I posted this in another thread but i think it deserves its own. In the current state of the game is too easy to nuke spam your enemy into oblivion. It turns the late game into a nuke slinging fest. As of today the most efficient way to countered is by building more nukes of your own, making armies almost irrelevant. Maybe the answer lies in anti-nukes, make them cheaper and faster to build (the missile not the launcher), so it becomes harder to spam nukes to kill your opponents base. Once a anti nuke is in place it should VERY hard to nuke it to oblivion. What a heck make the anti-nuke launcher more expensive to counter balance it. So now u have a extremely important tactical target. It stops the nuke palloza we have right now, and its becomes a really important structure to defend and take out. It will make nukes great against large advancing armies and unprepared bases, but effectively countered by a single extremely effective structure, that has a huge bullseye in it.
Sad but true. Ideally they should both be real stabs in the side when fighting against an enemy with them. Balanced if you will. Yet if either one being better pisses anyone off more, it is the nuke.
i always build anti nukes before nukes and never had any trouble, or you feel that nukes are op at the moment , but no in pa everything is counter-able. scout to know what your opponent has. late game huge armies through gates nukes or send to annihilate. apparently people are to slow to build counters??? why people say it's op it so easily counter-able.
Instead of nerfing nukes, Uber should decide where they want to take this game, and offer a more optimal path towards that play-style. What I mean by this is, if Uber doesn't want every competetive game to converge on nuke/anti-nuke battles, they should make it easier to kill your opponent with a land army. For example, if you scout your opp building nukes such that they are aiming to end the game, instead of juking you into building anti-nukes across your entire base, you should have the ability to respond properly and win easily by amassing an army of tanks and running over your opp. What I'm suggesting is that Uber nerf walls and laser towers, or at least make infernos and their T2 counterpart better apt at storming base defenses. The other way is nerfing nukes into oblivion where they don't exist in competitive play because you can't do anything with them.
Okay, makes sense.... ...Or they could nerf wall hp a bit... Or buff all unit's health a bit... Or make walls block terrain but not shots... Or any other number of possibilities. Btw, afaik, just because people don't abuse overpowered t2 air since the nerf, doesn't mean t2 bombers don't in fact still snipe nukes in their usual numbers. Just not commanders for the most part.
If you watched the last tournament you would see that some of the best players built anti nukes. Nukes are super expensive until after 25 minutes. Anti nukes are needed so much more since the commanders cost nerf.
A thought... what if they made Anti-Nuke T1 instead of T2. Also make them slightly cheaper. From personal perspective getting an Anti-Nuke up and running ( with a missile) is harder then getting a Nuke ready to fire. And considering what a nuke does vs what an Anti-Nuke does that seems really backwards from a game play standpoint. If they want Nukes to be a more run of the mill attack then Anti-Nuke needs to be easier to get up then the Nukes. If they feel that Nukes should be game enders then it makes sense that Anti-Nuke is harder to get up. *Keeping in mind I don't have numbers for either, maybe the anti is quicker technically, but the effect of completely each is drastically different and heavily weighted in the nukes favor for effectiveness* I could be wrong but I get the feeling they don't intend for Nukes to be game enders, only base busters. Sadly in their current state nukes are very often game enders as they break peoples backbones and it's hard to recover. Or worse yet with a pair of them or more out right snipe commanders with them. Yes you can scout and see whats going on but that's just one more micro action we have to take. This game is already heavy in the micro realm. Having to constantly bring your attention to your opponents base to see if they have a nuke in in the works is time consuming and hurts your expansions. Anything to help free up some of the microing is a positive for this game in my mind. Just my 2 cents
I do not think an antinuke should make you entirely safe from a nuclear missile blitz. If the enemy outproduces you, and produces more nuclear missles than your antinuke, he should be able to break through with a concentrated salvo. It should be noted that antinukes are already significantly cheaper than nukes. What does need fixing is that no matter how many antinukes you build, even if you have more antinuke missiles prepared and concentrated in one spot, a large salvo of nukes is always guaranteed to let a missle slip through. Even if you outnumber them.. why this is caused i have no idea, but may be due to multiple anti nukes targetting the same nuclear missile causing them to be used up at a faster rate. To be fair, the late game nuke slinging only usually comes out to solve difficult, impossible situations when it comes to planetary assault. When we have more options for cracking turtled planets other than 35 warheads that take 10+ minutes to build, I'll take those instead.
