please make nukes better!

[blitzkrieg1980]

People still live in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

It has been 65 years since the bombs dropped on Japan. Saying "people STILL live in..." is a poor way of making your point. The discussion should focus on what the city looks like immediately following the nuclear strike... not a couple dozen turns later.

How about 25% of all improvements, 50% population lost, 90% military and pollute every tile within 2 of the city. The place is royally hosed but not a crater.

I like the improvements being destroyed being low. However, population loss should represent not only initial casualties, but also subsequent casualties due to radiation sickness, fallout, starvation, lack of medical supplies and infrastructure, etc etc. 75% population loss (depending on the strength of the nuclear device) is a better representation me thinks.

 

[Carver]

It has been 65 years since the bombs dropped on Japan. Saying "people STILL live in..." is a poor way of making your point. The discussion should focus on what the city looks like immediately following the nuclear strike... not a couple dozen turns later.

Hiroshima was never abandoned. So the idea of wiping out the city would be unrealistic.

I like the improvements being destroyed being low. However, population loss should represent not only initial casualties, but also subsequent casualties due to radiation sickness, fallout, starvation, lack of medical supplies and infrastructure, etc etc. 75% population loss (depending on the strength of the nuclear device) is a better representation me thinks.

Well, the health effects are already modeled in the game via ruined tiles.

 

[blitzkrieg1980]

Hiroshima was never abandoned. So the idea of wiping out the city would be unrealistic.

I wasn't suggesting total destruction. However, Hiroshima was also hit by a tiny nuke in comparison to what a multiple warhead thermo-nuclear ICBM would do. I'm all for scaling up the destruction with newer and more advanced nuclear technology.

Well, the health effects are already modeled in the game via ruined tiles.

Ruined tiles has nothing to do with the # of population that would die after the initial explosion.

All I'm saying is if a 5 megaton thermonuclear device was dropped on central Hiroshima in 1945, they would have had to rebuild the city from start.

Again, scale up the destructiveness with newer nuke units.

 

[Ahriman]

People need to remember that the population of a city in Civ represents not just the population in the urban center, but the population in the surrounding rural hinterland as well.

Remember that for most of history, urbanization rates were pretty low. Those people you have working tiles? They live in villages, towns and farms in the countryside.

 

[Schuesseled]

How would it be bad for gameplay?

How else are you going to model a disincentive to be the first to use nuclear weapons?

How is "make the AI smart" compatible with "make the AI not use nukes first, even when using nukes first has no particular downside"?

There has to be an in-game penalty for being the first to escalate to nuclear war, otherwise there is no logical reason for the AI not to start flinging any nukes they have.
A diplomatic penalty makes the most sense from both a realism and gameplay perspective, and it constrains the human player as well as the AI.

Hard-coding nuclear reluctance into the AI when the human player faces no such incentive is weak design.

Sorry i should have made myself clearer.

I meant that AI players wouldn't use thier nukes against another civ if they know they have a sizaable stockpile of nukes also, unless attacked first (for the majority of the time)

Just like in r/l no one wants to be the one to start a nuclear war.

If the AI's opponent didn't have any nukes, then the civ would either deploy his nukes or not dependings on his flavours.

--

And in this way, you don't need a diplomatic modifer, or sucha harsh one anyhow.

 

[Ahriman]

So what stops the human player from throwing nukes around willy-nilly?

It makes no sense to have the only block to nuclear war be hardcodes, rather than actually providing disincentives to doing so.

 

[dulsin]

If each nuke drop put 15 or more pollution tiles on the map that would be plenty of reason to not drop them. A few cities later and the environment will take a nasty whack unless you can get a horde of workers there ASAP.

 

[Schuesseled]

So what stops the human player from throwing nukes around willy-nilly?

It makes no sense to have the only block to nuclear war be hardcodes, rather than actually providing disincentives to doing so.

what stops a human player, nuclear acopocalypse?

Starting a nuke war is fun and all but unless you have a lot more nukes, mutual destruction should be the most likeliest result. (this is of course hoping nukes are capable of destroying not just weakening enemies.)

The advisors should pop up on your screen and warn you from tripping a nuclear armageddon, of course you can always ignore them, but having every civ hate you or an AI who starts a nuclear war is bad for gameplay, it makes it less fun, which is of course the games reason for existence.

