Poll: Assisting Nukes

What do people think?

I think that Assisted Nukes are a pain mid/end-game, as your army/airforce/navy which takes a while to build can be annihilated by an instantly built Nuke.

If Nukes were like Catapults (in that they could not be assisted) then in order to have large numbers of Nukes, people would need to plan ahead by building many silos.

Currently the answer to "Oh dear god, my opponent has built a Teleporter on my planet!" is not "It's cool, I have an army and bunch of Factories with a few Nukes I'd rather not waste!", it's "Better send my 300+ Fabricators to spam nukes!"


There's no need to build troops in a large economy. Nukes can be built quicker, do devastating damage and reach the opponent quicker.

This isn't about economics. The economy scales too rapidly with planetary expansion for Nukes' cost to be a deterrent. And if we make Nukes so expensive that nobody can build or use them, then what's the point of having them? Furthermore they will end up being used as game enders, and spammed at some point when people have a planet's economy each to draw on.

This is about the time and effort of building an army versus the instant win two Assisted-built Nukes can grant.

Exactly.

In my eyes, all factories shouldn't be possible to assist.

I like the idea of assisting factories, it gives you something to do with your excess builders. and it is still limited by the roll-off time. As long as it can be limited somehow, I have no issues with assisting factories.

I would prefer this to be balanced by rolloff time for factories and some preparation time for nukes before they can launch.

you mind searching?
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/assisting-nukes-anti-calmly.55158/

Maybe if the nuke mechanics weren't so bad.

And what about anti-nukes? If you can still assist those then you just made nukes useless. Along the same lines, the first anti-nuke missile is built with the launcher so even if you couldn't assist the launcher, you can essentially assist the first one by using more fabbers to build the silo, and so you'd have to remove that feature. Also, nukes cost 34,200 Metal and anti-nukes cost 17,280 Metal... so what does it matter that both can be assisted when, with an equal economy, you can't possibly produce nukes fast enough to overwhelm the anti-nukes. This is, as I've always asserted, a matter of economy. Period. End of story. Assisting allows you to control your economy and diffuse or focus it as you see fit... so if you're equal economically over your enemy and he out nukes you... then you just did play well.

I have a list of ways to balance assistance. Rolloff. Efficiencies. Economy availability.

The bad thing is, this poll is invalid, this poll is an opinion, game design is a fact. It is a fact, if the economy was left alone, nukes weren't assisted, you would just chain-build 20 nuke silos. If they don't take 20 minutes to build, that means a nuke every minute still, just requiring more silos and better management.

Anyone want to do this and capture a video, instead of assisting nukes just chain build 20 silos with that limitless t2 eco and let them do their 15 minute course, followed by chain nukes less than a minute apart? I would waste 25 minutes of my time doing it, but I couldn't record the result.

If you just make the nuke cost in proportion for how often you want it accessible, you would get better results.

On that note, I want catapults be assistable, have a minute long missile build, autofire holdfire and returnfire, cost about 1/15 a nuke, and store 5 missiles a silo or silos be fairly cheap. Would become t1 missile launcher, nuke being t2. That would at least diversify it. That would make it fun. As I said, that would be balanceable, it could either be an ecodump high production item and still limited by range and such, or a utility item you use in a pinch (vanguards inc).

That feature is in fact being removed as far as the devs have discussed. That is BECAUSE the factory autoqueues the missile and helps the fabbers with excellent efficiency in producing that missile, but the main part is the factory and fabbers work together making it.

I doubt they will make this game from Nanolathe Commander to GDI Construction Yard type of game. Seriously lol. That is a pretty inhereit game mechanic.

Unassisted anti-nukes. Boom.

No poll there.

Yes, but do what SupCom did and make the nuke missiles themselves have a longer build time, while increasing the build rate of the nuke launcher (maybe by say 10x, each) That would give you the same time to get an unassisted nuke, but make assisting less effective.

Though I know PA does resource usage / build power differently than SupcCom / TA , so I'm not sure that PA allows this, I haven't had a chance to look at how build power works in PA.

