What if Nukes Weren't Superweapons?

Nuclear weapons are peculiar in that once the technology is available, a nuke is actually dirt cheap to produce compared to its destructive power. Nukes are also something of a symbol for large-scale destruction. So I can't think of a better way to change the perspective on the scale of combat in PA than to scale down the meaning of a nuke.


Nukes are Small Potatoes

Given the scale of PA, with the real superweapons being smashing asteroids, or even planets into each other, a nuclear weapon is absolutely paltry in comparison. Nukes are large-scale destruction in a region on a planet- but compared to the entire planet, not much area is being destroyed. And because PA is being fought over multiple entire planets, nukes are naturally greatly diminished.

So I propose a serious reworking of nuclear warfare in PA which differs from TA and SupCom. In those games a nuke is a superweapon- massive, expensive, and potentially game-ending when used. In PA, this paradigm doesn't really make sense for nuclear missiles- but perhaps it does for crashing planets together.


Accessible Nukes

Naturally, if we're going to have nukes that convey less utility to the player then they should be cheaper, and more accessible. I don't suggest making them dirt cheap- nukes should be a significant enough investment that you do not want to fire at nothing, or have it intercepted. It should sting to lose a nuke without firing it, but it's not the end of the world.

It seems to me that the smartest way to do this is to vastly reduce the cost associated with nuclear launch capability, and to make nuclear weapons more convenient to acquire and use. Cheap silos, cheap missile submarines, even having ships, aircraft, even mobile land units with nuclear capability. The missiles need to be cheaper also, but not necessarily to the same degree that the launchers need to be cheaper.

Having cheap launchers also means they can be easily destroyed, and more easily countered using cheap antinuke- potentially even treating a big missile like a normal orbital unit/plane. Normal tactical missile defense would be too short-ranged to prevent a nuclear missile from detonating far overhead, however. Furthermore, more available launchers and defenses creates a density distribution rather than a binary presence/absence antinuke picture. Light nuclear defenses might be overwhelmed with a large missile barrage. Potentially even including dummy missiles.

Inexpensive independent missile silos, or concealed missile submarines might be hidden in remote locations, secretly giving you nuclear options. But they will be revealed to enemy sensors when they launch missiles, so choosing your moment is important.


Nukes as Base Killers

The way I conceive of the gameplay of PA, a player will need to build many bases on a planet's surface to decisively control that planet. Not just a single large base. A planet-killer weapon, such as crashing something huge into it, will naturally destroy the planet (or at least most of it), and all the bases on the planet are destroyed.

Nuclear weapons allow for a huge blast on a sub-planetary scale. In functional gameplay terms, a nuke completely destroys one base, wiping out its structures and all attendant units in the area. If you only have one huge base, this would be bad gameplay. However a player might have many smaller bases on a planet, especially large planets, with which to continue the fight, and to send units to rebuild. More analogous to losing a single unit out of an army than losing your main base in a smaller RTS game.

The ready availability of localized annihilation splash damage nuclear weapons is itself an incentive to distribute your economy and production. You shouldn't put all your eggs in one geographic basket.


Nuclear Splash Damage

I think it is a good idea to give nukes two blast radii. An inner primary blast, which is the "anything within this ring DIES" indicator, used to annihilate bases or pretty much anything else. As well as a second, much larger shockwave radius, within which units and structures take significant damage, but probably will not be destroyed unless they are fragile or already damaged.

Having this type of damage distribution makes nukes situationally effective as on-demand fire support. Having silos, submarines, or other missile launchers within a theatre opens up tactical options, like calling in an air strike. But with considerably more punch.

Having a larger, lower damage blast radius makes nukes much more viable to use in open-field combat, not just against static targets with large amounts of HP. Nukes become useful against a huge number of small units deployed together, encouraging players to split their forces up, and adds risk to blindly bunching all your forces together in a deathball. Which is very good.


Conclusion

Overall, I think due to the planetary scale of PA, the place of nuclear weaponry in the game needs to be reconsidered. They should no longer be game-ending superweapons, but rather much cheaper, more commonplace missiles that happen to affect a big area. There are quite a few roles and types of gameplay that nukes might create, such as encouraging spreading bases and armies, density distribution of nukes and antinukes, and information warfare and mindgames regarding the location of silos, subs, etc. Recasting nukes as single-use big-time splash damage adds a lot to the game.

Planet-killers should fill the cost and destructive power slot which TA nukes used to occupy. Smashing an entire planet into another planet should be exorbitantly expensive, and yield potentially game-ending destructive power in one shot.

