My insight into nukes:

Remains the fact that at the present if we would remove Nukes and Anti-Nukes from the game, nothing would dramatically change, and perhaps we would even have a better game-play.

Sad to say, 'cos a nuke impact in itself is just awesome (in a game).

I am a bit afraid that at Uber they are overwhelmed with stuffs to make ready before release, that this aspect of the game will be left behind.

My solution would be to make easier to counter Nukes, so that other units will be determinant in the final result.

One should first accomplish a successful attack against the Anti-Nukes of the opponent before landing a missile on the area. Or use the Nuke to open a gate into a defensive stronghold, so that an army could finally enter and finish off what's inside an otherwise inexpugnable base. Those are just example I thought on the second.

Making Nukes more powerful will simply reduce them at ultimate weapon to which the most will resort, killing other more interesting approach to a strategic game that has so many other good units to deploy.

Nevertheless, I would still enjoy having Tactical Nuclear Submarines

Perhaps those would carry less powerful Nukes, with a limited range. They could also fire in automatic at specific targets.

Well T2 is usually a direct upgrade for T1, especially air, so... yea. Glad we can agree on something.

Megabots (the way you portray them) are very much like nukes. 1 unit to rule them all (and don't get hung up on semantics, we are talking about the launcher here too not just the missiles themselves). Both are game enders and eventually unstoppable if not countered. At least megabots have more than 1 thing that can shoot at it...

I know you don't work for Uber brain, but you might as well for all the time you spend here. You and those like you drown out anyone who differs in opinion until the only opinion left for Uber to hear is your own. I've never see you agree to disagree.

Yeah, but I'm not. Been pounded by a nuke just once. The thing is, I win every second game by using nukes. ****'s ridiculous.

Yeah, this issue has come up a couple times already, and most of the usual players are here. I still vote for a two-tiered nuke system, with cheaper tactical nukes with a much lower range, complemented by a more expensive than current interplanetary nuke in it's own giant-orbital-launcher-sized silo. But that's just me.

I'd like to see this too, but with an equivalent unit for each advanced factory. Short range, weaker nukes, and can't assist, but they're a decent amount cheaper. For all your planetary base busting needs, and gets nukes used more as a support and less of a game ender.Then the ICBM interplanetary nukes can come in later game for a game ender .

I think this would make a nicer, more gradual power slope from weaker nukes up through KEWs, so you'd have a lot of options in terms of balancing "superweapon" needs against unit production needs.

I think a good start, at the very least, would be trying to improve the Nuke/AntiNuke system to be more interesting and then balancing that new system.

Right now, even if we did get AntiNukes/Nukes balanced respectively, it'd still be a boring system.

I'm a huge fan of collaborative development threads, so it'd be nice if a dev started one for discussion on ideas to alter the system.

I've thought that making an orbital anti nuke laser that draws from your power would help planetary invasions aswell, might be an interesting thing to test in the short term.

The system currently has it so that nukes are effectively their own 'domain', like ground, sea, air and orbital. So you have these other domains, which have all these units in them which have lots things that effect eachother in all these interesting ways making for good gameplay. Then you have nukes, that occupy the nuke domain, in which only nukes and anti nukes lie. It's like a seperate game almost within PA, the only way it ties into the other domains is how resource collection rate affects nuke/anti nuke building rate, which, considering the abundance of resources is not much of a tie in.

So you can either make the ground/air/orbital/sea and nuke layers interact more or just shift nukes to another layer. In this case, I'd suggest orbital as they are ICBMs after all and that makes the most sense. By shifting nukes to the orbital layer, I mean make them vulnerable to anything that can shoot orbital units down, Umbrellas, Avengers and Anchors. This'd need to be balanced very finely, it should take a lot of avengers to even intercept one missile and shoot it down (decent HP) but it'd mean you could have a concentrated and mobile nuclear defence in the Anchor and the power of a few umbrellas on the path of a nuke could bring in interesting positioning play (Nuclear subs anyone? ). It'd mean orbital play becomes a lot more intersting aswell, as now controlling the orbital layer gives you free rain to nuke with impunity (With the exception of umbrellas, which are expensive and don't cover much range). Also, It'd also be interesting if you could make nukes target orbital units (Or maybe a smaller, tracking anti orbital nuke as a seperate unit).

