As most of us know, there was a change a while ago (I don't recall exactly which build, and browsing through Jables' build thread didn't turn up much) that changed the terminal behaviour of nuclear missiles. Namely, instead of dropping into orbit and then flying to their target area (incidentally also producing a rather beautiful wave-o-explosions effect when launching large swarms), the missile instead appears right above the target and drops like a stone. Since I was unable to find the relevant entry in the build thread for this change to answer my question, I shall instead present it here- Why exactly was this change made? For one, I personally think the new effect is significantly aesthetically inferior to the old one. Nothing really matches the awesomeness of watching a wave of missiles carpet a planet, producing a wave of nuclear detonations as they pass. (Not to mention that, well, the old flight effect is the one featured on the steam 'Hail of Nukes' trading card, and by god does it look pretty.). When firing swarms of missiles, having them magically appear over their target when they finish their IP transfer looks very unappealing. And secondly, the flight path change introduced a rather dramatic balance shift, since previously, a nuke could be fired upon by any antinuke silo under its flight path. Now, since it appears directly on top of its target, only antinuke silos around the target area come into play. While this is the same behaviour as found in the original TA and Supreme Commander, both of those games had the advantage that an antinuke silo had a far greater coverage area than in PA. In TA specifically, a single antinuke silo could provide cover for almost your entire base on even the largest of maps, while the PA antinuke is lucky if it protects a half dozen factories (The TA antinuke also had the advantage that it would fire on an inbound nuke the moment the nuke was launched, giving you more warning, but that's ancillarly). Put together, it means that if you want reliable antinuke coverage (especially against beefier mid/late-game swarms of 4+ missiles), you need to spam antinukes around every structure you want to protect, doubling or tripling up on silos, whereas previously, you could spread them out and be reasonably sure that they could fire on nukes on their way in. This is a bit confusing to me, since the combination of the flight path change and small coverage radius means that in order for antinuke coverage to be maximally effective, you need to cram your base into a small a space as possible, something that Mavor explicitly stated early in development that he was trying to avoid (in that case, the point was about not including such base-compressing gamplay features like adjacency bonuses, but my point stands).
Ah, yes, I was going to ask about this too. The old way of doing it was in fact extremely unbalanced, because it was impossible to predict how far a nuke would have to fly to reach its target. You could be sending a couple of nukes at an area with no anti-nukes, only to have them be shot down by anti-nukes on the other side of the planet. However, I agree that the aesthetics aren't as good now. The best way to deal with this would be to make the nukes visibly fly around the target planet like they used to, but at a higher altitude where anti-nukes can't reach them. Once they reach their destination and start diving, the anti-nukes in the area should fire.
both of you have very valid points, the latter taking the cake by a mile IMO. a common ground can be found perhaps. thinking hard I start to try to move nukes back towards a longer 'in atmosphere' path so that they cross the path of more antis and have a more aethetic appearence but then comes the problem again of knowing the entry point and piling up antis at it..... Wait a minute!! : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/lets-face-it-nobody-likes-orbital-arriving-pinpoint.64128/
To be honest, I never really got that impression from them, though I could be mistaken with their coverage area. the interface is a bit vague about which intel circle corresponds to the coverage area, and looking at the game data raws, it does seem to be a bit bigger than I thought it was. Looking at the values, though, it still seems to me that the coverage radii are a bit small in comparison to the nuke's damage potential, especially when compared to TA and Supcom. In PA, Antinuke silos have a coverage range of 300 (if I'm reading the data raws right), while the nuke has a blast radius of 150. So you can still drop a nuke at the edge of the coverage zone and take out a noticeable chunk of what ostensibly should be a protected area. Compare to Supcom, where antinukes have a coverage range of 90 vs. a nuke blast of 30, or TA, where antinukes have a coverage range of 2000 vs. a nuke blast of 512. I'll agree that this is a bit unbalanced, though to be honest, I didn't mind it that much in practice, even when I was the one on the attack trying to nuke someone with heavy antinuke coverage. This brings up another issue, though - As it is, a nuke fired interplanetary is more effective overall than a nuke fired at a target on the same planet. When fired interplanetary, the nuke will drop directly on the target, only taking antinukes around the target into account. But when fired against a target on the same planet, it will be engaged by every antinuke between the launcher and the target. This is hardly the only counter-intuitive gameplay facet that comes from interplanetary movement (for instance, it can sometimes be much faster to move fighters from one location to another on a given planet by sending them on a transfer to a nearby moon, then back to the original planet where you needed them), but it highlights the issue with the nuke change. This is similar to how Supcom's nukes worked (the missiles flew on a very high trajectory befory dropping down, and the antinukes could only fire on them in this terminal stage), and would be a fair solution to the aesthetic problems, provided the nuke also behaved this way on non-interplanetary trajectories.
If you were going to go with the old visual approach, would it not make sense for nukes to arrive from orbit at the centre of the attack circle, and spread from there? This means you still have control over where they arrive and thereby know roughly what the flight path for the nukes will be, but you get the visual effect of spreading from a central point.
Not true. It was a little-known fact that, a build or two ago, nukes would only arrive in a planet's air layer at the point where the the planet's air layer intersected with its (the planet's) orbit path. You could exploit this to drop nukes on top of antinukes before the antinuke missile could catch its target. It was pretty helpful if you wanted to break dem turtle shells. Now that happens everywhere! Mostly antinukes do catch their targets now though. But nukes are so damned expensive that this rarely comes into play - most people go for unit cannons first and only turn to nukes when unit cannons get slow/ineffective/tedious.
While I agree the old effect was better visually, it added a degree of uncertainty to using nukes. Uncertainty/chance is something I feel should be minimised in strategy games as much as possible.
