Why even put Nukes in the game?

[Malarkey]

It seems a lot of the people wanting exceptionally powerful nukes in the game are thinking of it from one perspective only: them nuking another Civ.

Lets flip the tables around, though. Say you've spent hours and hours on your game, building up a mighty Civ over the course of a few days and are getting close to victory. Your opponent (whether Human or AI) sees this and to stop you, drops a nuke or two on your top cities. You five best cities are completely annihilated, buildings are gone, wonders are gone, all from 50 (combined) turns of production.

Yea, that'd be great. Every game would come down to building a few nukes.

I agree with you completely, and I would have posted the exact same thing, if you hadn't. The only thing I use nukes for in my games are a means of retaliation if I'm ever to get nuked myself. They're purely for defensive purposes in my games, and only used when I'm completely out of options. The last thing I want is an AI civ nuking one of my cities, so I make sure not to use nukes myself unless I absolutely have to.

As far as the SDI project goes, it's a joke in real life. Your chances of actually hitting a nuke in space are extremely low. Under the Clinton Administration they built satellites that would smash into rockets in orbit. They only built a few of these for testing purposes, and as another member had already mentioned, it only had a 50% success rate. What wasn't mentioned was that the test rocket to be intercepted had a beacon on it to tell the intercepting satellite exactly where it was. Without that beacon, the chance of interception would have been much closer to 0%. They also didn't take into account that an ICBM could be lauched with multiple decoys, further decreasing your chances of intercepting the real deal. SDI will never be a feasible solution IRL. It's too expensive, and it's too easily fooled. You have a much better chance of shipping a nuke on a container on a cargo ship, and having it detonate when it reaches the destination city. All of the billions of dollars the the US government has wasted on missle defence have been for naught. Scientists have been saying this ever sense the projects conception, but the politicians are still trying to get their little pet project to work.

Don't believe me? Watch the Frontline documentary on the subject here.

 

[SPQR300]

But the game needs SDI fo balance reasons, nevertheless it should come much later... :S

 

[meatwad4289]

NUKES ARE WONDERFUL IF YOU CAN USE THEM.

See in everygame, I go For nukes as soon as possible. And then the UN. I build as many nukes as possible. Win Sectary General, THEN Vote against building Nukes. I always end up having the power before any one else gets infantry or something small. In my 2nd Game I had over 250 Nukes in my country. I only launched 10, because I couldnt only attack 5 Cities, because my troops were surrounding the other cities