Ofcourse I'm not just suggesting make this change with the current state of orbital, this would probably require quite a number of changes to the current units.

Shifting nukes to multiple layers also more interesting! You could make nuclear bombers, either as a seperate unit or something you can buy on the t2 bombers (Or on the larger transports if implemented, which makes sense). As mentioned previously, nuclear subs are a thing too, or large mobile land based ICBMs.

To summarise, nukes just need to be intergrated with the other layers of the game better to make them more interesting. I've thrown out a few suggestions above, some of which I know aren't perfect, but are just there to provoke discussion, but ultimately I just think the nuclear game is effectively a seperate one from the rest of PA.

Nukes are extremely poorly balanced at the moment. Nukes are way too powerful in relation to anti-nukes.

A nuke lets one strike any target on any planet. An anti-nuke only protects a very limited area. Yet, even if the nuke missile itself is expensive (34000 metal) while the anti-nuke missile costs 'only' half as much, the anti-nuke building itself costs much more than the nuke building (22000 vs 5000), meaning anti-nuke defense ends up costing just as much as the weapon it's defending against - the defender has no advantage. That means one can easily out-spam anti-nuke defenses with sheer numbers of nukes and the opponent will be powerless to defend against it. It turns the endgame into a massive nuke-spamming fest that there is no economically viable defense these weapons.

Contrast the cost of nukes/antis with Supreme Commander where anti-nukes are considerably less expensive than nukes - the way it should be.

Worth noting the cost of the anti nuke building includes construction of one anti nuke.

But yeah, I agree, it's still too expensive.

Guys.. just want to point out and have a question.. it is possible to target nuke into orbital unit. Should it be this way?

I think people resort to nukes when they literally can't do anything withany other unit. For example if someone can't get there units on another planet with it being blown to bits and don't have a crashable planet then all they can use effectively are nukes.I think they should add a way to get a decent amount of units on another planet besides a teleporter and make anti nukes slightly easier to get up.that should balance them.

I'd like for nuke defense to be cheap.

By cheap, I mean it is EASY to protect your main base (your energy reserves) but you cannot just spam them all over the place once you get T2. It doesn't even have to be an ANL. A massive railgun that snipes nukes outta the sky with a 3-4 second cool down? Yes please.

This way, nukes become more strategic - you'd use it to take out that defensive line that's been hampering your armies, or defend your base against a similar army. Suddenly, having multiple types of nukes makes sense, because spamming them seems redundant.

No. That's ridiculous and bugged.

Not auto fire. What if your sub targets a vanguard that just hotdropped into your base?

People go for nukes as soon as they aren't under constant pressure from their opponent.

This is why currently, it is SO IMPORTANT to get T2 quickly in a FFA, so you can start spamming t2 bots to go after people who have nukes. Or even t2 air.

Nukes are more effective than armies because of the current power of defensive structures. This just doesn't make sense and really hurts gameplay imho. It's subtle, but if you watch the semi-noobs, the class of people who uses whatever is OP at the time, they all spam defensive stuff now. It's that cheap. It's that effective.

Thankfully, it's still a FOO strat, which means people like me don't have many issues with it.

Still an issue though. FIX PLZ

See IRL the anti nukes options are actually MOAR expensive than the nukes which makes em useless so if USA and EU gets into a thermal nuclear war with Russia and China everyone simply DIES! Well except for the Elites that will hide in there bunkers and underground cities, they've tried to start WW3 to make the 2012 prophecy a self full filling prophecy.

