anyone getting sick of nukes?

I'll reserve judgement until light space fighters aren't statted as though they were capital dreadnoughts. It otherwise sounds cool.

I absolutely believe that the nuke should still explode when it is destroyed. Nuclear bombs are for chumps. You won't get anywhere cracking a planet without a few grams of antimatter. The only way to possibly stop such a weapon is to d-gun it out of existence (a feature of SMD and possibly the ubergun. Aren't I just craaaazy).

Wouldn't nukes be cheaper? and you could say that nukes auto detonate to prevent capture...

How would you capture a high altitude missile flying at mach X in the first place? I don't think they have to worry as much about capture as they do getting shot out of the sky.

If nukes always explode, it means that far more "glancing hit" scenarios are possible with them. For example, typical non-SMD defenses might always kill a nuke before it reaches blast range, but the base still gets whacked with significant shockwave damage. Full nuke power stops being a game ending thing unless you're already mostly dead, or if you're nuking an enemy army, or if someone wishes to terraform mountains. It provides a powerful anti-air or anti-space weapon, since intercepting a nuke means losing units to the blast. It also provides an amazing downside to stockpiling nukes (provided the silo itself doesn't use tissue armor).

Aren't mountains just props? I am not sure you can change them like the rest of the terrain.....speaking of props, does anybody else feel like some of the terrain stuff we have are less like parts of the planet and more like glued on set pieces?

yyyyyyyyup, more on this in the scale megathread

expecially on the lava planet, I don't know about you guys but I think every single plateau model should be redone in it to fit more with the terrain and just look good.

And what about being able to move across them? Like what about having my commander at least being able to shimmy up a mountain to build an AA turret up there?

dude I totally wish that was a thing

Having nukes in SCFA was great when playing against AI. It was a good equalizer since most gamers (those with lives in the real world) had trouble matching the economic efficiency of the AI in most cases.

But I don't think nukes are a good thing in player vs. player games. It just turns the game into one big nuclear arms (and anti-nukes) race.

Not as much fun in my opinion.

... i dont realy see the problem, its not hard to get anti nukes, and when you have anti nukes your safe for a while (he will eventually be able to overwhelm them, but you should have won/lost the game by that time if your playing for real instead of just relaxing).

I brought this topic up before but it got lost in the discussions. I think we will likely have an option of how to set games up with say a 'no-nuke' option. I agree that it can get boring (or annoying even with anti-nukes) but I also see how it can help break someone who is dragging a game out by turtling hard.

Every feature needs coded so I'm not expecting this any time soon. I think priorities are elsewhere at the moment.

Nuclear tic-tac-toe isn't my thing but I'm not totally anti-nukes. Just some games might be more enjoyable played without them from time to time.

I have said this before, but the old role of nukes being the game-ending tie-breaking superweapon is no longer suitable. PA games are (potentially) going to be spread across multiple planets, and smashing planets into each other acts as the game-ending superweapon. Given the resources of an entire planet, nukes should not be that expensive. And the planet-smashing weapons have the role of ending a stalemate, which means nukes need a different job.

In my opinion, PA needs to put quite a bit of effort into making nukes an integral part of normal gameplay, which are a strategic weapon that is much smaller than the absolute tie-breaking superweapons. Instead nukes provide huge splash damage on-demand, such as for wiping out large, compact armies and bases. I think nukes should have the gameplay function of discouraging large armies from clumping together, and discourage huge mega-bases.

Very large forces and bases are obvious nuke targets, and therefore they incur an efficiency penalty in the form of needing to pay for antinuke. Spreading those same units and structures out over a larger area means there is no single spot worth nuking.

There are a lot of different ways that dynamic nuke gameplay might be implemented. One demonstrative game is Defcon, where major superpowers have quite significant nuke and nuke defense capabilities. When one or more nukes flies through an antinuke's range, the antinuke should fire frequently and either inflict damage, or repeatedly have some probability of destroying one missile. Overlapping missile defense means you have a greater chance of stopping more missiles, meaning the attacker must use more nukes to achieve the same effect.

A nuclear strike should not be a single missile which will either succeed or fail by the presence or absence of antinuke in the target area. Instead, it should be a nuclear bombardment where the player has to consider the locations of launchers and the location and density of missile defense both in the target area and along the missile's path.

The problem with allowing a weapon to kill a huge mega base, is that killing a huge mega base usually wins you the game. It doesn't really matter what the weapon costs at that point, because any single good hit is a game ender.