 

[Carver]

Ruined tiles has nothing to do with the # of population that would die after the initial explosion.

Ruined tiles can deprive the city of food, leading to starvation.

People need to remember that the population of a city in Civ represents not just the population in the urban center, but the population in the surrounding rural hinterland as well.

Remember that for most of history, urbanization rates were pretty low. Those people you have working tiles? They live in villages, towns and farms in the countryside.

By the time we have nukes the urbanization rate is considerable and those folks out in the countryside are relatively small in number.

 

[Ahriman]

I hate the idea that says you should be able to invade and conquer enemy countries that have nuclear weapons without them using them unless you use them first - because they're hard-coded not to use them.

Also; nuclear waste that damages your enemy's tiles and economic output is not a reason to not use nuclear weapons.

I also hate the idea that slaughtering country X with nukes should have no impact on what any other country things of you. If say the US in the 1950s had launched a successful first strike attack on Russia and annihilated it, they would have been seen as genocidal maniacs and treated as a pariah state by the rest of the world.

By the time we have nukes the urbanization rate is considerable and those folks out in the countryside are relatively small in number.

Really.... remember that India and China have been nuclear powers for decades. Pakistan is a nuclear power. All have huge rural populations.

 

[Schuesseled]

I hate the idea that says you should be able to invade and conquer enemy countries that have nuclear weapons without them using them unless you use them first ..

I would love for this to be the case. In the real world, countries have nukes, but would nuclear power deploy nukes if they were invaded by another nuclear power, i think not.

(think what if russia attacked the US, would anyone want to be the first top start throwing non-conventional weapons.)

 

[Zhahz]

No global warming due to use of nukes please.

Illogical.

IMO using planet destroying weapons should um, destroy the planet.

If you wanna bend reality and go nuke happy then use a mod that let's you vaporize everyone on the planet with radiation and no negative effects.

And of course the diplomatic and city state effects of going trigger happy with nukes should be pretty severe.

 

[tom2050]

I strongly suggest they do go with a radiation zone instead of spreading pollution (although both could be done); so being and having units effected by radiation will cause problems done the line as well and make the area not able to just be 'cleaned up' so easily.

 

[SGRaaize]

In reality, this doesn't work too well. Silo-based nukes can be placed fairly close to each other, yet deeply enough underground that they can only be destroyed by a direct hit. Such a hit, of course, will release a huge cloud of dust, and the particles in the air are dense enough to demolish anything moving fast (like a missile nearing its target) while simultaneously loose enough that anything moving a bit slower (like a missile being launched) can get through unscathed. As a result, you can launch a first-strike against one nuke, but then you have no way to get at the others for, say, a thirty-minute window during which your opponent is free to launch them.

For more realistic (and playable) nukes, I'd like Civ V to:

1. Break their development into more stages. Early nukes should be difficult to transport (in vulnerable bomber planes). Later nukes should be based on a combination of terrain-improvement silos outside of cities (and that throw up a cloud of dust when hit, preventing future hits for a turn or two) and mobile launch platforms (e.g., submarines).
2. Permit nuke theft. Probably requires adding espionage back in. Alternatively, barbarians cities change to terrorist camps in the modern age and they try to get their hands on them.
3. Add UN inspector units with the ability to disarm nukes and/or sanctions.
4. Add catastrophic local political penalties. It doesn't matter what government-type you have; under most situations, people aren't going to let you launch nukes willy-nilly.
5. Permit nuclear defense agreements via diplomacy, a la "if you get nuked, I'll nuke the aggressor." This would work especially well in combination with the new city state mechanics.
6. Make some victory conditions (cultural and diplomatic, at least) unavailable to a player who launches a nuke (or, at least, who launches a first-strike).
7. Make late-game nukes much more powerful. Combined with the increased deterrence possible with the silo improvement in #1, players/AI will become more realistic in their assessments of when to launch nukes.

Although they are nice ideas, they wouldn't really stop us or make us hesitant from using Nukes and winning the game by domination at all

 

[Pembroke]

Hiroshima was never abandoned. So the idea of wiping out the city would be unrealistic.