Can people please stop crying about nukes. They are OK, they were always ok. It's a ******* nuke, it's supposed to annihilate **** and when you own a planet you are supposed to be able to spam them, because you OWN A PLANET. The problem is in antinukes, which I believe have been fixed in the next balance pass. YES, nukes should be assistable, who the **** wants to wait for 15 ******* minutes to build a nuke, where the enemy can build 10 antinukes in that time.

/rant

The point is that the problem doesn't lie in nukes, it lies in the fact that orbital invasions are so damn hard. Ideally you should be landing 100 units right on top of or near that nuke/orbital bombing the living **** out of it, THEN building a stargate. Also you should be queueing up 5 to 10 teleporters not just one. If they nuke it, who gives a damn, you have 10 more and they have wasted a small army worth of resources to kill a few units worth of resources. Also when invading have about 10-25 T2 fabbers ready to stream through and order them to build an anti-nuke immediately once you have your beachhead you obviously want to protect it against a freak accident like an enemy nuke.

In the midgame, if an enemy has a nuke, but you didn't go for one you either have an army big enough to kill them/their nuke or you have lost already due to being overtaken or going for an army on a planet where enemy is too well defended by distance or terrain to take them out. If you are talking about FFA, then your argument is already invalid: FFA's are random and unpredictable, you CAN'T balance them because there will always be that one pr1ck that escapes/is left alone and backstabs you when you are not prepared, if not with nukes then with an asteroid or an army.

Edit: apparently pr1ck is too bad of a word to show ob this forums, WTF.

The Poll itself is not an opinion. It is not leading.
I express my opinions beneath the question of "What do people think?"

Yes you could build a bunch of Nuke silos and slowly wait until you had 20 Nukes, and then send off one every minute. But that would take time to set up and cost more metal for the extra factories.

So wait, 15 minute nukes are ok, and so are 5 minute planet smashes? (t2 fabbers coop building with full planet t2 eco can easily build minute fast halleys).

Balance issue detected. Nukes cost more time, planetsmash costs less time, nukes weaker planetsmash stronger. ERROR.

So what, you take away assisting with planet smash, halley coop build that is. So only 1 thing at a time can build then. Then you need to balance build time off of the actual base time it needs to be built since assistance is no longer ingame. So you just build at one rate with multiple fabbers all at once. So you still accomplish the same thing, but more factories and once the fabbers are done building stuff they sit idle. That highly reminds me of C&C Tiberian Sun, just saying, you built structure at a time there too. What game is this supposed to be based off again?

These are tactics which play around the fact that Nukes are insanely easy to build. Tactics I agree are employed, and myself employ.
What I'm suggesting is that Nukes not be able to be near-instantly built, that way you don't end up playing wackamole with Teleporters.

You argument that FFA is impossible to balance holds no water with me. In a 3v3-5v5 Team game you might equally have one member of a team who runs off and builds Nukes or a Game-Ender.

Planet smashing is different.
You can see your opponent going to the planet.
You can pick your Commander up and escape.
You can't spam planet-smashing.
You can't use it to take out a single army encroaching on your base without taking your entire base with it, and smashing means losing the potential economic income of an asteroid.
There are far more downsides in comparison with sitting in your base with 300 Fabricators pumping nukes out.

wow, I'm surprised by that reply... you know you could have revived the thread and asked a moderator to add the poll...

this is ridiculous, one rule I've stood by since the beginning of my participation to the PA forums is that PA should have no random rules.

this idea is just to limit a capacity you otherwise have, and hence have you feel crippled for it, to balance.

you're not supposed to accomplish balance through random rules, you're supposed to accomplish it through stats.

I feel like you're totally ignoring the rationality of his argument. How can you possibly say that it's fine that you can smash a planet in shorter time than building a nuke? Like, one is ACTUALLY a game ender, the other is not, but you're arguing that the game ender should be cheaper and calling it balance. Am I just missing something?

They are not easy to build, especially not by midgame. in the late game like is said, you won a planet, or at least half a planet if the game is still going on. One would think that oyu should have enough to spam nukes by that time, but also by that time you should be actively scouting and looking for enemy nukes and probably blindly building preventive antinukes with at least 1 fabber. also at that time building and spamming an anti nukes, that by the way cost a third of what nuke costs, should be even easier than nuke spam.

So... Assisting Catapults?