MAD (Mutual assured destruction)

[Impaler[WrG]]

This. Cold wars get boring fast.

Ah but Brinkmanship is both Fun and Exhilarating! See Balance of Power the quintessential game of Brinksmanship, so long as their is some kind of system in place to support this kind of play it can be very interesting.

 

[Ahriman]

I highly doubt that any diplomatic AI we're likely to have will be capable of the kind of nuance needed to make such a system work.

In a game specificially designed for that, maybe, but not in a game about all of human history.

 

[Xzylvador]

I can't be entirely sure but i don't think nukes get destroyed by other nukes, therefore you can still counterattack, if i m wrong then yeah that shouldnt happen.

You know, you might be right there. Units like bombs, missiles and airplanes tend to be ignored by this kind of stuff. Haven't really tried it, I tend to rush for the UN and get nukes banned before anyone can build them. (Which by the way doesn't make sense neither! If anyone wants to break the treaty, let them! Right now the only way to break non proliferation is to call for the same vote again and then veto... but if I was going to veto against the world's will anyways, why not just build those nukes anyways and have the same result immediately?)
Still, it doesn't feel the same... having your totally destroyed cities launch a volley of nukes. I actually especially liked the "self-destruct" option which doesn't seem to get any attention in this thread. A last chance, possibly before you make the choise, you'd get a prediction of the nukes effect. Like "Sir, Washington, New York, Boston, Miami and Las Vegas will lose 85% of its citizens and buildings, its surrounding areas will be unexploitable for the next 200 years. We will lose 90% of our military units in those cities." "LA, Houston and Detroit will be wiped off the face of the earth, all civilians, buildings, military and culture will be lost, its surroundings uninhabitable for the next 3 centuries!"
I don't know about you guys, but if I see that this -the destruction of the last 40 hours of gameplay- is the result of me feeling like tossing a couple of nukes; and I know I can stop it beforehand and try for a conventional war instead; I'd abort the nukes.

Also, I agree that post-fusion wars would be hard to declare and that currently there isn't much incentive NOT to start throwing nukes, but given enough feeling of consequences (diplomatic, economic and military) to nuclear war and leaving enough space for a conventional war without so heavy drawbacks, wars would/should still be possible.

 

[nzcamel]

Despite the propaganda spread by the US military, there really isn't much anyone can do to stop a missile attack, weather they be nukes or otherwise.

Based on whats commonly known, maybe not..
But in striving to change the world we don't deal in the accepted reality of the day. You need to find ways to make what seems impossible, possible.
Do you really know what cutting edge US military technology is...?

 

[nzcamel]

Anyone else think that instead of immediately exploding, there should be a 1 turn delay on nukes? So when A launches their bombs, B gets the message "Sir, our military advisors have detected A's nukes heading towards us! Hopefuly, our missile defense system will take them down, but we should retaliate with our own nuclear weapons now we still can!"
--Maybe, for the real peaceloving guys, an option that if B decides not to launch their own nukes in retaliation, Civ A gets the message at the beginning of their turn saying "Sire, B has decided not to launch their nuclear weapons at our cities. It's not too late to abort these bombardments and self-destruct our nuclear weapons!"

I don't see why it couldn't be put in. It'd make the end game nuclear warfare more interesting in my mind, not less..

 

[}{ELL/\/()]

i feel nuclear weapons should have much higher research/creation/upkeep costs

 

[Earthling]

The thing is, this concept is almost entirely already within civ IV even. So much in fact that people routinely complain all the time in the forums about nuclear war/fallout. You already CAN cause widespread/global devastation that basically destroys every civ and its economy via nuclear weapons. If just a few things were changed probably nothing is ever needed to fix this again, namely

-Rename the "global warming" feature so clueless players don't complain, and just make it say "pollution/fallout" or something like civ III. If you've ever really experimented with nukes in the game though you see that this already does what "MAD" would do in practice - enough nukes really turns a gameworld into a radioactive desert. Try turning off space/culture victory and see what happens after a big nuclear war - I think part of the problem is players never see large nuclear battles because space victory is such a quick default by that point in the game/tech tree.

-Then, the only other problem is to prevent exploiting the AI. All that's really needed is a feature to allow nuclear missiles to "retaliate" to an attack on the same turn as the civ is attacked. Currently a human player can do something sneaky like capture an AI's city holding all of its nukes before it can launch them - just change that and you're good. The AI are perfectly willing to build and use nukes if you the human player don't actively prevent them through the UN or Space Victory or conquering the AI earlier in the tech tree or something.

tl;dr This system is already incorporated into gameplay, far enough that nobody wants to go further to make the game completely uninteresting to play. More complicated diplomacy/concepts the AI will never understand should not be introduced into the game.

 

[Ihmemies]

I've waged several nuclear wars in Civ4, and they almost always are pointless. Like you're bored and the other team seems to be winning, so why not have a bit of fun? Put all cities to produce nuclear weapons and make a strike. Opponent reacts with a strike, and especially if we are in different continents everyone keeps on producing nukes and nuking each other till the whole world turns into desert. What was the point?

 

[adeling]

I've waged several nuclear wars in Civ4, and they almost always are pointless. Like you're bored and the other team seems to be winning, so why not have a bit of fun? Put all cities to produce nuclear weapons and make a strike. Opponent reacts with a strike, and especially if we are in different continents everyone keeps on producing nukes and nuking each other till the whole world turns into desert. What was the point?

I find a large-scale ICBM and strategically placed submarine nuke attack on a pre-nuclear enemy is entirely effective. Especially if you have Marines or Modern Armour ready to storm the, now undefended, beaches.

MAD is built in as another poster has already described, but there is an absence of consequences on the nuker in the scenario I've described...

 

[Kruniac]

But the human player is removed from the effects of a nuclear war. They don't really lose anything like they would in reality. In effect, a human player in Civ is potentially and quite often the nightmare equivalent of a sociopathic leader in reality that is willing to dispose of human lives on a scale that makes all the wars we have seen in reality pale in significance. MAD is nothing to that human player. Unlike the computer in the movie "Wargames", a player doesn't end a Civ session involving nukes saying "it's a strange game. the only winning move is not to play."

Well, making MAD something like "If the player fires, the game ends", or enhancing the effects of nukes to the point where surviving past the launch would be excessively difficult would solve this problem. Even the most inconsiderate player wouldn't want to instantly lose or have useless cities and lands because he decided to instigate a nuclear holocaust.

 

[Ahovking]

MAD should work with Civ and would make you double think about attacking the second largest nation.

 

[Disgustipated]

not to get off topic, but there is no evidence that nuclear winter would be as bad as experts predict (and yes I'm a clueless player who thinks global warming should be renamed nuclear winter- at least separate the two!). Anyways there is no evidence to say civilization can't exist after a nuclear war. Maybe the civ4 model isn't so far off after all. You launch enough nukes, and see what happens to all your grassland. The only cheesy thing is your city occupying the same land that was just nuked. It is highly contaminated at that point. I'd rather see the remaining half of the population flee to nearby cities.

 

[Ahovking]

This is why The USA and Russia should not reduce their nuclear arms,