IMO, bases should be largely impervious to nukes. There are more than enough weapons in the PA universe capable of shooting down a gigantic ICBM, so let them. Have air fleets shoot them down. AA weapons. The D-gun. Etc. The nuke can blow up, do some flash burn damage, and teach a very important lesson that nukes aren't everything.

Nukes can still be very useful as planet terraforming weapons. If there's an easy attack bridge to your base, turn it into a crater. If there's a mountain blocking your access, remove it. Nukes can still carry a very important strategic role of reshaping worlds and removing terrain towards your advantage, and they don't have to kill a SINGLE enemy unit to be worth while.

If the nuke has enough power to flatten a mountain (or do enough damage to allow units to pass through) one would expect it to destroy an entire base. Terraforming in the way you're describing takes immense power/energy.

And it WOULD, if it could ever get there. But huge *** missiles have a way of getting prematurely 'sploded, so it's not as easy as you think.

The only way nukes can be allowed to be powerful AND cheap is if they're easy to deal with. A missile that is easy to deal with is pretty pointless if it can't be used in any other way. Fortunately PA has terrain warping as a major game mechanic, and nukes are the perfect scale for that sort of thing. It is better to direct units towards roles that nothing else can do first, and to let the mass killing power be a secondary thing if you get lucky.

Completely wrong. This is just like saying that a combat unit that is easy to deal with is pointless if it can't be used any other way.

Currently nukes are individually very powerful. And so is antinuke, and antinuke counteracts nuke very binarily. This made sense when the purpose of nukes was to end games in their final stages.

However nukes don't have to be so expensive and difficult to counter. Cheaper nukes would simply mean you would need more of them. Much like how cheap units must be used in quantity. One nuke could be easy to deal with. But a salvo of a dozen? Or more? Many salvos of dozens of nukes simultaneously? Just because one nuke is easy to deal with doesn't mean nukes are easy to deal with.

Having cheaper and more numerous nukes is more interesting than having very binary nukes. A player with a stockpile of nukes has more choices about how to place and use them, and a player trying to guard against them has to decide how to neutralize or defend against a nuclear threat. Having a range of power of nuclear strikes and a range in density of nuke defense creates an additional dimension of gameplay.

Naturally the player launching the nukes would prefer to split one nuke per target cluster. But one antinuke covering each would prevent that. So instead, the player launches multiple nukes at defended targets. The defender can stop that by placing more antinuke. However those nukes can be dropped anywhere, so the defender has to make hard choices about where to pay for antinuke. Especially against a player who controls large amounts of territory, protecting the entire area with dense antinuke becomes cost-prohibitive and makes the player vulnerable to conventional attacks with ground units and aircraft.

Ehh.... It's more like saying "a combat unit is pointless if it can't fight", which is exactly the problem an easily countered nuke would have. Those problems become irrelevant if nukes aren't given a strictly combat centered role.

The terraforming role works, because it is an awful idea for almost everything else. Nukes are just expensive enough to avoid excessive (lag inducing) use, and can be given the right counters to push it towards anti-terrain roles rather than a hurpdurp win-cannon. Those factors create a unique role that is largely not possible otherwise.

What you are describing is more of a very large tactical missile. It's not really a nuke.

It's not a good idea to design the entire game around nuclear slug matches, especially when there are so many better super weapons to work with. Cheap and strong is perfectly cromulent, and nukes certainly are cool, but ultimately nukes have to be kind of sucky because nukes are not the main focus of PA. Let the wars be fought with real combat units instead of T3 guns, and let asteroids be the game enders that the kickstarter video shows them to be.

I definitely do conceive of nukes as smaller weapons compared to the larger scale of PA. What you call them is sort of irrelevant. Tactical nukes it is.

I do not propose to design the entire game around nukes. I propose to design nukes to fit within the main play of the game. Planet-killers do the job that nukes had in TA of ultimately resolving stalemates and ending the game.

This is why nukes have such a strict counter in the form of antinuke; to prevent the game from being a nuke-fest. Nukes can be cheap and strong, but if antinuke is cheap and effective as well then nukes become a support option.

Nuclear fire support should be like artillery. It supports the army from afar, giving tactical options with advantages and disadvantages. Nukes have the advantage of potentially dealing huge amounts of damage. And they have the disadvantage that if they are intercepted they are a resource-consuming waste of time, and can potentially fail to provide the support you were counting on.

