planetbusters!

[Sloth_MD]

Schwick, why do you think so few people would die if a city was the direct target of a nuclear attack?

History and testing. There's a reason why a city like NY would be targeted by 10 nukes instead of just one, and it's not just on the assumption that a couple would miss or be deflected.

 

[rhialto]

Yes, geographical area. And just as a single legion unit doesn't represent one soldier, a single nuke unit doesn't represent one missile.

 

[NewWaver]

Would probably change the face of warfare totally. If this idea doesn't happen, I think something along the lines of an Ion Cannon (from Command & Conquer) would be another option...

 

[sir_schwick]

I hated those things in renegade. They would always blast my ass whenever I grabbed the blue flag.

 

[Tholish]

There is always an arms race. Better swords lead to better shields lead to better swords...Planetbusters need not destroy the world, if there were a mechanism for reducing their effects. A city dome, or ionized shield maybe, would reduce them to regular nukes rather than ocean makers. And future techs would make workers able to terraform ocean back into usefull land anyway. Or maybe you could have a tech that gives you a totally undetectable saboteur, so that if a city has this saboteur and shoots a planetbuster, it blows up on the launch pad. But the saboteurs are very high maintenance units (variable maintenance cost, yeah). Or maybe planetbusters could have totally unpredictable effects, which are randomly determined, so that you don't know in any game if they will improve the terrain (turn all the land to solid gold) or mutate the victims, turning them into supermen who will be able to defeat you, or work as predicted. Also, you could have planet buster resistant units, like modern armor that has a good chance of surviving a nuclear blast if it isn't too close, only this would be force field protected units.

(To mod planetbusters, just have a tech that makes cheaper nukes available and another tech that allows the production of no maintenance robot workers to clean up after them, and multiple antimissile wonders [would they stack?].)

Planet busters are inevitable, if you want to convincinigly represent the future, but need not be a game imbalancer, as counterbalances can easily be justified.

 

[sir_schwick]

The only real counter-measure to current nuclear arsenals is reason and common sense. That is why the modern arms race has resulted in peace rather than war. The cost of using new weapons is higher than the gain. This would be the same with planet busters.

 

[Teabeard]

Planet busters = bad idea! Civ4 ought to move away from its warmongering roots and introduce more intellectual governing practices, along w/ the war component. The current level of nuclear armaments is more than effective, its already a 9 tile radius. Now, if you want the graphics changed so you can see a crater where the nuke is detonated, then okay. Something similar to how artillery damages terrain in Conquests.

I agree completely.

 

[CenturionV]

Better than all this, why don't we just have designable warheads? The bigger they are, the more they cost, and the worse there enviromental effects. And nukes should have a based level of damage. If I launch a 500 KT nuke at new york it should do a goodly bit of damage, but if I launch it at a montana town with a few thousand people, it should completely destroy it. Also fallout and radiation affects need to be more realistic, so fallout should fall downwind, and small bombs should create no lasting fallout at all (like the bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki left no noticable fallout) while huge 50 MT superbombs, should be rediculously huge and expensive, and be able to nuke twice as large an area as the current nukes, and cause heavy fallout.

I have yet to descover a game that comes even close to realistic with nuclear war, they either portray it as some kind of basically conventional weapon, with little or no consequences, or as some kind of world ending weapon that makes earth uninhabital after only a few shots. Both are rediculous extremes that seem to conform to either a cartoony view of nukes as just big bombs with an additional "cool" effect of a mushroom cloud, or the irrational enviromentalist defeatist view of small nuclear exchanges destroying all life one earth in a single day. Both should be avoided in Civ 4.

 

[rhialto]

The reason we don't have designable warheads is because it will take resources away from some other area. And once you allow one unit to be designed, there is no longer a convincing reason not to allow for a complete unit workshop a la SMAC.

Unit workshops are great for SF genre, but don't make so much sense for most of Earth's history.