Expanding on Nukes

Sorry!!! But....... dis be...... merica imma talk hows I wants to......

Why is building anti every time bad??? Guess you don't have to and get your *** blown away...... even if you don't scout building anti between you and your enemies is always good.

Sure, you can talk like you want to. But it's a pain to read and it almost makes me want to dismiss your opinion entirely. It's not in your favour to do so.

The reason building an anti-nuke every time is bad, is because it costs resources. Resources that could have been spent on other more useful things given the situation. A large part of mastering any RTS is resource management, and if something is a necessity rather than a choice then it quickly becomes a boring mechanic.

Wow! This is a lot of effort to completely miss the target. Moar nuke options do not change the problem with games devolving into nuke fests. If anything, it pushes battles towards more nukes. (Also, nice try on making more midrange stationary artillery. It has to be the worst weapon type to be included in any RTS ever.)

What can a nuke make? Craters. What does a crater do? They permanently change the shape of planets. Why is this important? PA is the only RTS game that can permanently deform the map. Isn't that cool? Ipso facto, dingo dango. Terraforming is your nuclear role. Everything else is completely secondary to the fact that you can change a planet's shape at will, without blowing it all to hell.

Can nukes still kill stuff? Sure. Is a nuclear slug match something that should be encouraged? Not in a million years. PA is not a defcon game. If it is anything like TA, it is an army game. Robot vs. Robot battles should always be the preferred mode of battle. They are the bread and butter that make large scale battles qualify as large scale battles. Nukes take a back seat to epic robot battles any day of the week.

Over 50% of everything in the game is capable of killing units. Nukes as a killy weapon can only serve to diminish the role of everything else. That's worse than not being included at all.

Bobucles, you aren't seriously claiming that the primary purpose of nukes is to move dirt. The primary purpose of nukes is to blow up the enemy. Making a crater is a side effect of the explosion used to destroy everything that used to be where the crater is. Making craters for their own sake is silly. Nuking dirt is silly, even if it does deform the terrain.

Nukes don't "terraform" anything. They don't make it "earthlike" or habitable, they make the area uninhabitable. Even for far-future robots, a nuke might be characterized as making the area highly inhospitable for a brief period.

Any complaint about nukes being overly prominent should be addressed by increasing the efficiency of antinuke. Nuclear slug matches are avoided by making antinuke an effective defense, including mobile antinuke to protect armies in the field. The size of nukes and antinukes relative to the rest of the game is an unrelated issue to the prominence of nukes.

I don't have an issue with nuke effectiveness currently. Adding cheaper, shorter-range nukes which can be carried on mobile certainly makes large splash damage more available, but it also makes nuke gameplay more dynamic and interesting. And it gives the player a lot more options for how to use nukes, as well as more limitations because of the shorter range of the missiles. Cheaper and more efficient interception also makes for more counterplay, and more aggressive options to make your nukes more effective including scouting, using artillery and air strikes to eliminate more numerous and expendable antinuke, and invading to clear the area completely.

I completely agree that armies are the focus of the game. So, consider the effect that having inexpensive, short-range, and low-yield tactical nukes has on armies. An army can possess a limited number of tactical nuclear weapons that it brings with it, instead of nuke gameplay revolving around incredibly expensive ICBM's. These missiles must be used carefully because missile defense can make them useless, but they can be very powerful in one battle when used well.

And what about large battles? Is a "battle" just two large blobs of units smashing into each other? Or is a 'battle' when two large armies lock into a protracted engagement, with both sides spread over a large amount of space, including defensive units, artillery, support, and so on. Battles don't become "large" by accident, and they aren't large merely because of the number of units involved either, but because of the amount of territory involved. The number of units follows from the size of the theatre because you have a lot of area to cover and need more units to have a presence in more places.

A tactical nuke wouldn't even necessarily wipe out a whole army depending on how it is deployed across a region, but one nuke would completely annihilate an army completely blobbed up in one spot which lacks antinuke. Forces get more efficient in conventional battles when you group them tightly together. But they should also become more vulnerable when you group them together. This creates a strength vs risk dynamic which can be mitigated by adding antinuke, which can also be destroyed.

And why is that? Moving dirt is a mechanic almost entirely unique to PA. It can create choke points, deny landing spots to the enemy, and it pushes the game towards an inevitable end.

The problem between killy nukes and dirt nukes is that both mechanics are not created equal. Moving dirt is handy but ultimately not that big a deal. You can create chokepoints, deny landing spots and push the game towards an inevitable conclusion. But those are very slow and low yield returns. Flat out killing the enemy is a quick, high yield return. The two can never work in the same unit, without one of them taking a sideline.

So which mechanic should take the sideline? Is it one that the dev team is working hard to make a unique and engine central feature of the game, or is it the one that kills lots of stuff? Sorry, but killing lots of stuff just isn't that important. Just about everything in the game can kill stuff, and AoE doesn't take any radical game redesign to use. Moving dirt IS important. It adds something new to the table, and it can not be accomplished in many other ways.