Indeed. But I would still like to see that either the first anti nuke be free or that their cost be reduced a bit. The reason behind this is that setting up an emergency anti nuke is almost impossible now so it's usually better for oyu to just build a hidden nuke launcher and nuke their nuke, if you survive it than out up an emergency anti nuke launcher. I have no
Zweistein hit the nail on the head. Many times it's more beneficial to just nuke them before they nuke you. By passing what anti-nuke is suppose to be about. Again keep in mind that a completely Anti-Nuke does nothing but counter a nuke sent to it's area of defense. Were as a nuke is effective across the entire planet and any moons orbiting the planet. Even the slight cost difference between the two doesn't account for what you can do with the Nuke vs the Anti-nuke. A long shot idea.. but what if Anti-Nuke was also an Anti-Missile defense. Many people complain about Catapults coring out their bases. If anti-nukes had a secondary use, limited anti-catapult then I feel the nuke vs Anti-Nuke use would be less of an issue. This still wouldn't solve the issue of trying to storm a planet and getting nuked as soon as you show up, but that's another matter dealing with planetary assault problems.
I'd rather see supcom stile tactical missile defense be seperate from anti nuke launchers. Oterwise anti nukes will either be usrless(can be disarmed for free) or op (way too cheap/free)
I'm in favor of: -make the anti-nuke launcher cover a lager area -Make anti-nuke missiles faster and cheaper to build -Make the anti-nuke launcher more expensive
That's an interesting idea, I don't know where it would take the game, but if the nuke and anti-nuke were the same building would seriously shake things up. Right now the anti-nuke is really a no-brainer, and it doesn't do much. You just scout the nuke from your opponent and build an anti-nuke where something more expensive than a missile exists. The only decision making happens when you decide if you want to build an anti-nuke there. I think people would go from targeting power and production to targeting nuke launchers. So each party would keep launching nukes at the same place, with the stronger economy winning. After one party gets through, they would have the ability to nuke the rest of their opponents base without fear of retaliation, at least of the nuke kind. Though you would still have to balance standing army spending vs nuke race, I don't know how I feel about that.
This is an interesting point. I've been watching a few PA streams recently, and in one in particular the player 9/10 times goes for nuke spam to finish the match. This is done by taking over a moon and spamming t2 energy, mex, and adv combat fabbers (argh I hate that they can assist buildings) and about 10-20 nuke silos. However, I don't think I can recall, in even one such match, this player being a)scouted or b) counter attacked in any way. The player who gets nuked merely starts building nukes, or anti nukes, or runs away. I can't tell whether this is just naivity or a problem with game balance. It is worth noting that the player spamming nukes had a few anti nukes, but not really a lot of other planetary defences in most of these matches. So a premptive attack with, say, teleporters, or orbital bombardment, or astreus drops, or even a well placed nuke or two on the energy reserves would do considerable damage. I guess this is the problem with new players, or indeed, having to keep track of too much at once, but it seems odd that people don't think "hm, maybe I should just send a quick satellite over to a few of those moons to see what is going on".
Odd it may seem but I know from person experience and watching of many games it's split attention issue. We have infinite number of things we can be doing that require our attention. Scouting takes all of your attention for however long you do it. You can try fly bys but if someone has a lot of AA those fly bys end up not telling you much as they never make it deep into a base, were as a manual scouting you can move around AA at times. Also flyby require you to plot a fly by, then later on look over what was scene, and hope what you are seeing is real and not a old imagine/not scouted. If your fly by is destroyed say by a wandering AA you really dont know what you are seeing isn't real (aka you never got a scout ). I realize many will say scouting wins and loses games so make time, but in the heat of things it's hard to pull yourself away and drop everything your doing to scout. I would say currently 9/10 games are ended via nuke. The other 1 in 10 is done via Aircraft spam (keeping in mind this same aircraft spam is what keeps land armies from doing much of anything). I feel the game has really become a turtle up game for fear of nukes and aircraft spam. Artillery creep is also coming back into fashion once again, thanks to land wars being wiped out via nukes/aircraft.
Surprisingly, Anti-nukes are in great spot right now I believe. The thing is that you can build 2 anti-nukes at the same price as nuke. So actually it's better to make 1 anti-nuke and you are 20k metal ahead. Then later on when you get proxy bases all around the map nukes get useful. That's pretty late, about 25-30 min mark so it's lategame when nukes become only decent (2 places to defend = the same cost as nuke). In previous tournament anti-nuke was something normal amongst the best players. Nukes are only too powerful in team games because for every nuke you need 2-4 Anti-nukes. In 1v1 they are only strong in late game and I believe it should be like this because of their cost and we need more ways of attacking without having to deal with big distances between bases. Also we have seen more interesting usage of nukes recently. Godde used his nuke a couple of times to take out my huge armies coming at him so that's nice tactics aspect. Clopse has used the nuke against me against my 5 proxy T2 factories which was also very interesting way to deny peoples expansion. It costs a lot though so such actions are only partially successfull because they have to sacrfice a lot of economy that could have been spent on armies. So nukes are getting more tactical and more about choice and no no-brain attacks on commander and that's good.
I already said make MRSAR or MIRVS where the missile splits off and makes several targets. This is balanced and works where the antinuke will still land somehwere where the nuke can target those spots on the map which will be highlighted via circles. The anti nuke will then have a random chance of dropping back on your enemies who launched it.