Yes. Provided if you use just 1 bomb. A single strike even with today's mega yields shouldn't destroy the city completely. That's unrealistic, agreed. However, equally unrealistic is that if you pour in nuke after nuke after nuke and have the city still standing there. Use enough nukes in the Real World and at some point the place will be just a leveled and glazed over desert with nothing standing. It's a matter of *how much* and I think you should be able to duplicate this result in Civ, too. A reasonable solution could be that each nuke decreases the pop amount and once you nuke a size 1 city it gets razed.

As to how to balance the whole thing while still keeping it usable I liked Arbustro's idea of simultaneous launches. It's even realistic: even if you strike first in the Real World the other guy is bound to notice before he's hit and launch a retaliation strike. Of course, Civ is a turn based game so we'd need a different solution but that's just game mechanics. For example, a very easy to implement way to do this would be to just not destroy any nukes stationed in the city that is hit with a nuclear strike and so are available in the opponent's turn for a counter strike. This doesn't mean that the nukes somehow magically survive the strike but reflect the situation that the victim was able to launch them before your warheads hit. It could also be that at this point such nukes are now in a use-them-or-lose-them mode and must attack in the next turn or they are killed.

This would also create more realistic MAD situations. You (or the AI) shouldn't be afraid of using nukes because you get some mystical diplomatic points penalty, but for the sheer reason that if you do launch your victim is going to retaliate with his arsenal so that you need to carefully think about it and gather some intel as to how much he could hurt you.

 

[dulsin]

I strongly suggest they do go with a radiation zone instead of spreading pollution (although both could be done); so being and having units effected by radiation will cause problems done the line as well and make the area not able to just be 'cleaned up' so easily.

The reason to go with pollution tiles is there is a method to clean them with some effort. Even with a megaton weapon the area of total devastation would only be the size of a single tile.

The exclusion zone from the Chernobyl disaster is only 30km which is far smaller than a tile in Civ.

 

[Ahriman]

I would love for this to be the case. In the real world, countries have nukes, but would nuclear power deploy nukes if they were invaded by another nuclear power, i think not.

Are you kidding me? If the 1970s Soviets/Warsaw pact had invaded western Europe including France it would be *very* easy to see France or US in Germany using tactical nukes on invading armored columns

If Iran in the next few years (or Iraq in 1991) had nuclear weapons and was invaded by a western alliance, you bet that that the regime in charge would have seriously considered using nukes.

If India launched a massive invasion of Pakistan, the regime would be seriously tempted to use nukes.

If a massive alliance of arab armies invaded Israel and were winning, you bet Israel would use nukes, even if some arab country had developed an arsenal too.

Similarly North Korea. You really don't think the regime would use nuclear weapons to try to stop themselves being overthrown?

If the survival of your state is at stake, there is a very high chance that you will use your nukes to defend yourself.

(think what if russia attacked the US, would anyone want to be the first top start throwing non-conventional weapons.)

I think you don't understand the psychology involved of the military and political leaders.
Go watch 13 days - or Dr. Strangelove.
Existential threats kick in the fight or flight response, and some people choose fight.

More importantly though, there is the gameplay factor.
Its just terrible for gameplay if you could invade and conquer a nuclear power without them using their nukes on you.

IMO using planet destroying weapons should um, destroy the planet.

What makes you think they're planet destroying?
There have been dozens of detonations of nuclear weapons over the last 50 years, for testing purposes, including many atmospheric tests (eg by the US in Nevada, US and France in the Pacific).

Dropping a nuke in a desert or atoll doesn't somehow have less impact on the global environment than dropping it on a city.

 

[Shnoof]

Here is my take on what nukes should be like:

Nukes in real life are a very serious matter and should be dealt as such in Civ 5 for maximum realism. They are not to be used for any random encounter, but only in the more dire of situations. I feel like once the players get into the stage of building nukes (if they so choose so), they need to take care of them a little more than a normal military unit.

Types of nuclear weapons:
Fission bombs - Earliest nuclear tech, harms a single hex.
Fusion bombs - Later tech, harms 7 hex circle, with middle being the most damaged.
Tactical nukes - Subcategory of bombs, can be loaded onto vehicles or used alone, must be built as such.
ICBMs - Subcategory of bombs, can only be loaded into Missile Silos. Cannot convert ICBM into Tactical nuke, or vice versa.

