do have an idea for how to introduce the "mutually assured destruction" concept into the game. @Gazebo , would be it possible to code, perhaps using the events code, so that each time you use a nuke, an event happens in one of your cities (randomly selected) with effects more or less equivalent to it being nuked, without actually needing the AI to nuke it in retaliation? That way, you'd have to consider the trade-off whether it's worth to nuke your enemy if one of your cities will automatically be nuked (the next turn).

I like Gazebo's solution more, that the defender also has to have a nuke to retaliate.