Fair points, all of them.

I might add that if Nukes are to be pulled back from being game enders, they shouldn't take out a commander in one hit.

One thing to note is that as you get to the extreme lategame, where more planets end up KEW'd, the battlefield decreases in size. (According to neutrino.) This means that nukes once again start to become very valuable, especially once it becomes infeasible to just send in the nearest space rock. If nukes become as common as you suggest, then it will take some careful balancing to ensure that the lategame doesn't become a series of nukefights, where just one successful attack wins it.

This is actually very interesting, I hadn't considered that with respect to nukes.

However isn't the amount of resourcing going on also dropping as planets get destroyed? This seems like a desirable result that as the battlefield shrinks, smaller weapons get more significant. Nukes also have a direct counter, unlike planet-killers such as crashing a planet into another planet. So if there's only a small area left, players will rely more on antinuke, and less on spacing and positioning.

Additionally, this is only after multiple actual superweapons have already been built and used for effect. So the economies at issue are (or at least were) extremely large, and the game has already gone on for quite some time. Even if nukes could end the game decisively, a decisive end condition is not a bad thing at this point.

It's really all about scale. Once the scale of your economy grows the ability to use bigger scale endgame weapons becomes possible. So look at it this way, your economy at the beginning while = your economy at the end, because scale shifts as planets are 'sploded. If you look at it this way then really nukes remain both endgame super weapons and midgame base killers. Which is also really interesting because if you link that with the idea that was discussed elsewhere, you could use the nuke to intercept an incoming meteor, annihilating (or disabling assuming engines can be targeted and then capture the meteor) it instead of your planet.

I really don't see the problem with nukes at all... as long as antinukes are cheaper to get than nukes. If the counter is easier and cheaper to get all is fine.

We could keep nukes costing the same as past games, but arm them with a MIRV warhead.

I wouldn't mind seeing a third effect of a nuke - temporary disabling of units, as their electronics overload and shut down from the EMP blast. Smaller units & structures affected the most (least amount of resources spent on shielding), and the blast radius being much larger than the damage radius - AND it goes off if the nuke is intercepted.

This would give you some additional tactical options for throwing nukes at the enemy over the head of your heavy troops that are massing for an attack - the closer you get to breaking their antinuke defense, the more you can disrupt their systems and defenses.

Some things you might want to consider- if the EMP goes off even if the nuke is intercepted- what's to stop a "double tap" approach of using a nuke to disable all the antinukes, and then firing again for effect? And even if EMP only goes off on a successful hit, that would mean a single hit would disable all the antinukes within the EMP's radius, which seems like a very rapid snowball, and is undesirable.

If EMP is included- not a bad idea necessarily- then there needs to be rules for which units are affected. One approach is to make a somewhat arbitrary list, as it must exclude nuke defense at least.

I think a smarter approach is to reverse what you suggested, and have big units be the most affected by EMP, with small units having fewer, simpler, more rugged electronics. And make structures immune to EMP- they have enough problems with the damage component.

The consequence of using this setup is that small units get toasted by nukes in a large area, but beyond the shockwave they're pretty much OK. Big units only get toasted by nukes in the innermost primary blast area, but they get stunned out to greater distances.

That's kind of an unintuitive arrangment though, to have smaller units shrug off an EMP and large heavy units get disabled. But I'm not suggesting a catastrophic disabling here, more like heavy units shut down for a few seconds, and light units for maybe twice as long - the idea would be to assist in a battle, not disable the enemy so you can move in at your leisure.

Heavy units are already vulnerable to a direct nuke strike, in that they're much slower and more predictable on where they will be.

On the topic of rolling EMP into antinuke defences, I believe it should be possible to saturate and break down a defensive perimeter, especially if nukes become smaller and more accessible. The TA/FA tradition is that nukes are so amazing destructive that to allow any through is a game ender, so it's a simple matter of 'do you have enough antinukes stockpiled' and that's it. If we change it to make nukes more accessible but less destructive, they can become much more tactical, and it's no longer a game ender that a nuke penetrates your defenses.

Since you're suggesting that antinukes also become cheaper, a smart player will be layering his defences.

My thinking is that you aren't going to use nukes to "assist in battle" such that a few seconds' stun is relevant. In close quarters you would be killing/stunning your own units as much as the enemy's units, given the large area of effect. Certainly nukes will be excellent support when you have armies moving about the map- but then a few seconds' stun isn't really long enough to work with.