Delivery vector:
Fission bombs
- Dropped by bomber units (if bombers are researched)
- Shot from nuclear artillery cannon units (if artillery is researched)
- Used alone as short range missiles (if rocketry is researched)
- Shot from missile launcher units (if rocketry is researched)
- As ICBMs (if ICBM tech is researched and built as a Fission ICBM)
Fusion bombs
- Launched by planes (require both rocketry and bomber techs)
- Launched as short range missiles (with rocketry)
- Launched from missile launcher units (with rocketry)
- Launched as ICBM (with ICBM tech and built as a Fusion ICBM)

Associated buildings/Wonders:
Manhattan Project (World Wonder) - Enables nuclear weapons/research for all players. I see this gets some controversy on the forums, but seeing how you can't just build nukes without special buildings, it should balance it out a bit. Once people knew that such a bomb could be built, everyone with the proper resources did.
Uranium resource - Required to build nuclear weapons.
Uranium Enrichment Facility - Required to build nuclear weapons in that city. This facility causes unhappiness in the city.
Missile Silo - To launch an ICBM, a player must build a Missile Silo facility in a hex outside a city tile and transport the ICBM there. Seeing how normal civilians don't really know there are silos near their city, there is no happiness penalty for building one. Silos are hidden from all other civs, unless a spy unit is placed directly on top of it.


Relocation/storage of bombs:
Nukes can act as land units for transportation to and from units/facilities. They can stack on top of other military units. If undefended, enemy units can capture it (barbarians getting their hands on nuclear bombs?). They do not "relocate" like in Civ 4.
To launch ICBM-class bombs a player must relocate ICBM to a Missile Silo.

Damage:
Fission bombs do damage to only one hex, while fusion do damage to a 7-hex circle (middle hex plus the 6 surrounding it). Middle hex is converted into semi-arid/desert/tundra. In the case of fusion bombs, the surrounding hexes lose any forests and improvements (only roads/rails are left).
Units out in the open have 50-100% of their health reduced, 50% chance of dying if targeted directly. Units fortified in a city with nuclear bunkers, on a silo, or on a military improvement have less damage done to them.
Cities lose population and lose some of their more modern buildings. Fusion bombs do more damage than fission in their center tile, but significantly less in the surrounding tiles. Fallout shelters reduce damage to population only.
After the city is nuked, owner has option to abandon city (if remaining population is low), remove some remaining population as a settler unit, or do nothing.
If a natural wonder is directly targeted, it is destroyed. All other civs like you less.

Fallout:
Tiles affected by nukes have fallout damage. Food resources produce at 50% efficiency, increase unhealthiness in nearby city. Fallout disappears after decent amount of turns, or can be scrubbed with proper tech.
Fallout cloud is emitted from blast and it migrates around map for a few turns, causing temporary "fallout" affect on tiles it is over.
If too many nukes (I'm talking about covering almost every square with blasts) go off, fallout cloud can lead to nuclear winter, converting most of the map to ice or tundra slowly. It does not end the game, but definitely reducing the map's usable area.

Penalties:
Uranium resource - Each resource only provides enough for a finite amount of weapons. Yield can be improved with techs (balance building nukes fast or wait until you can squeeze more out of the limited resources you have).
Launching nuke on enemy - Enemy population hates you, so taking over cities afterward has a longer unrest period. Small unhappiness penalty lasts a long time in cities. Civ AI leader hates you for a long time, switches focus onto nuclear weapons of his own for retaliation, unless completely non-aggressive.
Other civs - Small disapproval from all other non-militaristic civs.
Your own civ - Slight unhappiness if your civics are not militaristic.

Anyways, my brain hurts a bit now, so I will stop here. What yall think?

 

[Ddude97]

Wow.
Very nice, my only complaint, roads/rails should be destroyed also (whether its realisitic or not) because they don't do anything but trade routes (no movement bonus if I remember correctly)

 

[timtofly]

It would always be realistic to loose road and rail. Destroyed trees would not "stack" themselves neatly leaving the roads open.

According to the interviews, they are keeping roads/rails as trade routes, as movement bonuses, but adding maintenance cost to reduce road spam.