The idea of nukes being a superweapon that has to be dealt with is simply not good and should not be the focus of PA. Your nukes are boring and a game dropping its roots for superweapon battles is going to be boring.

That's not to say that nukes can't deal impressive damage, but they should not be game enders that force a "save or die" response. Saving against a nuke should be easy. They're huge, slow chugging targets. Just shoot them until they die, and watch the fireworks. Pretty much anything can do that.

So with that logic, all parts of the game are boring mechanics????

And nukes being in game makes anti a necessity for the smart player. Besides it all comes back to scouting in the end.

I'll say it again, Intel is king in the strategy world.

Reductio ad absurdum,

Not all elements of the game are similar, and thus can not be compared to another.

If you intend to name a type of argument, you had better know which ones are legitimate and which are not. Reductio ad absurdum is actually a good argument in the form of an indirect proof. This isn't a case of it, but nevermind.

The desire to include non-lethal or less-lethal weaponry seems to spring from a desire for diversity, for its own sake. I am a huge fan of unit diversity, but casting nuclear weapons as dirt movers, and using an argument that "well, lots of things deal damage, that is so boring" is just ridiculous.

Damage is how pieces are removed from the board. It is tightly analogous to the capture mechanic in chess, but is quite a bit more nuanced. Dealing damage is not a function that you can abstract out, and dealing damage is not a "feature" that gets dulled from variations on a theme. It is integral to how units and weapons work. The fact that weapons deal damage is not an argument for making weapons that don't.

A chess variant where the king couldn't capture any pieces would be fun for a laugh.

A chess variant where pawns are indestructible, cannot capture, and cannot promote would also be fun for a laugh. Might be broken though, would have to test it. Knights obviously become incredibly important.

He has a point. You don't really have choices in these kind of games, you do what you think is necessary in the current situation in order to win. In order to win, you have to (depending on the map) expand, spam factories, spam land forces, turrets, use terrain obstacles for your advantage, etc. There isn't much choice in what to build or what to not build. With your logic most of the units in the game would be boring.

What is that if not choice?

Like many have said, large part of countering nukes comes down to scouting. Which can be nearly impossible on large maps,or even worse on multiple planets, requiring insane micro. Scouting nukes should be made easier, have a cheap nuke builder detecting satellite which would make nukes under construction show up as red dots on the radar or something. Everyone knows adv radar satellite needs a nerf anyway.

I disagree building an antinuke can be an insurence so your enemy might not neccesarily go for nuke rush instantly ... this game is as much about reacting as it is about planing ... idealy you plan the battle out to the way that the enemy does what YOU want him to do ...

Well why not if you have some other master plan in mind but that strategy doesnt really make all that much sense. Building a pre-emptive antinuke just makes your enemy spend his resources on some other form of offense while you spent yours on a now useless piece of highly specialized expensive defensive structure. The lesson to learn here is that turtling will never win the game.

Then lets just go back and play warcraft again ... or just remove
All defensive structures and maybe any potential defensive units along with them ... because god forbit to defend yourself without being branded as a turtle because you wont ever built an offensive unit to attack ... seriously can we stop that for once? This is basicly asking to just play even more risky and just throw around units because "WE MUST HAVE MOVING ACTION"
And how dare the devs put in wall segments ... *sigh*

Nothing against you and i dont mean to attack you but

this turtle branding slowly but surely gets ridicolous it is outragous
When poker showed me one thing then it is that patience can win you a game ASWELL ... surely it might not be as fun for some but it does help
I am not going all donkey just because others cant deal with a slower game ... if you know how to brake a turtle then just do it dont tell someone to not defend when he knows how and wants to

Obviously defensive structures are not without merit, but let me put it this way: primary objective of the game is to destroy your opponent, in other words offense. That is how you win the game. Only secondary to that objective is to survive,i.e.defense. Just surviving will never win you the game. Unless you're playing anFFA, and everybody else happen to kill each other.

So turtling can make sense but as a general rule you wish to spend as little resources as possible on purely defensive structures because it doesnt lead to winning the game.

But hey thats just my opinion.

Its all about knowing how to turtle effectively ...
If you are not careful that turtle will bite your finger off cut clean when makes his turn
Dont think a turtle wouldt harass or expand as well
Turtle =! Sitting in a cor errr .... in one place and raising a prisoncell aroud yourself

No doubt i was speaking in highly idealized terms..any actual gameplay situation is of course not that simple.

Anyway,to get this thread back on track: I don't think nukes are that game ending currently..if anything I think they kind of fall in between. You can cause massive damage in the late game with them, which is good for drama and keeping things rolling.

Some of the options are weighted and better if you want to win. Basically it's a choice, but you probably don't want to do "bad" choices, thus leaving no choice/few choices.

Anyway, this is very off-topic.