A more lengthy stun for relatively few, large (or sensitive) units makes more gameplay sense, even if it is unintuitive. Small units are getting annihilated out to a quite large radius anyway. Having the EMP stun be extra harsh on them, but only to the tune of a few seconds, is unlikely to be interesting, or even relevant.

You are absolutely right about layered nuke defense, and about having nuke defense be quite common. Rather than a presence/absence dichotomy, there would be a realm of density distribution over area. The thing is, if EMP works on antinuke, then a single hit might completely remove all enemy antinukes from the equation.

I seem to remember Uber talking about how nukes may end up changing terrain. What if nukes (and KEWs) were given a certain mass of planetary body that they can vaporise in the area of effect, including resource points. Obviously a KEW would destroy more. For a planet, it wouldn't be so much, but it would slowly take out resource points as the game progressed. For asteroids though, the amount of mass vaporised would be a significant portion of the body itself. This offers an easy and intuitive system to reduce battlefield size and take out asteroids.

Cockroaches mate. And because of the square-cube law, a smaller object has a greater ratio of armour to volume than a larger object, even if the larger object has thicker armour.

Yeah and if the ratio of armour actually meant something in terms of damage mitigation you might be onto something.

Isn't a small nuke just a tactical missile? The big ones are, well... BIG ones. Like the TZAR bomba was a play toy.

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I've seen the EMP effect used on Supcom2 nukes. It's very much an "umm, okay?" deal. The nuke already deals the damage. An EMP isn't that significant on top of it.

An EMP isn't dangerous if you have a way to catch electromagnetic waves and ground the resulting current (FYI, an EMP damages electronics by turning into big electric current on a fragile surface, such as a CPU). I imagine a robot with pure metal skin has no problem being a Faraday cage.

Is this really a problem? Look at what would happen now if a major nuclear war would break out.

My suggestion to add: Allow decoys (and make all missiles travel slow). Cost-wise they would be most of the cost of a warhead and to the enemy they look the same until they land and don't go all mushroom cloud on them. As lategame approaches and resources go up while terrain goes down, it becomes more feasible to mix these in and you approach what is IMO an interesting cold-war style standoff where no one wants to use nukes for fear of getting a draw from everyone losing everything.

No, I mean the BIG ones should be cheap and accessible. Like tactical missiles in SupCom/FA in scale and significance, but tactical missiles hit a single target, and nukes go BOOOOM. Tactical missiles and/or cruise missiles in PA would need to be scaled down as well, as they are clearly less powerful than nukes. Killing a single target means a lot less when there are a LOT of targets that need blowing up.

Still, compared to a planet even the biggest nuke in TA is child's play. Not to mention there are legit planet-killer superweapons in PA which obviously need to be far more expensive and powerful than nukes.

And regarding EMP- clearly a secondary effect practically no matter how it's implemented, and not really that important. I do agree it would be strange for an entirely-metal entity to be affected by EMP, but the question is whether it's more fun to play the game if they are.

And decoy missiles (if available) would obviously need to be very cheap, or it would defeat the point. You would just use another real nuke if the costs were remotely comparable.

Nukes are superweapons. They are just planetary-scale superweapons. KEWs are system-scale superweapons. There could be more *-scale superweapons, like orbital- (Ion Cannon ).

Consider game with only big planet - "classic" gameplay. Nuke should keep it's role for that type of game or be replaced with some orbital equivalent.

If you trying to make nukes more C&C-ish then you missed "speed" point. Nukes in FA was terribly slow so they weren't efficient against armies.

If nuke to be replaced with some kind of slow Ion-Cannon-type-thing, than nuke may take a place as anti-orbital/anti-mass defense. But this will probably require mobile anti-nukes as well. Maybe we should just allow nuke TMLs and keep strategic rockets as they are now.

Buildings will be a bit larger in PA from what we've seen than they were in FA and TA (in comparison to units I mean), and with no adjacency bonus, bases will be sprawling and possibly split up over different parts of each planet. The effectiveness of nukes is by default reduced due to this.

And nord, by your logic, my fist is a face-scale superweapon. :/

well all your units are robots and a nuclear EMP spreads out electromagnetic waves across a large field and fries the circuitry not disables it

This discussion about real electronics vs real nuclear EMP is sort of pointless. PA units could just as easily be running photonic computers, quantum skullduggery, even flux capacitors or whatever you please which could be impervious to EMP.