Preparing for a possible invasion.

[donsig]

Are we sure no one else has advanced flight? If someone has it then it'll be cheaper to research. If no one has it then we get a chance at an SGL. I wouldn't deviate from our spaceship research just yet but we should not rule our advanced flight just yet. If SABER and FREE start fighting then I say we forge ahead to space. If that war doesn't begin soon then I'm more inclined to want advanced flight.

 

[General_W]

Advanced Flight makes us much, much more difficult to take over and I don't see how FREE and SABER will just allow us to build the space ship without attacking us.

To me – this is the bottom line of the whole deal. Who cares if it delays our time to launch… if it ensures that we actually live to see that day!

I didn't realize that Radar towers leave the underlying improvements untouched… that just makes them even more valuable!

While a radiotower is nice, the EWS is the key to victory here.

I agree that this is tremendously important... but when FREE or Saber (or both) come after us - it'll probably be with a stack of naval units so big we won't be able to stop them. Once they land - we'll probably need every advantage we can get. If they get a foothold for even one turn - things will get really really ugly.

Question: What, exactly, does a nuke do in C3C? It seems like this will be really important for us to know. Especially after we make ourselves safe from conventional attack… (I apologize if I'm the only person here that doesn't know the answer to this… )

 

[Niklas]

You're not the only one - I've never ever used a nuke, nor seen one used. So I'm curious too. For instance, could a tactical nuke kill off a large stack of ships?

 

[donsig]

I've used ICBMs on cities before. Not exactly sure about this but I think it kills all units in the city as well as everything in the nine adjacent squares. Those squares also become polluted. I have no idea what city improvements are destroyed. An ICBM is a great way to clear out an enemy capitol that is about to launch a ship. It won't destroy the SS but makes it very easy to capture the capitol city. Oh, and against the AI if you nuke one of them then next turn whoever has nukes unleashes them on you.

I don't have as much experience with tactical nukes.

 

[Niklas]

AFAICT the only difference between an ICBM and a Tactical Nuke is the range. They are both just as devastating. So that should mean that we could have nukes target a stack of ships, killing all units within a one-tile radius. Not bad...

 

[tomasjj]

AFAICT the only difference between an ICBM and a Tactical Nuke is the range. They are both just as devastating. So that should mean that we could have nukes target a stack of ships, killing all units within a one-tile radius. Not bad...

Are you sure?
I seem to recall there is a difference in destruction levels as well, as there are quite a difference in shield investment iirc.

 

[Niklas]

No, I'm not sure, as I said before I've never actually used one myself. I'm just going by the civilopedia entry, that says that the ICBM has "the same devastating effect as the tactical nuke, but has unlimited range", or something along those lines. That doesn't mean there couldn't be a difference in destruction level, since the 'pedia is known to be inexact.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think it reduces the size of a city, as well, though I'm not exactly sure by how much.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Created a small scenario to test this.

Rome had 6 icbms.

Egypt had 24 infantry and a size 8 city.
1 icbm dropped the size of the city to 4, killed 17 infantry, redlined the others.
2nd icbm wiped everything out

Tried it a second time, set thebes to size 14. 1st icbm brought it to size 7, 2nd icbm wiped out the civ.

 

[Paul#42]

The second one razed the whole city? I mean left just rubble or pollution?

 

[AutomatedTeller]

city was gone, egypt eliminated (they obviously had only 1 city)

I dunno if having buildings inside the city changes that or not, and there may be a random element to what happens.

 

[Niklas]

That's NOT good! So what's the fastest road to Integrated Defense?

 

[donsig]

Tactical nukes do seem to inflict the same damage as ICBMs. Looks like the city size is halved (rounded up) and units are killed or injured. I hit a city with a tactical nuke in a test game and two marines survived on adjacent mountains. I sent an ICBM in after that one of the marines even survived that.

If you target a tile adjacent to a city the the city size is reduced by one with the usual unit effects. It looks as though nukes can target any tile with in range except it's own cities. Other tiles inside your territory are fair game for nukes as are water tiles.

Here's an old save I beefed up with quite a bit of nukes. Feel free to unleash the carnage.

Oh, I'm still not sure about SAMs (the city improvement). We concluded before that they wouldn't help against nukes but then again, you need five of them to build the missile defense small wonder. Are we sure SAM bases wouldn't have a chance against ICBMs?

 

[General_W]

this is all highly disturbing news.
If 2 nuke strikes can totally destroy a city - then even with SDI, you'd only need 8 ICBMs to destroy our capital

Please tell me there's some way to avoid this!

 

[Yilar]

Sams have no effect against ICBM's. Either you got SDI and you stop some of them, or you don't have SDI and you don't stop any of them. We are not gonna build SDI either way, as it lays at the end of the tech que.

 

[Niklas]

I tried the test game and I agree with donsig's findings. No matter how many ICBMs I pumped into a pop-1 town, it wouldn't raze, but any size above that saw the town drop in size to half (25->13->7->4->2->1->1->1->1->....). I'm not sure how that maps to what AT saw.

We can survive being nuked down to size 1. We can't survive losing the town. But if it's like me and donsig find it to be, we should be safe.

 

[General_W]

whew!
That's good news.

But to survive - we'll need our military well spread out, so we survive with sufficient forces to defend/counter-attack against any landing.
Still - that should be doable... if painful.

EDIT: this also makes the EWS even more important. We can't allow people to Nuke and Invade on the same turn - as long as they have to nuke us a full turn before they can invade, we should be (relatively) safe.

Can anyone confirm the effects of a Nuke on any Radar towers we might build?

 

[PrinceMyshkin]

Yes, I used to use nukes quite a bit and I never recall a town being destroyed. From what I recall a nuke has a 50% chance of killing each unit. It may be all units in a city or none, but survivors will take a lot of damage.

One of the worst effects of nukes I've not heard mentioned is they also destroy roads as well as creating pollution in all 9 adjacent tiles. I used nukes mainly for this effect to cut strategic resources and prevent or slow ai's from building SS parts. Here's a screen of Paris which had 2 spearmen in it before I dropped a nuke in a test game. All the rails and roads are cut to the capital.

It seems if a nation is willing stopping or slowing a spaceship won't be too hard with nukes.

Edit: Crosspost with General_W. All improvements including radar towers would be destroyed.

 

[Paul#42]

Maybe AT's towns had no (own?) culture and autorazed?

 

[Niklas]

Well, on the up side, nukes are very expensive. It's not like we're going to face several per turn. If they use them to cut our resources, we should be able to reconnect. Resources are only needed on the turn we start a component anyway, so they're not that crucial to constantly defend. It's worse that they could take out our production capacity - but as I started saying, nukes are very expensive.

This obviously reinforces the importance of having a very strong defense, and EWS. It may be harder to get the ship off, and may take longer than we'd like, but it's not impossible. And we must have nukes of our own.