Nuke 'Em

[Helmling]

Alright...now I've been playing Civ for nearly 20 years now. In all that time, I swear I cannot remember EVER being the victim of a first strike with nuclear weapons by the AI.

Then the other night (first long term game with the "new" patch, which is actually the last patch for most of you since I'm on Mac), Catherine wasn't the least bit shy about slamming me AGAIN and AGAIN with nukes. My one border city took three of them, taking huge chunks of my army with it. When she started the war, I thought she'd made a huge mistake and I set out to annex most of her bordering cities. My early gains, though, were erased when I had to pull back all my forces to defend a giant, radioactive gap left in my core territory.

Now, on the one hand this is good. The AI, or some AI's at least, should be willing to play dirty, to lay waste to civilian populations in unprovoked atrocities. It keeps us on our toes, keeps the game interesting.

However, here's one thing I think they should patch about this experience:

Make it an <snip> atrocity!

Always before in Civ, the use of nuclear weapons was a big deal. There should at least be a pop-up alerting the player when an AI tosses one of these things around and there should definitely be a diplomacy modifier for certain AI personalities and any Civs friendly to the victim.

Moderator Action: Please do not evade the auto-censor. In future, please rephrase.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[BobDole]

It is sort of weird that they threw that out the window. In IV, if you decided to initiate a nuclear holocaust, almost everyone was gonna end up pissed at you for doing it. Now, it seems like no one cares about watching their neighbor get nuked into irrelevancy. You can have half of a civilization's cities taking a nice radiation bath but it doesn't really seem to matter, although if you built one city near someone 2000 years ago, they're probably still holding it against you now.

 

[Helmling]

Yeah, that's why I'd like to see some greater diversity in AI personality and reactions. Some leaders should have a sense of honor about that type of thing and respond no matter who the victim is, and some should only care if it's in their backyard or if it was their trading partner whose whale meat is going to be glowing brightly for the next 10,000 years.

 

[AriochIV]

I was also a bit surprised to get nuked in a recent game, and to see other civilizations that had been nuked.

In the situation in which I got nuked, it was especially silly... the AI had sprung a sneak attack and more or less overrun two of my cities... then it nuked -- TWICE -- a city that was surrrounded and about to fall, down to 10%, with no defenders. The nuking civ (Germany) killed about half a dozen of their own units, and totally decimated a city and its environs that they were about to take relatively intact.

Not impressed.

 

[snarzberry]

On a side note, what does the animation for nukes look like? I always play with quick combat on so I have literally never seen one go off, just the aftermath. Is is cool?

 

[Helmling]

The animation runs pretty slowly on my machine. Plus it's painful to watch when it's your city taking the nuclear hellfire.

Moderator Action: PDMA removed.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889