But that's wrong. Anti nukes are the very reason that games devolve into nuke fests. You can have all the exciting play between air, ground, sea and space that you want, but when a nuke is built all of that comes to a halt. Then there are two choices: Deal with the nuke, or die.

Sure, you can ward off the inevitable nuke rain by building some SMD. But if there is any point in time where you can not immediately handle the enemy's nuke stockpile, it's game over. You can sacrifice most of your air force for a desperation snipe, which only wards off a loss. But his complementary SMD snipe is an instant victory, automatically placing him in the lead.

That's how a game becomes a nuke fest. It is not because the nukes or antinukes are expensive or cheap. That problem is irrelevant. It is because the strategic weight of nukes and anti nukes become so powerful that it drowns out every other feature of the game. Foolproof strategy to take the seas? Gotta deal with the nukes first. Planning an amazing planet grab? Nukes are in the way. Girlfriend cries for you to fix an itch she can't scratch? Sorry baby, but this guy has nukes.

Having a binary can deal with/can't deal with answer to a base flattening weapon is perfectly fine if the game has been dragging on, the weapon is a game ender, and you just want to get things over with. But nukes aren't game enders. So why are you trying to design them in that way?

This is more than a little hyperbolic. The deployment of any offensive unit forces the opponent to react. If undefended, a large Pgen field can be destroyed just as easily by a handful of Scampers/Dox, as it can be by a nuke. Hence the player needs to react in some manner, regardless of what the threat is. The only difference is the amount of time the player has to react, which is governed by economics and intelligence gathering.

The key difference between Nukes and units at the moment is that the player has only one way to react to nukes, but many ways to units. There's nothing wrong with employing a strategy that forces your opponent to counter it. That's common to pretty much every multiplayer game ever. What is wrong is being forced to react to a strategy when there is one and only one counter. That becomes dull, uninteresting and unsatisfying.

However, there are a number of ways that the nuke game can be tweaked to fix this. Ideally, whether players are throwing tanks, planes, artillery shells, nukes, or asteroids at each other, all should be entertaining. The way to do this, is to add more dynamic counterplay to the nuke game. There are a number of ways that the nuke-counternuke system can be improved, including multiple types of anti nuke, orbital layer interactions, different types of missile, linking defending to radar tracking, economic balancing in terms of capital versus marginal costs and a variety of other options.

Could not agree more. The trick is to make nuke play dynamic and interesting, and design it so it works alongside land units, air units, orbital units, intelligence gathering, and other dimensions of gameplay.

However...

These are rather complex and not very elegant ways to design nuke gameplay. Adding more types of stuff will always make the game more complicated, but won't necessarily make the game more interesting. The trick is to design simple mechanics that create novel and complex gameplay situations.

I propose to make antinuke fire rapidly, and have a probability of intercepting a missile with each shot. Antinuke will attempt to intercept any nuke flying through its area of effect, not just a nuke aimed within its radius. If it takes one missile down, it will immediately select another enemy nuke within range and continue firing. More antinukes will increase the probability of intercepting a particular missile, and therefore decrease the effectiveness of a large salvo of missiles flying into or through the antinuke, because more of the missiles are more likely to be destroyed.

Naturally, this means the player launching the nukes wants to send a lot of nukes in at once to try to overwhelm the antinuke defense, rather than trickle their missiles in one at a time. You have to consider the locations of your launchers, potential and known locations of antinukes, and their density, to determine how many missiles to send in order to get some nukes to successfully land. Reconnaisance of targets and antinuke locations is critical to effective nuclear bombardments, since a large salvo of many nukes becomes expensive, and it is likely many of them will be intercepted. Using too few, or picking the wrong targets risks completely wasting all the missiles. This also makes units like missile submarines very useful, because you can maneuver your launcher to get a good shot through where the enemy's antinuke is thinnest, or even just nuke from up close and personal to minimize the chances of interception.

And from a defender's perspective, you have to make decisions about how to structure your missile defense grid. The fact that nukes can be intercepted in flight also means that firing a nuke over more distance (especially over more enemy-controlled territory) makes it less likely to reach its destination. The player defending against the nukes has another reason to control more territory around a base to enable them to construct a deeper missile defense grid. Defense in depth using many small outposts with antinuke, perhaps multiple layers of antinuke 'wall,' perhaps concentric circles for 360 degree defense, or perhaps sparse but dense missile defense by placing a lot of missile defense on key bases, with little antinuke elsewhere.