I would also like to see a nukeless option for games as well but I would also like to have to have an option to disable anti nukes so we can all have a cold war in a FFA ha ha Infact there should be a game mode where everyone starts with a couple prebuilt cities with many nukes stockpiled in the beginning of the game, with the alliances and diplomacy options for an epic FFA game. Commanders should have a bunker to hide while they watch the megadeaths and after everyone dies and everyone will die ha ha the commanders can come out and rebuild and pretty much start over kinda like a reset. Like you just started a game only this time its a nuclear winter aftermath

Oh and they should also make it so when a planet gets nuked too hard the planetary crust cracks and the demons from hell swarm out the cracks and kill everyone how cool would that be? come on you know that would be awesome

I'm against auto-fire with nukes in principle for the simple reason that it complicates things much more than helping the player out. And yours may be a good example. Targeting a mobile unit with a Nuke is plain silly (with the exception of the Commander).

However, units do auto target all the time. Some units do select they targets all the time (air vs ground). So if we will have a nuclear submarine how will we use it? Should we select one and target manually at every shot? We have already in game ships with very powerful long range missiles, and they simply fire at will as soon as they have a target in sight. Why a Tactical Submarine should be any different?

Said that, a nuke (even a smaller tactical one) has a considerable impact on the area of impact. In case of a tactical Nuclear Submarine, the way I see it, it should target only high valuable stationary structures, like Factories or clusters of Eco. Evaluating the cost per benefit of stationary target is way simpler than doing the same for mobile units.

Yeah, it is a tricky one to get it right. We will hardly see it happening anyway.

What?!

The only historical event I'm aware of in that sense is this one.

Thank you Vasili Arkhipov, the man who stopped nuclear war
Fifty years ago, Arkhipov, a senior officer on the Soviet B-59 submarine, refused permission to launch its nuclear torpedo
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war

Oh yeah the guys trying to kickstart WW3 are the Illuminati trying to form there New World Order, more specifically the banking elite like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers ect. They are pushing there Agenda 21 through the UN to turn the USA into one massive wilderness that people won't be allowed to be in and kill 90% of the world's population. They failed to fulfill the 2012 prophecy cause the good guys in the airforce nuked there under ground cities that they were gonna hide during the thermal nuclear war.

Still advocating ammo-less anti-nuke structures to balance the nuke-gameplay asymmetrically. I think that offers more tweaking possibilities than mirror-style system that is currently in place. Plus it might make nuke-defense one contender for huge energy consumption late game together with teleporters and intelligence sites - if metal becomes the limiting factor once again in the future, that is.

I was all for making anti-nukes cheaper, but I've seen a lot more of them in top level play recently, so now I'm not so sure. Nuke play seems pretty reasonable.

i see people speeking about overhauls all the time but they never explain how that overhaul shall look like ...
antinukes do not stop you getting nuked ... tanks, bombers, missiles do so get those to your enemies frontdoor ... there need to be the tools to be able to do that ... balancing the nukes or antinukes themselves IS NOT the answer ... to me people still seem to willingly run the same cycles for when a) the unitrooster not being done and b) ballance not being final ... i mean how many times did we talk about this and said the same thing over and over again? i am realy missing people giving propper examples of how stuff could or should look like ... saying that the game partly is broken over and over doest make it a bigger problem than it already is and the devs know that ... we have now like 20 to 30 nukethemethreads in which this is done and it is just sooooo tiring ....

I somewhere proposed the nuke defense building to be a ground based laser-thingy that only needs energy to operate on standby and quite a bit more in action - i.e. destroy incoming missiles. Nukes wouldn't be destroyed instantly but over time thus enabling both the attacker to overwhelm such a defense with additional projectiles as well as the defender to overwhelm incoming nukes with additional defense lasers.
This would mean that nukes are metal-expensive for the attacker and energy-expensive for the defender.
Plus such a ground based laser opens up all manner of interesting interactions with orbital (mirror/relay) satellites, which would make shifting orbital to a support role possible again.